La Furia del Ermitaño, un teatro sonoro sobre la locura

Introduction

La Furia del Ermitaño (‘The Hermit's Fury’ in Spanish) addresses the issue of madness and its dimension of psychological fragmentation. The work investigates the story of Luis Gonzáles, also known as ‘Juanito’, who spent a large part of his life isolated as a hermit in the Las Chilcas valley, a central region of Chile. For about 30 years, Juanito has had little contact with the rest of the world, limiting his interactions to receiving food, and gifts, and to occasional visits by those who spotted him on the side of the Pan-American Highway or between the rocks of the landscape where he lived. His almost unbreakable silence filled the mystery of his life, stimulating the rise of many local legends, including his mental illness as the cause that led him to live in extreme isolation. The Hermit's Fury is the name of a climbing circuit that opened in the mid-nineties in the Las Chilcas valley. The name of the site recalls some episodes of hard encounters and aggressive reactions of Juanito against climbers who began to travel in that place.

Mapping at home

The project began during the first lockdown at the time of the pandemic. In the course of my isolation, I started to conceive the musical language of La Furia as the result of experimentation with the elements available at my home: my own voice, instruments (a violin and a guitar), and above all daily objects such as metallic bars, toilet rolls tubes, cans, rings, or my daughter's set of toy instruments (triangle, xylophone, tambourine, and flutes). This context of limitations and scarcity led me to think that the elements involved in the construction of sonic places in La Furia worked as a peripheral operation: a soundscape of discarded components, casual

gestures, or residual materials. The sonic world of the piece is a timbral palette of fragmented, rough, accidental, and partially uncontrollable sounds. Through mapping these small clicks, taps, pressures and slides, scratches, random reverberations, and blown sounds that behave like textures produced by a percussion set.

Preserved ruins

My process of mapping at home informs the timbral palette as ruins that have been preserved or in other words, have survived from the first stages of my explorations to remain and configure the completed work. The preserved ruins are as follows: first, percussive gestures with tambourines, triangles, and metallic drumsticks hanging from a thread, second, roughness signs by dragging rings on the surfaces of percussion instruments or on the floor, third, elastic contact by keys bouncing randomly onto instruments or surfaces, fourth, inaccurate vocality by my own

explorations on overtones and air sounds.

Synapse and tripartite structure

Schizophrenia is one of the illnesses that could explain the behavior of the Hermit of Las Chilcas. The disorder is probably the result of dysfunctions of the nervous system and its mechanism of impulse transmission between neurons, known as the synapse. This is a process where a net of terminals of the neuron called dendrites receives the impulse from another (pre-synaptic) neuron, then travels through the neuron body called Axon, where it accelerates until jumping from the axon terminals through neurotransmitters, reaching the next (post-synaptic) neuron’s dendrites and restarting the process. This cycle of three moments: reception, acceleration, and jump is the principal structural hierarchy of textures organization in the work.

Parts

The tripartite structure of the synapse allowed me to conceive three parts in the composition. I combined synapses with three concepts that describe mental disorders.

- First part: entropy

I associated the first synaptic phase (the reception moment) with the entropy concept. I address entropy as a measure of the amount of information we hope to learn from an outcome (observations), and we can understand it as a measure of uniformity. The more uniform the distribution, the higher the uncertainty and the higher the entropy. In schizophrenic patients, entropy could describe the personality’s fragmentation manifested in sensory inundation, and excess irrelevant sensory information in the brain, resulting in abnormal information processing, selective attention, and cognitive deficits in patients.

As a result, I generated irregular and erratic textures that address a more stable situation. Sonic events of different nature coexist in a kaleidoscopic and high-density texture in which each instrument makes a different sound without establishing particular preponderance: key clicks, voilé, finger percussions, harmonics glissando, whispered voice, phonemes alternation, battuto coi crini, spazzolato, and bowing parallel to the strings.

- Second part: intertextuality

The second section combines the tripartite synaptic structure with the concept of intertextuality. This idea influenced not only this second part but conditioned the entire pathway of the work. Moreover, intertextuality as synergies between heterogeneous components articulate the text from a perspective of mutual influence that structures sound, text, and stage design. 

- Third part: pruning

This part combines the jump moment of the synapse process with the concept of pruning. This word denominates the phenomenon of removal of the unnecessary synapses of the nervous system. My approach to modeling the pruning process in the composition tends to decrease the number and variety of events in opposition to the kaleidoscopic environment of the entropy part. 

Text 

The text of La Furia is a series of statements that follow an intertextual principle to invade the navigation of the listener with reflections on the issue of mental disorder and the hermit's remembrances. The text is repeated, reread, and commented on by other players of the ensemble (not singers).

The three parts of the work contain seven sections addressing the piece’s issue by paraphrasing various sources: the thought of Kitaro Nishida; Zen traditional tales; studies on schizophrenia by Gaetano Benedetti; and quotations from psychiatric patients in Argentina. In addition, I included my childhood memories when traveling the landscape of the Las Chilcas valley.

Acts

My text nests three types of acts: describing, remembering, and meditating. 

- ‘Describing’ informs sections that evocate the landscape of Las Chicas in the entropy part: Gravel and Slope, and Road. 

- ‘Remembering’ inspire the questions about what images of my childhood emerged and how people believe the hermit lived and went mad. This act influenced the sections of the intertextuality part: Road construction, The bus and the sunset, and The journey and the accident. 

- ‘Meditating’ is the act that reflects on the condition of solitude, death, and the inheritance left by the hermit, motivating my work on sections of the pruning part: Nocturnal soliloquy, Climbers and heritage, and the finale.

Inverting sonic roles theatrically

At the end of the intertextuality part, the second transition point blocks the sound flow like a state of shock during the automobile accident that, according to the legend, made Juanito lose his mind. At this stage, three players move to the piano, presenting a vocal texture using the cast iron plate as a resonator. The elimination of the instrumental ambit opens the piece to a resonant chorus that, for almost 3 minutes, suggests a theatrical situation with four performers located around the piano. Therefore, a new choreographic and democratic dimension (as in the case of the players’ spoken text) appears when the performers at the piano replace the scenic and timbral presence of sopranos. Moreover, this area (called nocturnal soliloquy in the score) alludes to the internal, dissociated, and ghostly voices that inhabit the physique of the schizophrenic patient. Here, texts combine meditations on the nature of the disease that the hermit knows and understands, adding them to mental images about the landscape, the cold night, the loss of consciousness, and the frustration, manifested in the quotation from a psychiatric hospital: “What I would like to give life, what I never gave it”.