The performance-installation Dissonant Counterpoint is another chapter in Diana Policarpo’s extensive research, ransom and reinterpretation of the oeuvre of ultramodernist composer Johanna M. Beyer (1888-1944), a seminal name – albeit rendered highly invisible and marginalized – in electronic music and experimental composition. By bringing into dialogue Beyer’s work and life, according to a feminist political perspective and resorting to a device that is set in motion by parallel trajectories – sound, text, sculpture –, Diana Policarpo appropriates, inscribes in the present and breathes life into the musical legacy of the German-American composer, drawing attention to the historical discrimination and invisibility of women (a single, immigrant woman of the 1930s, in Beyer’s case) as well as to a fundamentally androcentric and limiting artistic canon. Dissonant Counterpoint repositions and reworks two compositions by Johanna M. Beyer. Status Quo/Music of the Spheres (1938), an un nished political opera adapted by Policarpo in The Spheres (2017), and Three Songs for Soprano and Clarinet (1934), whose three corresponding poems, elegies to the movements of the cosmos and life written by Beyer, are also present in this installation in a situation of constant tension with the holistic character of Music of the Spheres – Beyer considered rhythm and sound as antagonists, both in music and in nature and the cosmos. Policarpo also evokes Beyer’s words using excerpts of her letters (1935-41) to American composer Henry Cowell in a spoken word audio piece by Emily Beber. In line with the spirit of the politically powerful nale of Music of the Spheres, in Dissonant Counterpoint Diana Policarpo o ffers a sort of posthumous social-political catharsis for Johanna M. Beyer.
Mariana Duarte
