PIANOMIRRORING

The Psycho-Analogical Music of Alessandro Sironi

“PianoMirroring is the art of translating the human personality into music in a composition that is born at the moment, while I look a person in the eye sitting in front of me. I get in touch, I observe her for a few seconds, establishing a mysterious dialogue and then I begin to tell her through the music.”

Alessandro Sironi: pianist, composer and writer, but above all the creator of PianoMirroring and musical PsychoAnalogy. A new way of self-knowledge through music.

BY M.G. PIA

What is PianoMirroring?

This technique becomes the beginning not only of a way to overturn the artist-spectator relationship, but above all an instrument of self-knowledge.

Each of us is a mysterious infinity, something that goes beyond the name, the profession he does, the social class, religious or political belief.

That “something” - which we can call Soul, I, character or personality - can be represented with music, precisely because music has the gift - and, in my opinion, the purpose - of highlighting the mystery that we are. I believe that music is the greatest representative system of the human psyche, and therefore music is an ideal tool to understand who we are beyond all superstructures.

What is the purpose of your work?

I try to summarize it with an image. Our psyche is comparable to a museum full of works. A grandiose place that, however, has a problem, an unresolved question that has always been known to both the ancients and modern psychologists: practically most of that museum is in the dark.

Psychology calls that “unconscious” darkness, a mysterious, inaccessible area that hides a great deal of our identity. We practically do not contact much of who we are. Contacting our hidden identity is the purpose of all wisdom traditions: from the East - which that purpose calls Enlightenment - to the West, which defines it as Fullness.

To achieve all this we would need a switch to illuminate all the interior rooms, but we cannot find that switch. On the contrary, we only have a small lamp that illuminates some painting, and what little we see we call “me”. Music, as I understand it today, is a form of light that, entering through the windows of the ears, can illuminate parts of us that we do not see and thus help us in a journey of knowledge that is the basis of all our deep longings.

In this sense I can say that the purpose of my work is to help people to know themselves.

How does this knowledge come about through music?

I use another image.

We all know the cliché of the singer who makes crystal glasses vibrate with his voice. This happens because the glass vibrates at the same frequency as the singer’s note. If we take this physical phenomenon, called the resonance effect, and apply it to the psyche, we see that we also work the same way. That museum I was talking about before is, deepening the metaphor, a museum of crystal works that are resonated from the outside world.

Every time we listen to music, fragments of our unconscious are solicited. The emotion we feel is the proof, the testimony.

All this happens when we listen to any music, but also when we look at a landscape or when we meet a person who “resonates”, we say. It always happens, but in the case of mirroring it happens in a specific way, that is, the event that resonates the psyche is built on the individual person, and every reaction or inner movement of the person is seen and returned. This is how, in the approximately twenty minutes of mirroring, the person can have the strong impression of having been contacted deeply and in areas of himself that he may not have known about.Let’s say that mirroring is like giving back to the person a kind of perfume that he is wearing, but maybe he doesn’t feel it anymore. Or maybe she has never heard it. How do these meetings take place?

Mirroring can currently be done through private individual sessions or during public performances.

In the first case the person contacts me and comes to the studio, without an audience, in the second they are real concerts in which, instead of playing pieces of music normally intended, I play people, putting them one at a time in front of me at the piano . About 7 or 8 volunteers in the audience who make themselves available. The sum of the mirrorings, plus some collective experiences, creating unique and unrepeatable events, where every time I compose different music depending on who I am in front of. This is PianoMirroring.

And what, on the other hand, is Musical Psycho-Analogy?

Musical PsychoAnalogy is the whole conceptual and philosophical structure behind PianoMirroring, Through PsychoAnalogy, mirroring is no longer just the experience of a moment, but becomes an operational tool that aims to bring the person to three precise self-understandings, which I call gifts. Three gifts that this work can bring to the person.

Do you want to summarize them briefly?

The first I have already anticipated, or the possibility of putting the current state of the person to music. That is, to give back the image of her current self. At this point the person is placed in front of the mirror of the current state of his inner reality, and which I could define as the current state of the ego, or the sum of the wounds and internal strategies that the mind implements to survive in psychic territories. It is a snapshot of an inner position.

But this is not enough to bring knowledge into the person. Each of us is not just the current state, the what it is, that is, a potential lives within us, a more evolved identity, or a mature version of the self.

The second cognitive gift is exactly this: to show the person that mature ego that they may not know, and to show them what their life would be like if they thought and acted on that ego.

And how does all this happen?

I used to compare our psyche to a crystal museum. We tend to always vibrate the same glasses, which are generally wounds and automatisms. Inside us it is as if we had a pianist who in every moment plays music that always activates the same glasses for us and starting from those glasses we look at the world, filtering it with that music.

In practice, that pianist creates in every moment the soundtrack on everything that happens to us. And that soundtrack is generally disharmonious. What happens if we put another one in place of that automatic pianist? What happens if instead of looking at the world with a certain music, we look at it with another and more mature one?

Within us, in fact, there are both ordinary glasses and royal glasses, that is, on the one hand, ordinary emotions and on the other, large areas of our psyche that concern bliss, compassion, gratitude. The Christian tradition calls those areas Paradise, which in psychic terms is a dimension of the being that inhabits them and which, if contacted, would make us feel satisfied, full, fulfilled.

So the second gift is to get the person to see a world from that position of perfection.

The third gift I have called the oracular gift, or the possibility of obtaining answers from the unconscious to any question we ask ourselves. This is the center of my work and probably the most pioneering and original intuition. According to psychoanalytics, every person, event or object that belongs to our external world exists within us in the form of an image. On everything we see outside of us we project those images, and if those interior images are the glasses of our metaphor, then it means that music can come into contact with the images that are the foundation of our life, making them vibrate.

When we look at our home, the city we live in, the person next to us, our children: our physical eye sees objects, people, while our psychic eye sees those unconscious images, but we don’t notice them. If we project the image of a ship in storm on our house, then in that house we will feel bad, we will feel nauseous, we will feel as if we cannot find a safe haven. But the problem is not given by the house itself, but by the image that we carry within us and that the house takes care of showing us. This simple example explains the power of unconscious images to radically change our reality. When we use music in an oracular key we go inside the psyche to ask questions that apparently concern external problems, such as that with the house or with our partner, but in reality we are asking our unconscious to reveal the images that are at the basis of those relationships. . Basically we are asking the psyche to provide us with the codes of our life.

And how can all this be achieved?

In the case of the oracular strategy, through two-day seminars within which, through the effect of resonance and synchronicity, we are able to bring out symbolic images from the participants which are then transcribed and interpreted through a code. In this way we are able to obtain answers of great depth that go far beyond the answers we can obtain with the rational sphere. Here it is too complicated to tell how this strategy works, but I can say that after almost nine years of seminars and symbolic readings, people have obtained great benefits and in most cases have obtained answers that have changed their perception of themselves and their problems.

Can PianoMirroring and Musical Psycho-Analogy be defined as healing tools?

If by healing we mean bringing knowledge and therefore healing from selfignorance, certainly yes. And in my opinion, until we heal from ignorance of the real processes that inhabit us, any attempt to feel good or to defeat our ills is illusory.

The truth makes you free, meaning the truth about ourselves: who we are, what are the real unconscious purposes, but above all the truth that we already know, that is, that everything that happens to us is intelligent and perfect. We just need to bring this truth to light and acknowledge it. As far as I’m concerned, music can be a great opportunity, as long as we return to music its value and its evocative and inspiring power, capable of showing us who we really are.