Olec Mün
Argentina
Argentinian composer based in Spain. pianist, minimal electronics, experimental, Olec studied piano, jazz and harmony with professors such as Nicolás Guerschberg, Francisco Sicilia, Guillermo Romero and Paula Suarez. His music is a constant search for the Unknown and earn for revelation of light. During his twenties he visited India and Africa, where he got immersed in their culture and felt a strong calling to approach music from a premodern perspective, considering it as a functional tool to connect with the invisible world, a vehicle for healing, recognizing and encountering ones Soul and not only as an entertainment discipline.
Response to the question:
“COMPOSING THROUGH GEMATRIA”
I arrived at Napoli with a seed idea I had had in mind for a couple of months. As we know God works in mysterious ways, this was an idea I could have not developed if the residency would have taken place in April 2020, just because I did not have the knowledge needed yet.
I will try to briefly explain what this idea was about:
In Hebrew, each letter corresponds to a number (A=1, B=2, etc.) So when you see a word, you can add its letters and have a number corresponding to that word. This is called GEMATRIA in the wisdom of Kabbalah, and it is a much complex discipline which I am now only beginning to investigate.
Two other central concepts of Kabbalah are the Tree of Life and the Names of God. The first one is a map of reality going from the Cosmos up to the human Soul. It is a way of structuring and analyzing the energies of life. The Names of God is a complex subject which I am now only starting to investigate but has to do with numerous combinations of sounds and letters, each containing a specific energy. Each Name of God is associated with a specific sphere of the Tree of Life.
Not to extend to much on this, my idea was to start a composition based on the numbers behind each Name of God. This approach interested me because it meant composing not after a melody or feeling, but structured in numbers and what they transmitted to me.
During the first days of the residency I was anxious to sit down on the piano. I though I wouldn´t be able to develop my idea, since it was not easy to find a time on my own with the piano. There was always something more entertaining and attractive to do, such as walking around the city or collaborating with other artists. Surprisingly, as soon as I was able to sit on the piano, the music started flowing very rapidly in a couple of sessions. The challenging moment appeared when translating the letters to numbers I realized some letters involved represented big numbers such as 400. This meant that only one letter would make me compose a melody of 400 beats. It then struck what I had only sensed before, my composition would require high levels of concentration and focus which I had not achieved before with my music.
Meanwhile in the residency we had attended both the Sufi whirling and Performance workshops. They both fitted perfectly to what I was doing. The first one helped me realize what I was composing was a kind of deep ecstatic meditation, just as the whirling, and the second one, that this composition had a lot to do with durational performance. In order to achieve what I had proposed I would have to take myself to new levels of focus, presence and endurance, just as duration performance does.
So during my sessions I was able to slowly slowly, advance on this ambitious composition. Of course I did not finish it, but I had the initial impulse and I am very happy and grateful for that. I believe I will complete the composition during 2021 and I honestly and humbly think it is something quite original and unique, not only for the end product that will come out but for the process I am going through while composing.
This brings me back to the Art of Remembering. Just as I feel my previous compositions had to do with remembering horizontally, like a timeline going to the past, be it my own personal narrative or my family history, this composition has to do with a new way of remembering which I perceive vertically. The Tree of Life takes you vertically from the most dense dimensions of the Soul, high up the more subtler dimensions. This composition, when reaching deep levels of meditation, feels like it's taking me there.
On the other hand, simultaneously, while I was composing this work on the piano at the museum, I was sharing the room with Spanish dancer and performer Ainara Lopez. Sometimes, while she was investigating her own project she connected with my music and danced to it. When I noticed that, I also connected with her movements and a dialogue commenced. This interaction became a habit in our sessions, creating a kind of meta-composition. With a mutual understanding, almost without using words we were able to co-create during the whole residency, finalizing with a shared presentation on the last day.