You Can Make These Noises, Using Instruments and Humans

God, I hope that is the end.

After 28 minutes, the place went dark, while the performers were in the middle of a sentence. It was, in fact, the end – a relief. It doesn’t matter how the sentence was finished.

Then, everyone in the audience applauded, while the cast turned on the lights and ran some long curtain calls, congratulating each other. I don’t know what they were all clapping for, but it was likely out of habit and courtesy, I would guess.

During the half-hour, there was nothing recognizable as music, except for some clips from Verdi and Vivaldi.  The rest sounded like scraping and screeching, multiple unrelated pitches played together as if they were chords, and some tune-like solos thrown in, such as a series of bassoon blasts.

(In this video, there is a five-minute segment when the orchestra is warming up and riffing randomly with their instruments, before the conductor appears. To me, this period on the video sounds like the “score” of Alfred, Alfred.)

Like the orchestra, the performers shouted and shrieked meaninglessly, and hollered phrases at other characters in Italian.

Or, as we have learned to say: This music is too advanced for my education and sensitivity.

I stuck with it because I could tell from the video that it was going to last less than one hour.  The blackout at 27:15 was a pleasant surprise. For that, I clapped a little bit, too.

Okay, But We’ve All Had Bad Dreams

We read that the Italian composer Franco Donatoni became sick in 1992, and spent some time in a hospital in Australia.

He represented his take on the visit in Alfred, Alfred, and apparently, he had a tough time in his hospital room.

Wearing heavy makeup, unnaturally placed -- or masks -- a sequence of characters come to see the patient and yell things at him, or bring him food. These include a few nurses, a team of doctors, and some relatives. Nothing else happens, except that many of the visitors end up motionless on the floor.

One other patient lies in bed near the composer, until that roommate stands and performs on a trumpet. He plays a bit of music from a 19th century opera.

We also see:

• A nurse wearing five breasts

• People with balloons

• A nurse with 3½ - foot fingers, all ten used as canes as she walks

• Announcers bringing bad news about the patient’s family members

• A woman wearing a fish

• Sherlock Holmes

• Videos of the faces of each of the visitors, presented in dual images on the walls.

The effect on the viewer/listener is unpleasant.  These sounds and images are the sorts of things that happen to us when we have a terrible fever, and become half-awake in the middle of the night, with our brain malfunctioning. Often, if we are lucky or have some pills, we can get back to sleep and recover.  But with Alfred, Alfred, we are not so lucky. It goes on and on.

We conclude that Sr. Donatoni was unhappy with his treatment in the hospital, or that his sedatives were improperly prescribed, or both.

This is all we can glean from Alfred, Alfred, except that Donatoni did not have any paying projects, during the 1990’s when he put all these instructions down on paper, for the instruments and the performers. I understand that he got real work, soon after that, or possibly a book of Italian crossword puzzles, to better occupy him.

This video was made at I Teatri di Reggio Emilia, located between Bologna and Milan, in Italy. It seems that the organization had a scheduling gap in May, 2024 at their Ariosto Theater, so I guess they did this thing, and committed it to video. No film was wasted; it is on electronic media, taking up only a moderate amount of space – not a great loss.