Camera Picta (2024)

There is no difference between existence and non-existence. Non-existence is merely a word, but the word is always a person, and the person is that dimension within humanity that lives in love for what is yet to be created, in what is missing.

This is how Inger Christensen writes in her short novel The Painted Room (Det malede værelse, 1976), which revolves around the Italian Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna and his work on the frescoes in the Camera Picta in Mantua. These frescoes are renowned for their display of illusionistic perspectives – pespecially the ceiling fresco, which seems to open up to the sky, with figures gazing down at the viewer.

Drawing inspiration from Mantegna’s frescoes, Christensen crafts a compelling narrative, a fantasy of the relationship between art and mortality, and the allure of the not-yet-created.Similarly, I have composed a musical fantasy based on The Painted Room, a fantasy that is as much influenced by Christensen's evocative prose as by Mantegna's imagery. My composition is written as a continuous movement, comprising five different types of music – just as the various paintings stand side by side in the same room. The idea is that each section within the walls of the musical room possesses its own character and sound. The prepared piano, with its eleven modified notes, adds tonal variation and enriches the distinctiveness of each section.

The structure of the piece is chiastic with a "mirror-like" form where the music, where the music, after progressing through five sections, reverses direction and retraces its steps to the beginning. Each of the five sections is revisited on this return journey, but in reverse order (5, 4, 3, 2, 1), with internal variations that introduce new perspectives. Notably, the turning point occurs not at the midpoint but at the golden ratio—a concept central to Christensen’s poetic universe—ensuring that the path "away" is longer than the path "home.

This chiastic form was inspired by the concept of the painted room, where one can wander freely, and by the dome's sotto in sù effect—depicting scenes from below, as though looking upwards. My composition is also influenced by the intricate interplay of form and structure that characterises Christensen's work—a balance of spontaneity and discipline that I find profoundly inspiring for music.

“On the relationship between intuition and arithmetic” – this is the title of the thesis that Christensen’s narrator Marsilio is working on in The Painted Room, which could very well serve as a motto for her own literary work. I imagine that this fictional thesis would also have appealed to Barbro B. Johansson.

Camera Picta is approximately 17 minutes long (whereas visitors to the "real" Camera Picta are only allowed to stay for five minutes!).

- Britta Byström (2024)