Giovanni Muro (p2) A last visit to Casella’s ; May 1983

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” Soren Kierkegaard “In Venice Tasso’s echoes are no more, And silent rows the songless gondolier; Her palaces are crumbling to the shore, And music meets not always now the ear...” George Gordon Byron- Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Waiting for longer than was strictly necessary , so as to be certain that the corridor was empty, Giovanni reached up and moved his fingers along the door’s lintel. In the short time that it took before his finger-tips felt the familiar shape of the key, he had been certain that it would have been removed at some point in the intervening years , probably by one of the university’s cleaners or decorators. But as soon as Giovanni felt the key’s thin hardness all such sceptical anxiety and protective realism had been substituted in his mind by a prosaic, powerful and comprehensive understanding of the inevitability of it’s recovery, just as a child is reassured to know once more that six follows five and who is oblivious to the mathematical chasms that ever lay between; for ,of course, the key’s presence had never been in doubt : it’s discovery was necessary for the narrative that he was now living out. With the key secure in his hand Giovanni picked up his small brown case that contained his camera , lenses, film and other photographic paraphernalia, and made to open the door. Despite the traces of rust where the protective chrome had been chipped, the key turned in the lock with familiar ease, but the door resisted his gentle press, as if over the years the surrounding faded cream frame had expanded against the wooden door’s blue painted edge, the mutual vestiges of once gummy resin bonding to create a honeyed seal. Then, with a soft , wordless sound ,an aural hieroglyph or haiku-like composite, somewhere between the tearing of a parcel’s brown wrapping paper and the rustle of autumn ferns as a doe sought cover, the door became free and opened inwards, stirring up long-settled dust into the mid-morning sunlight that entered the room through the gauze covered windows that faced onto the small courtyard below and the walled garden beyond. Giovanni stepped inside, placed the key into the pocket of his trousers and closed the door. Before he put his case down onto the thin, grey carpet, Giovanni looked around, gaining a generalised sense of both familiarity and difference, the room’s smell still reassuringly present, if fainter, as the bed-ridden pulse of an old man is to a visiting nurse. There had been a time when he’d first returned to Venice in the late ‘70’s when he’d been a regular visitor to this room, situated on the first floor of the IUAV’s off-shoot at Ca’ Tron. While in many ways institutional will was as rigorous then as it had ever been, politics and social pressures had resulted in occasional situations and practices (administrative staff being on the pay roll without any apparent job ,role or hierarchy , academic staff being seemingly either on permanent leave of absence or on strike , while degree courses were run with barely any syllabus or formal teaching ), that ,looking back just a few years, seemed unbelievable. Maybe much of what had been reported in papers and in bars was indeed apocryphal , but one tangible manifestation of this period of mild providential institutional liberalism (the universities’ principle purpose in so behaving perhaps having been an attempt to stave off a more radical critique of those who ostensibly ran things, largely for their own convenience), was that some of the students at IUAV had taken possession of this old tutor’s room ( that they had whimsically renamed on the door plate, now long gone, “Doctor Dante Cassela”), ostensibly as a “music room” to “challenge notions of the acoustic in the built environment and its impact on the human experience”. In practice “Cassela’s” had quickly become a rigorously enforced no-go area reserved for the more stridently political students and for like-minded people passing through, many of whom would rest up for a day or so, using one of the mattresses that lay on the floor. Here , at all hours of the day and night other than early morning, when the atmosphere tended to be slow and somnolent, there would be discussions, some stoned, some heated, always earnest , on politics and music, often around the issue of either the ethnographic morality of the appropriation of folk and indigenous music in contemporary experimentalism or the tensions between European and American avant-garde minimalist trends . Better still there would be “Sonic Tonics”, when records would be played at the “wrong” speed or either very quietly or as loudly as the beat-up speakers of the hi-fi would permit. Latterly there had been sessions involving taped sounds that were played on a reel to reel machine that had one day just appeared, “liberated” from some more formal use within the IUAV. But more often than not , between card games and conversation, there’d just be albums of beat poetry and more experimental recordings playing, that would be listened to in absolute silence as cigarettes were smoked and dope passed around. But best of all, at least as far as Giovanni was concerned, was when a few gifted musicians would gather together around the upright piano that stood against the wall opposite the boarded-up fireplace and tiled hearth ,to share and shape their melodies and improvisations , particularly when the pianist had been his friend Giorgio. Giovanni moved to one of the windows ,drew back the gauze and forced open one of the panes . Looking down onto the courtyard and garden Giovanni watched as a flock of pigeons quietly and without show or ostentation, criss-crossed the stone paving, pecking at the green shoots growing between the cracks. Beyond, the garden was lush and unkempt. A decade before, in the Spring of 1973, years before he had started coming to “Casellas“ or knew Giorgio, Giovanni and some friends had broken into Ca Tron’s garden late at night, setting themselves up in the farthest corner by a brick wall that had spiralling marks in the covering plaster , where they made a small smoky bonfire out of fallen leaves and brushwood, that had done little to counter the deepening chill . They had stayed there until