Pietro Grossi Selected Writings

pietro grossi Selected writings edited by Marco Ligabue Musica/Tecnologia, 1 (2007), issn print 1974-0042, issn online 1974-0050, isbn 978-88-8453-570-2, pp. 283-330 © 2007 Firenze University Press e Fondazione Ezio Franceschini 285 Introduction Marco Ligabue In addition to musical and artistic works, Pietro Grossi left a large number of writings that illustrate and document his thoughts about music and its relationship to technology. These writings – which have already been published on other occasions and are now, the most part, out of print – aim to bring his work and the cultural, social, and aesthetic climate in which he was active to a broader audience. His work conveys fully that multi-faceted character, which found expression in many projects of the purest pioneering spirit, initiating the spread of a series of transformations in the field of musical thought and expression that still today call for greater attention and evaluation. Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna’s pioneering experiments in electronic music at the RAI Phonology Studio in Milan, where for a brief period Grossi studied the new possibilities in the field, were quickly digested and re-worked in a personal and original key. The activities of S 2F M (Studio di Fonologia Musicale di Firenze) bear witness to this, activities which, by the way, would lead more or less directly to the founding of official centres of electronic music throughout the country. The first such department was founded in 1965 at the ‘Luigi Cherubini’ Conservatory in Florence, thanks to Pietro Grossi’s donation of the S 2F M studio equipment that up until then had been kept in his home. Due in large part to Enore Zaffiri and Teresa Rampazzi, who both gravitated to S2FM for a period, other official experiments were born in Turin and Padua, experiments included in this number of the journal in the sections dedicated to the two musicians. Grossi’s thought and activity soon developed well beyond the first experiments and moved toward applications of information technologies to music, taking off in a direction that very few shared in theory and practice; in fact, almost no one, including many of the pioneers. Among the earliest at an international level, the first Italian experiments in computer music began in this way, thanks in large part to Grossi’s work with the Istituto CNUCE (today the ISTI) at CNR and the design and implementa- tion of the first music computer, the hybrid TAU2, described in detail in the Graziano Bertini’s contribution. Beyond its practical and operational interest, the TAUMUS software developed for the TAU2 proved to have important aesthetic implications for musical discourse in its conceptual and organisational structure, implications which 286 introduction today find confirmation in the direction Grossi had imagined and predicted forty years ago. The selection of articles included here propose to trace definitively an intellectual and creative itinerary that was able to quietly and consistently make contributions by calling into question the future of music as form and expression, as well as by creating new coordinates for its existence and social significance. In this regard in particular, we would like to draw attention to Automazione e musica: verifiche e previsioni, Sulla computer music, Musica in tempo reale, L’istante zero della musica. Pietro Grossi’s original collected writings are reproduced here in their entirety and in chronological order by date of composition in order to make it easier for the reader to follow the development alluded to above.* * All the writings by Pietro Grossi here published are from: Pietro Grossi, Musica senza musicisti. Scritti 1966-1986, ed. by L. Camilleri, F. Carreras, A. Mayr, CNUCE/CNR, Pisa 1987. 287 [1] S 2F M NOtice 1 Music produced from November 1965 to January 1966 by the S 2F M (Studio di Fonologia Musicale di Firenze – Musical Phonology Studio of Florence) team during an electronic music course at the Music Conservatory, Florence. research hz use 10 geometric series 1° term ratio 80 2 110 1.9 140 1,8 170 1,7 200 1,6 230 1.5 260 1.4 290 1,3 320 1,2 350 1,1 sinusoidal wave results combinations of 8 fz of each series according to the binomial coefficients 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 ( 1 ), ( 2 ), ( 3 ), ( 4 ), ( 5 ), ( 6 ), ( 7 ), ( 8 ) average duration per 10” combination. the works quoted here are available to organisations and individuals Firenze, Piazzetta delle Belle Arti, January 31, 1966 288 [2] Report on the foundation, objectives and activities of S 2F M I founded the S 2F M (Studio di fonologia musicale di Firenze – Musical Phonology Studio of Florence) in 1963 and provided it with the equipment that permitted the execution of works high technical and artistic quality. This equipment is constantly being added to and improved so as to increase production, the most significant stages of which are summarised below: 1963 