Towards a New-Gesamt-Gesamtkunstwerke: Artistic Experiments and the Engineering of Social Consciousness

Four community projects (Anikibobo, BebeBaba, Sonopolis, Viagem) developed at the Education Service of Casa da Musica, Oporto, serve as the basis for a discussion about the role of art and artists in society. They are presented as contrasting experiments (in terms of time scale, communities involved-from babies with imprisoned mothers to disabled people or urban dancers, or aestheticsmusic only, music/dance/theatre/film) allowing a broad view about the potential of music to be the ischolar_main of innovative interdisciplinary practices that can deeply change the perception of social consciousness. Within this practice-based framework a few simple ideas emerge about the potential of Art, and Music in particular, to nurture affection, self-esteem and empowerment, and the importance of participatory, creative projects in changing the world of the people that participate in them. Several reasons might explain these effects but the physical experience of music making seems to have a pivotal role in the way people relate to music, to each other and with themselves. Within this context, a new approach seems to emerge for the longtime sought after idea of a Gesamtkunstwerke. In the New-Gesamt-Gesamtkunstwerke the composer is no longer isolated from the people he/she is creating for and at the centre of highly hierarchical system that is assembled to perpetuate his/her vision of the world. He/she becomes, instead, the catalyser of a complex network of dynamic relationships, and the art itself is far more than the crystallization in time of a set of achievements in several forms of expres-sion. The newgesamt-gesamtkunstwerke deals with interdisciplinary as a media rather than a product and new ethicaesthetic values need to be incorporated in order to fully understand what art is.