Faculty Ken Ueno

SIX MEMOS FROM A YEAR IN ROME
Third Memo: LAYERS
By Dr. Ken Ueno

A canon goes off everyday at 12pm. Sometime ago, in the history of Rome, the canon has replaced the meridian as the standard of time. I have noticed, however, that it is hardly ever precise (according to my watch, anyway).

In the garden outside my studio, the benches & chairs move like arms of a clock following the rays of the sun. Seeing their arrangement, one can see how many people had congregated there, and at what time of day. Sometimes alone, sometimes in small groups, they are the pupae left behind from past meditations and conversations.

Larger geographical and architectural features also resonate with evidence of past lives. In Tarquinia, a short trip north of Rome, there are several Etruscan sites. The Etruscans were a civilization wiped out by the Romans, and they built their cities and necropolises (burial grounds) on parallel plateaus, separated by a valley. Today, the plateaus on which they lived and worked, the cities, are ruins; and on the plateaus of the necropoli, are the modern Italians, living, and working the land over the tombs of the Etruscans. Sometimes they know what is below, some sites are dug and marked for visitors. Other times, most times (probably), they cultivate the land, and feed their children with produce without knowledge of the heritage of the ancient civilization below, but tomatoes are sweeter for it, basil and rosemary more fragrant.

Heaven. Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.

At Basilica of San Clemente, in Rome, one can see three layers of history. The lowest level is a 1st century Mithraeum (a temple to the pagan god Mithras). The middle layer is a 4th century church, whose riches include a fresco on a wall with some of the oldest examples of written Italian. It documents a period in time when there was disparity between the people's spoken language (Italian) and written language (Latin). Here, one can see the beginnings of Italian gaining a foothold as a written legacy. And what is this legacy? Well, in the fresco there is a depiction of a cart stuck in the road. The driver shouts to the men behind to push, swearing at them, saying Fili dei puta! The top level of San Clemente is the 12th century basilica that is visible from the street level.

The street level in Rome has been rising throughout its history. At San Clemente, you can actually see all those layers. I used to think the yearly flooding of the Tiber was responsible for this accumulation, but it is not. It was detritus. The accumulation of detritus caused the street level to rise, burying the city. What is interesting is that this burying, ironically, helped preserve some of the most ancient monuments. And this accumulation of detritus still happens today. How much alike are the Italians from their Roman ancestors. What is best preserved is what is thrown away. This is also how we know of Aristotle (I digress, he was Greek). All of his published writing was destroyed. What we know of Aristotle we know from notes, some thrown away, by his students. As trash, they were preserved better.

Rome is a big cake, whose richer layers are underground. To navigate here, you have to mainly take a bus, since there are only two subway lines. They only have two subway lines become they cannot dig here. Every time they try to expand the subway system, the run into ancient ruins. I have heard once that Rome was the first city in the world to reach a million inhabitants. So, there is lot below.

Rome is also a Frankenstein. Many medieval and baroque buildings have ancient marble ornaments culled, violently removed, from ancient monuments. For example the fountain, fontana dell'acqua Paola, has marble on permanent loan from the Coloseum. What is interesting for me is that these spoglie (Latin word for spoils, which has become a term used by artists and scholars for ancient marble ornaments encountered in secondary settings) is that sometimes they are structural (i.e. load bearing) and other times they are not. Please see the two photograph examples. In one, you can see how the columns don't match each other (here, they are load bearing). In the other, you can see that the marble ornaments are kind of just stuck into the wall almost randomly (and not load bearing) - like the Talking Heads quote inserted into this text four paragraphs ago.

All of these things are different markers of time. And now, they have influenced my relationship to the art of music composition. I don't think that I am wasting time, now, when I take a break and drink my tea looking out at the garden. I think about how important is what I am doing when someone might just grow weeds over it. Is it any less beautiful? The things you cherish most, in order that it might survive longer, should you throw it away? And more concretely: 1) How should, or should not, layers of structure of a composition relate to each other? 2) How important is it to have everything in a structure be organic?

As I write this installment of my Memos, it is Sunday, and all the bells in Rome are ringing again. The canons are daily markers of time. The bells are weekly markers of time. When I sit on a lone bench in the garden listening to the chorus of birds, sometimes an ambulance siren disrupts their song. These sirens are like commercials when watching TV, for they disrupt the local narrative of time, while relating and reminding the observer of all other like sirens and commercials. Spoglie are Zen in that they just are. But every time I see one now they, like sirens and commercials, remind me of other spoglie for they relate to each other more than they do the present structure into which they were imposed. And they are beautiful that way. I have no inclination to try to reclaim them into their rightful classical purity.