CAT NOTATION

Joulia Strauss

Concept: In two hymns to Apollo seven great harmonies of Greece were all brought to one system, teaching the art of peace to Roman conquerors (the barbarians) who knew only war and order as regular as that of their army.

Performance-sculpture-study. “Cat notation” is an science-and-art project that studies the heritage of the Ancient Greece on the one hand, and the military technologies, on the other. “Cat” is the main symbol of the project. It leads a whole range of other animals that were created with the help of technological simulation. These animals are not just virtual pictures, they are created on the basis of musical intervals that were characteristic for the Ancient Greece harmony. These very intervals – or their numeric equivalents – were used as proportions for the bodies of the animals, or Synthetic sculptures. These animals are vivid embodiments of each harmony and of the character typical of each of those harmonies (depressive Lidian Minus-Dog, chauvinist Hyperfrigian Swan etc.). These are three-dimensional sculptures. The limbs are moving in accordance with the little-known fragments of the ancient-Greek music.  And they are called mathematic operative animals. Yet Cat unifies them all. Flexible Cat includes all the intervals and governs “the miracle of modulation”, i.e. the possibility of one harmony, one animal, one mood to change into another within the same melody.

Usually those harmonies existed separately in different provinces of Greece whose representatives participated in the musical competitions. Initially all the harmonies were put together only when the First (4 harmonies) and the Second (3 harmonies) Delphi hymns to Apollo were created. The hymns were written many centuries ago and were intended to show to “Roman barbarians” the beauty of the Greek world. In these two hymns 7 great harmonies of Ancient Greece were put together into one music system embodying the possibility of non-conflict transgression between different and unequal types of ethics, codes, ways to feel and behave. They teach a high and most complex art of peace to those who knew only war and an order, as regular as the army’s.