first light, drinking and smoking, demonstrably unselfconscious between themselves, each aware that this would be remembered as being one of those “moments” (even if now, in recollection, it seemed to Giovanni to have been backwardly adolescent- more an attempt to reconnect with a latent but abandoned innocence than a celebration of new-found adult progressiveness). There had been music then as well, played by Paulo, who had since moved to Rome, on an acoustic guitar, including popular Italian songs, some sixties classics ( most of which had quickly dissolved into confusion when they realised that their apparent simplicity was beyond their collective competence) , and some improvised folk songs that everyone seemed to know. At more or less the same time as that impromptu nocturnal party had taken place, Giorgio, who was a few years older than Giovanni and who had come to Venice a couple of years before, had ,by his own account, been hanging out with a much harder-living group of acquaintances. If Giorgio was to be believed it was through them that he had met up with the drummer and composer Robert Wyatt ,who at that time had been living out on Giudecca while his girlfriend , Alfreda Benge, worked as a junior film editor on Nicholas Roeg’s film , Don’t Look Now, part of which was being filmed in Venice. Giorgio always held out that for a time there had been talk of them collaborating on a new album, but then Wyatt and Benge had returned to London,Wyatt had broken his back and that was that . Maybe it was true. Certainly, in later years, when Giorgio was very drunk, he would be known to sit on the floor cross legged, eyes shut, swaying gently back and forth, patting his hands on the carpet or a low table if one was nearby, and all the while softly crooning in an abstract, improvised style over a tune that only existed in his head , until someone would nudge him and he’d fall silent. But beforehand , out of Giorgio’s ululating throaty sounds , Giovanni would often hear something similar to the way Wyatt’s track “Sea Song” ended, the composition of which could be traced back to that period, as if Giorgio was trying to summon up those memories from the depths of what might have been. Then there had come a time when the crooning had stopped while the drinking had continued and the arguments and broken friendships increased. But before then there had been the stories and the music: his early days in Naples before he’d travelled north, hanging out and jamming with the percussionist Toni Esposito, the American singer Patricia Lopez and his beloved Luciano Cilio, and then , after his move to Venice his wildly energetic , but compact, improvisations. The first of these that Giovanni could remember hearing was a composition that was based upon variations upon the piano part on an obscure 1960’s track called “Screams in the Ear” by an English singer/songwriter called Bill Fay, improvisations that swirled around before building to a tumult, Giorgio’s hands stretching out and swooping up and down , before subsiding away to no more than the sound that comes just before nothing, at the far, far right of the keyboard. Best of all had been an improvisation that Giorgio had titled “ the Meek Madonna”, based upon Johnny Parker’s piano playing on the 1950’s track Bad Penny Blues , composed by Humphrey Lyttleton and mixed and produced by Joe Meek, that in turn had inspired McCartney’s pounding piano motif on Lady Madonna some 12 years later. In Giorgio’s composition the tune had been largely preserved but the key and tempo had been lowered and slowed down so that it was closer to that of the introduction to the Beatle’s earlier track, Hey Bulldog, but it had somehow retained all the future facing verve and drive of Parker’s original. Then in 1977 Giorgio had been lucky enough to obtain one of the few copies that EMI had released of Cilio’s inaugural ( and as it turned out, sole) record , called “Dialoghi del Presente “ , with its beautiful sleeve design by Fabio Donato and its five extraordinary tracks, some of which Giorgio said he had first heard and jammed on in earlier versions back in the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s. For a while it had seemed that Giorgio had become completely obsessed with this record and in particular Cilio’s piano playing on the short piece called “Terzo Quadro Della Conoscenza”, that Giorgio would play from memory whenever he could gain access to a piano in Venice that was sufficiently in tune and of quality to do it justice, something that the piano at Casella’s failed far short of. However, after a while Giorgio’s friends noticed that while he spoke of “Diologhi del Presente” as being an “inspiration” and a “ true revelation”, in actuality his own writing and performances had abruptly ceased and his drinking had inexorably increased. And now Giorgio was dead ,choked in his sleep on his own vomit. Giovanni paused, conscious that he was alone in this dusty, silent room ,that Giorgio and everyone else had long ago abandoned. What a waste. Giovanni had thought that this visit would have triggered within him the desire to commemorate and to celebrate, to find a way of lauding a friend, who had, in truth, died to him some time ago. More problematically, maybe he had also hoped that he’d be somehow able to use such feelings of bereavement as a way of reconnecting with the dark , morbid mulch that fed his own creativity , that was at best intermittent and had now been absent for what seemed like forever; that inexplicable ,unplaceable, fecund sense of past loss , that was always there, but so often just out of touch. But instead , fuelled by a mix of regret and emptiness, tinged with anger and frustration, Giovanni found that his most predominant feelings were of a more acute sense of shut-off-ness and isolation, combined with a conscious resolve to press on ; that this adventure had been a sort of negligent distraction from the more serious tasks that lay before him. Giovanni returned to the window and pulled it shut, the noise of which startled the pigeons, that as one took off and flew away, as if they too were assailed by greater cares. Giovanni crossed the room, exited, locked the door, replaced the key and left, never to return. In memoriam Luciano Cilio: 16.03.1950-21.05.1983, whose departure was too rapid.