Presentation in Florence of the Studio’s first work 1964 1) performances in Turin, Padua, Ferrara, L’Aquila, Rome of first works 2) presentation of the studio and its activities at the Festival of Contemporary Music in Venice 3) participation at the first International Colloquium of Electronic Music in Gand where I represented Italy 1965 1) conferences on the direction of research, study, and production with performances in the following Italian cities: Turin, Bolzano, Trento, Rovereto, Padua, Trieste, Florence, Genoa, Terni, Rome, Naples, and Palermo 2) broadcasting of research work from radio stations in Hiiversum, Lugano, Stockholm, Sydney and selected cities in the U.S.A. 3) participation in the exhibit “La casa abitata” at the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, with sonorisation in select rooms and the stand of the architect Ricci 4) collaboration with Bruno Munari on an exhibit in Milan 1966 Milan: Ideal Standard: organisation of audiovisual events in collaboration with the MID group, exposition duration: one month In addition, the studio has collaborated in Florence with the Association “Vita Musicale Contemporanea” (founded and directed by me) for performances of electronic music, providing the most up-to-date and comprehensive reviews of the cur- rent production of various studios around the world. (Paris, Cologne, Munich, Gand, Warsaw, New York, Tokyo) with which S 2F M maintains close contact. pietro grossi 289 In 1965 the Studio’s equipment was offered to the Conservatory of Florence to use in a course on electronic music. The offer was received with great interest by the director, Maestro Veretti and the Minister of Public Instruction, who authorised the course, the first of its kind in Italy and one of the very few in the world. 290 [3] Electronic music in Italy The activities of electronic music in Italy have been unique, lively, stimulating, in continuous transformation, and projected towards distant, aesthetic-operative goals with moments of exploration that have at times outstripped these very goals; a development which has benefited from the contribution of every centre in the world. A statistical analysis puts Italy today in first place in Europe and in second place in the world behind the United States, in terms of the proportion of research centres to the general population with studios in Milan, Turin, Padua, and Florence. To these studios should be added the two courses in Turin and Florence, private and public re- spectively, along with the constant increase in individual activity in both the technical and creative fields, especially at the present moment. The use of technical equipment puts us among the first – from the Milan Studio, equipped in 1955 with the most state of the art electronic instruments to the most recent creations on synthesisers and the use of computers. The same can be said of the aesthetic achievements, which range from brilliant, individual achievements dating from the very beginning to team experiments aimed at taking on the most subtle challenges, challenges which have been gradually elucidated with the availability of new technologies and new acoustic discoveries. The founding of the Phonology Studio in 1955 at the RAI in Milan marks the beginning of Italian activity in electronic music. The then director of the RAI, Mario Labroca demonstrated openness and foresight, contributing in a decisive way to the realisation of the first concrete results when he entrusted the Studio to Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna. These two composers were immediately able to make studio among the foremost and most active in the world, along with those in Paris, Cologne, and New York, by following their experimental approach, learning from them, and hence, developing their own direction, a direction free of conditioning by Paris and Cologne and, if any- thing, closer to New York for its daring use of acoustic resources, while true to a strong stylistic commitment to the European musical culture of the post-war period. That initial direction was enough to determine the work of several musicians work- ing at the studio, like Vlad, Castiglioni, Bucchi, Sifonia and others later, such as, pietro grossi 291 Nono, who still develops, transforms, and gives shape to the acoustic texture of his theatre there. The abundant bibliography of the Milan Studio activities between 1955 and 1960 is an important confirmation of the intensity of Italian productivity in that period. The first signs of increased the interest in the area of experimentation in electronics applied to music came in Rome around 1960. Vittorio Gelmetti, Antonio De Blasio, and Gino Marinuzzi, Jr. managed to produce some work on their own equipment, as in the case of Marinuzzi, as well as on the equipment provided by the Istituto Superiore delle Telecomunicazioni (Higher Institute of Telecommunications), as in the case of Gelmetti and De Blasio.

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