Jorge Sad Levi: Amusia/ A musical look on José Ingenieros

This scenic musical work is based on the book "The Musical Language and its Hysterical Disturbances" by José Ingenieros, published in 1902. The work includes two singers, an ensemble of improvising interpreters consisting of flute, trumpet, viola and piano, as well as live electronics and video projections.

Ingenieros addresses a kind of biological and normative musical semiology, which attempts a taxonomy of deviations from the norm. The book borders on the absurd for the moment, since to demonstrate parallels between the disturbances of the musical and verbal languages, it exposes cases of doubtful veracity, with a stigmatizing look. For Ingenieros, any deviation from what he conceives as normal is considered a pathology. He even says that his work could be of good use to the police and criminological authorities. In other words, that someone could be persecuted or suspected for what they listened to or for what they did as a musician, as if the transgression of an aesthetic norm or supposed musical disabilities were an object of study of criminology.

Amusia is a term that designates a series of disorders that make it difficult to recognize or reproduce musical tones or rhythms. Ingenieros seem to have great certainty of what is and should be and not be the music. But certainties fall before the challenge of art, in this case the work of Jorge Sad Levi, who confronts us with a reconceptualization of music and its ways of being produced and enjoyed. The sound becomes visual on the screen, and demands more than a logical understanding.

The music represents the clinical cases and the interpreters fulfill the role of the patients, who somehow interact with the character of Ingenieros, embodied in one of the artists, and demolish their theories with sound. He wants to impose a law regarding the sound matter and the group responds, until Ingenieros is defeated, but somehow he agrees to the musical experience and a kind of healing.

Amusia is also a diversion, in which music connects with parody, excess and sinisterness, in the Freudian sense of the familiar that becomes strange. In this way, the work dismantles the vision of Ingenieros, where any difference must be pursued, and a musical body emerges, erogenous, who manages to escape from the penalty of enjoying the different.

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