Italian living in Lithuania. This is how the Faculty’s Professor Dario Martinelli is often introduced, but it is difficult to fit all his personality, hobbies and achievements into this phrase. Originally from Italy, after gaining experience at the Universities of Helsinki and Lapland, semiotician, musicologist, composer, researcher of cinema and other cultural phenomena, he has stayed in Lithuania for a longer period of time and has been delighting KTU students with his knowledge and insights for 10 years.
Your research interests span across multiple disciplines: semiotics, musicology, animal studies, ethics/ideology, film studies. You have also recently presented a music album. What is common and different between these disciplines for you? What draws you to them?
There is an old joke that we tell among academics. It says that there are two different types of scholars: those who become so specialized in a single topic that in the end they know everything about nothing; and those who deal with so many different topics that in the end they know nothing about everything. I belong to the second group, definitely.
I guess it’s a question of passion, first of all. I’ve always believed in transforming your passions into your job. I love music, for instance, so I need an excuse to listen to a lot of music. Same with films. And I am very passionate about animal rights, so I look for opportunities to talk about them, and hopefully make people reflect about how much we kill and abuse animals.
Another reason is interdisciplinarity. Disciplines are different and similar at the same time. Similarities inspire consistence, differences inspire innovation. Very often, to see a certain discipline from the perspective of another discipline gives me a fresh approach and a lot of ideas that I wouldn’t have been able to imagine otherwise. To make just one example, in my last book, The Beatles and the Beatlesque: a crossdisciplinary analysis of sound, production and stylistic impact, I have been using models from film studies to analyse music production. Music producers often say that their job is similar to a film director, so I thought of verifying that idea in a scholarly sense.
Regarding your own music, how would you describe it? What inspired and motivated you to start working on it and record an album?
This is actually my third album, although of course we are not talking about anything “mainstream” that goes into the charts or sells by the thousand. The first one, called Zoosphere, was, for lack of better descriptions, electronic experimentation, based on animal sounds. The second one, (R)esistere, was a pop album for an Italian singer, and this last one, Late night talks, has more of a pop-jazz flavour: it was written and produced for the Lithuanian singer Gabrielė Goštautaitė. I enjoy the process of songwriting, both music and lyrics: it’s a combination of creativity and rationality. You need to have an idea, and that idea is often inspired by feelings and emotions, but you also need to engineer it into a structure, a sequence of chords, a certain metrics, a rhyme scheme… It’s a very “complete” process, and that’s very fulfilling. As for why we did this album, of course for Gabrielė it’s an actual job – she is a singer by profession, and to release a whole album, these days, is an effort that less and less singers do. We have excellent singers in Lithuania, some of whom also quite famous, who hardly released anything at all. In my case, since I already have a job, the motivation was just artistic: I wanted to do something nice, something that everybody involved would be happy to have done. With Gabrielė and all the musicians involved, we had a lot of fun in doing the album, and I think we are indeed all quite proud with the result.
What is creativity for you and what conditions do you think it needs?
I’ve mentioned this in other occasions, so someone may have already heard this, but I have a little problem with the traditional, romantic idea of creativity. The idea of the “muse” that visits you suddenly, usually in the night and usually when you are drunk or under some substances, and that inspires you to write a song as if you were possessed by some divine force… well, I find all this quite boring, honestly, and not as cool as people like to think it is. On the contrary, I think that poetry is potentially everywhere, even in the tiniest, daily things. I like very much Marcel Duchamp’s idea of the “object trouvé”, art as a “found object”. Creative is a person who sees a potential work of art where everybody else sees, say, a pencil, or a plastic bag, or a pillow.
Creativity is the active refusal to accept the world only in the way it was presented to you. That’s why, I believe, great artists tend to be also innovators and revolutionaries.
Do you consider working at the university to be a form of creativity?
Yes, despite all the efforts our policy-makers do to suppress creativity and reduce our job to a constant obedience to pre-made schemes and templates and to evaluate our performance in scales and numbers. There is very little room to think and do creatively and “outside the box”, but if you are very motivated you can use that room. But it’s important to underline that nowadays we can be creative despite the system, not thanks to it.
Humanities, as a field, is often viewed as a less useful, less practical discipline, and might require justification on why it is important. How do you feel about that? Do you think that humanities, as a basis for critical thinking, is even more important today?
I’m not famous enough to have my words stolen and made memes out of them, but there is one thing I wrote long ago that I have seen “recycled” by some colleagues, without acknowledging my intellectual property 😊. That is: natural sciences study what makes life possible – humanities study what makes life worthwhile. As long as we care for love, art, passion, beauty, rage, understanding, compassion, sadness, redemption, hope, joy, we need humanities. And yes, we also need the critical thinking that comes with them, in order to counterbalance our arrogance and our conviction that we can treat this planet and its inhabitants any way we like.
How would you describe the modern humanities?
Difficult to give one single definition. I think we live a historical moment when there are many humanities. On one edge, we have the conservative-nostalgic humanities that refuse to accept the modernity and live under the illusion that they can be what they have always been. On the opposite edge, the excessively-progressive humanities that have embraced modernity in a blind, non-critical way, becoming its obedient tool. Between these two extremes there are many other types. As rhetoric as it may sound, I would hope for a sustainable “golden middle”: embracing modernity with a critical approach, and treasuring tradition without turning it into a religion.
How do you spend your free time and take a break from the intellectual work?
I have a 13-year old son, and I happily devote a lot of my free time to him. Recently, he developed a passion for football, so now a favourite pastime of ours is watching games. He’s a Juventus Turin fan, like me: not that he had any choice, poor thing.
Besides that, as I said, I sort of turned my passions into a job, so, for instance, when I watch a film I may be relaxing and using “free time”, but then something happens in that film that becomes interesting for me professionally. I go like “wait a minute! This is something I could show to my students”, or “this is an example I could mention in the book I am writing”. So, sometimes, working time and free time mix.
Finally, my therapeutic place to recharge batteries is Birštonas: I have a small apartment there, and every time I go, it instantly gives me a sense of balance and happiness. When my Lithuanian friends learn about that, they always say “But… isn’t it a place for old people?” Then they come to visit me and suddenly they go “Oooh, but it’s so beautiful here…” Of course it is!
What films and pieces of music would you recommend to your colleagues and students? What have you discovered recently?
As for recommendations, well, it’s difficult to escape the classics, but then again there’s no use in saying Fellini, Hitchcock and Kazan, or Beatles, Stones and Pink Floyd, because most people will already be familiar with them. So, I will give two less conventional names. For cinema, please consider giving a chance to Ettore Scola: to this day, I haven’t seen anyone who can depict characters with such depth and sensibility. Try movies like The family, A special day or What time is it?
As for music, there is a hidden treasure called XTC, an English band who have interiorized most idioms of popular music and created an excellent synthesis of them. When I mentioned about how fulfilling is the process of songwriting, XTC is the name that comes to my mind: you can really see how much attention they pay to every single aspect of this process. Try albums like Skylarking, Nonsuch or Apple Venus vol. I.
