Books that show that art transforms us, recommended by Antonio Iturbe

In the winter of 1930, a clarinetist arrived in Casetas, Zaragoza, to take charge of the municipal band. There, with a population that is mostly illiterate, the power of music transforms many of its neighbors, while the shadow of fascism looms that will end in the Civil War. One of those neighbors was the grandfather of Antonio Iturbethe writer from Zaragoza who now narrates this episode in music in the dark. With him we talk about the power of music, telling historical memory and he recommends books that show that art transforms us.

Video: interview and recommended books by Antonio Iturbe

Antonio Iturbe explains that music in the dark born “From the concern of realizing that there were certain questions that I never asked my grandfather when he was alive, which is something that happens many times.” Also from his memories, which raised questions. “It began to attack me like a rash, wondering how it was possible that it was possible to explain in my house that my grandfather had played the saxophone, being a person with very little education. He went to school for only two or three years, he read and wrote, but not much more, and yet he played an instrument as sophisticated as the saxophone. That’s a thread, asking yourself questions that no one can answer anymore. Searching for answers, I found that in the Casetas music band, where my grandfather was born, where I was born, in 1930 a clarinetist arrived who took charge of the band in those years. My grandfather was from 1903, he was then in his twenties. That clarinetist met a lot of people like my grandfather, with very little education, almost illiterate, and yet he turned them into musicians.”

Art as a catalyst

That familiar concern later intersected with more universal questions. “That is the thread that I was stretching, looking for some documentation, but in the end, above all, asking myself big questions,” he says. “What would that moment be like with someone like my grandfather, like my grandfather’s neighbors, who were people from the countryside? , from the factories, that when they left their only life was to go to the tavern, suddenly they find a new life, which is the life of music, and how does that transform them And that is the thread that leads me at the same time? to unfold questions and more questions, and among them a great question that runs through the entire book: what is music made of, which is capable, without having weight, taste, color, or smell, of changing at different times? people?”.

music in the dark It is, from the title, a book about the transformative power of art, especially music. “That was one of the things that I was very clear about that I wanted to reflect in the novel: music is a completely universal language,” says its author. “That is, we hear some drums in Africa and we are listening to the heartbeat that we heard in our mother’s womb. There is something there that unites us, that moves us, that unites us with the rest of humanity. I think it is the most complete art of all, the most profound. Music reaches places of consciousness where nothing reaches. This is explained by doctors, neurologists, and psychiatrists. Oliver Sacks has a very nice book called Musicophilia, which talks about people with neurological problems who have musical hallucinations. And he explains to you that, in his long career as a psychiatrist and neurologist, the only treatments that have really worked for patients with profound Alzheimer’s, with profound Parkinson’s, have been treatments with animals, but above all with music. Music is capable of taking people who are in a completely vegetative state, lifting them out of their state, lifting them out of their chairs and making them sing. And that is something completely amazing.”

Narrate historical memory

But music in the dark is also a historical recovery, a novel based on real events in a time when darkness loomed over reason. “Art is of crucial importance and now more than ever, because now a kind of mirage is produced,” says Iturbe. “This was explained very well by Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451. There’s a moment when he says, ‘Plush them with information and they’ll think they’re thinking.’ Now there are such a number of items, flashes of information, pills of information or presumed information, that there is a feeling of relaxation. I already know everything and if not I’ll ask Google. We run the risk of atrophying that muscle that is the brain and the ability to think and reflect on our own. That is why art is very important, the depth that art gives us to ask ourselves the big questions: Who am I? Because I am here? What is beyond of? That there’s not? Because if not, with that kind of confusion of information in which we are involved, in the end everything responds to an economic order. We end up becoming consumers and what the culture wants is for us to be citizens.”

A story about the suffering of a person in war makes us much more pacifist than a great encyclopedia about World War II.

Fiction, in this task, has an advantage over cold data. “It has a much higher penetration capacity, and it is also complementary,” argues Iturbe. “The work of the historian who goes to an archive, empties the archive, gives us all the information and all the data, is very important. What happens is that the historian, many times, when he tells us about a war, he tells us about a battle, he tells us the number of combatants, how many tanks have participated, how many planes, how many bombs have exploded, how many dead, how many victims… We gives all the figures, all the data. But he does not tell us if those soldiers were afraid, if they were cold, if there were people waiting for them, what they felt, what their emptiness was like… The historian does not tell us all that because it is not in the data. And that is where literature has an important role in converting that coldness of data into people’s stories. Because then it does affect us. Because we are not data, we are not figures in a book. We are people and we have loved ones, we have losses, we have doubts and anxieties. Showing us all those anxieties and all those frailties makes us understand the tragedy of a war much more. I think that a story about a person’s suffering in war makes us much more pacifist than a great encyclopedia about World War II. There, literature has a very important task that does not replace the historian, but it does complement it.”

Books that show that art transforms us, recommended by Antonio Iturbe

Gabi Martínez who has become a bit of the great spokesperson for literature, that natural writing that the English say, that literature of nature. He went for a year to live in the Ebro Delta, a place in regression, we already see how our coasts are completely laminated by climate change, and also by the changes in uses that have caused the rivers that previously contributed a lot of sediment to the beaches and a place like the Delta, with such a large number of dams that we have made to create electricity surges, that the rivers arrive like pool water, and in the end what the storm takes away is no longer recovered by the river. It reflects that entire world of the Delta, a world also with its lights and shadows, such as the slightly closed worlds, that island of Buda, an almost a bit mysterious place. The truth is that it is also a book with personal things that Gabi introduces, which also gives us a vision of the current environmental problem, of climate change from a very personal perspective.

Musicophilia

Oliver Sacks

Anagrama Editorial

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Oliver Sacks has a very nice book called Musicophilia, which talks about people with neurological problems who have musical hallucinations. And he explains to you that, in his long career as a psychiatrist and neurologist, the only treatments that have really worked for patients with profound Alzheimer’s, with profound Parkinson’s, have been treatments with animals, but above all with music. Music is capable of taking people who are in a completely vegetative state, lifting them out of their state, lifting them out of their chairs and making them sing. And that’s a completely amazing thing.

Letters to Milena

Franz Kafka

alliance

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The figure of Milena, perhaps apart from those letters, is a great unknown. Her toxic relationship, her completely failed marriage with Ernet Pollack, her experiences, Kafka, how she meets Kafka… That whole part and how she ends up in the fields is wonderful. of extermination. It is a bit of a small story of Europe in the extermination camps. It’s great to get Milena back.

As a general recommendation, any book by Kafka. Kafka is unlike anything, it is a unique genre. Now we have to call The Metamorphosis The Transformation, but it is a small book that reads fantastic, but The Castle is completely hypnotic, it is a book that really has a very personal cadence and music, the process, well, any Kafka’s book is a success.

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