Via di san teodoro 8 was the address in Rome of the Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi (1905 -1988), a singular figure in the history of Italian modern music. Scelsi suggested that to understand his music one needed to know where he lived. Upon an invitation by the Scelsi Foundation, Rome, I decided to slowly interrogate his surroundings, the musical instruments, the familiar objects, the momentos, and above all, the panoramas of Rome from his apartment in Via san teodoro. Equal attention is given to the sounds of the environment as to the spaces themselves.
Originally, Via di san teodoro 8, was around 40 mins and screened at Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge and London; Berlin Konzerthaus; Tchaikovsky Moscow Conservetoire; V22 space and others. In 2020 I returned to the material to make a more concise statement, as a variant, this time adding a performance of Sabina Meyer’s performance of extracts from Scelsi’s Hô which adds a suitable timeless quality to the video. Nor is this the final statement, as there will be a third version next year that will reinstate the sounds of the ondiola electronic keyboard that formed the basis of Scelsi’s improvisations, and which features in the original version. With thanks to the Fondazione Isabella Scelsi and Sabina Meyer.
David Ryan is a visual artist and writer also actively involved in contemporary music. He studied at Liverpool and Lanchester (Coventry) Polytechnics, and also on a travelling German Scholarship to Hamburg, Lubeck and Berlin. He is currently an Associate Professor in Fine Art at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. Exhibitions have included Crossing Abstraction 1 (2009, Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin), After Image, (2013 Emerson Gallery, Berlin) and Crossing Abstraction 2 (2012, Kunsthaus Erfurt and Forum Konkrete Kunst, Erfurt). In 2015 he curated a large-scale exhibition Drawing Towards Sound looking at the relationship between drawing and musical notation at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich, and has also curated At the Point of Gesture (2013 Turps Gallery/2015 Wimbledon Space). Recent exhibitions have included June Mostra, (2016 British School at Rome) In Nomine Lucis (2017 Santa Maria Della Scala Museum, Siena), Ex-Roma, (2017 APT Gallery), Granular (2018 University of Greenwich) and Imagining Architecture (2018 IsdaT, Toulouse) co-curated with Benet Spencer. His work in music
