Giancarlo Toniutti - An Electroacoustic Labyrinth

A first-rate intellectual with his hands firmly in the material, Giancarlo Toniutti has, from his first recordings in 1978 alongside his friend Tiziano Dominighini for the “airthrob in” project, right up to today, been an artist-researcher who has made evolution his stylistic hallmark. Born in Udine in 1963, in 1982-83 he nailed three solo works of icy instrumental experimentation (“Wechselwirkung”, “Metánárkōsis” and “Das Todesantlitz”, collected on vinyl in the 2009 box set “The Early Tapes Period”), pushing to extremes the sonic manifesto of the most caustic Cabaret Voltaire, while also revealing an innate talent for building noise labyrinths from which it's hard to find a way out. With the following “La Mutazione” (’85), a magma at impossible temperatures seethes in the space of a Dantean frozen hell, making him the most likely heir to the extreme Vision of Maurizio Bianchi, godfather of Italian industrial, who just a few months earlier had announced the first of his many retirements from the scene.

Giancarlo, why are some of us drawn to noise? Is it an intellectual construction or an ancestral need?

I'd like to point out that noise and sound are, in all their forms and constructions, one and the same thing. It's only from the standpoint of the Western musical tradition, and from a musicological perspective, that it's been possible, historiographically, to speak of noise in opposition to (musical) sound. Today all this seems to me fairly anachronistic, given the musical practices of the "avant-gardes" over at least the last 80 years. So, doing away with the conceptual, acoustic, theoretical and practical distinctions between the two, one can simply speak of a natural passion for sound, evidently, though, for a sound that is sought after, a sound as a meaningful acoustic phenomenon, not merely inherited, passed down through a dynastic line. If one wants to look at it from a philosophical and biological standpoint, I think one can say that almost every organism, as a matter of habit, makes use of sound in its environment, both as a distinguishing element and as a cognitive one. Human beings, in the same way, work the same way. After that, individual cultures break these mechanisms down and recode them in their own way, within their conceptual environment. Where a specific attraction comes from is a question that belongs, perhaps, if a clear answer even exists, to the level of individual mental history. I have no answers to offer. I think everyone is drawn to sound and to its exploration, but then, for reasons tied to personal circumstances, environments, stimuli and events encountered along one's path, things change and narrow down. All of this can turn out to be highly diverse, can arouse or fail to arouse, can establish, can push toward different modes of relation for each person, whose reasons and degrees depend on that long series of personal contributing factors that I'm in no position to enumerate. In my view, anyone "exposed" to concrete models, to this or that musical form, will tend to recognize them as valid, whatever shape they take. There's no natural inclination toward certain sounds over others, no preeminence of certain modes over others, except as a matter of statistics and hegemony. Otherwise one couldn't make sense of the criteria—so different, yet perfectly shared within a given human society—that music possesses across cultures far removed and distinct from one another.

In the field of electronic music, what's the main obstacle that sooner or later every composer will have to face?

While obstacles can vary widely across different fields, and may stem from economic, social or local causes, in the realm of experimental, electronic or electroacoustic music, what stands out first and foremost as critical is the fact that the composer generally faces the inescapable circumstance of having to build his own musical world, both the single composition and the whole of his work, starting from a kind of relentless tabula rasa. This "normative" void is the consequence of the questioning of the formal and grammatical codes on which music had been ordered up to that point; in the case of Western cultures, this began around the end of the nineteenth century. For experimentation to be genuine, it must use history as a neutral field of work upon which to graft its own research, subjecting its hypotheses to trials and refutations and testing the value of the resulting axioms.

It's clear, then, that the composer of experimental music first has to confront territories almost devoid of fixed reference points. A kind of disorientation arises in a region of which one has no prior experience. Because questioning codes and reference systems doesn't immediately lead to new codifications. This is a very long path, and quite a tangled one too, along which a sort of terra incognita prevails, to be known only as one crosses it, and as such, as one can well understand, the choices to be made come about through continuous negotiations with matter and its forms. And it is precisely this instability that, starting from a condition of difficulty, must instead be turned into a strength.

During your formative years, back in the days of airthrob, what were your ears asking for?

It started with an almost sudden interest, in 1977, at age 14, in so-called German electronic music, which in my case meant mainly the work of Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream, in particular “Irrlicht” and “Cyborg” by the former, “Zeit” and “Atem” by the latter, immediately followed by Conrad Schnitzler's “Con”, and I moved around in that orbit. Little by little my interest broadened toward other models of experimentation, including more or less learned electroacoustic music. Those, however, were my first matrices, and they've stayed with me ever since. In the years before that formative moment, I wandered in an uncertain limbo, with no points of reference, even though for a while already there had been a need in me for unusual music, music with a sense of exploration, far from the same old worn-out sounds of the various pop music of the time, which told me little or nothing. It was something I couldn't quite identify clearly, though. This wandering didn't last long, to be honest, since within a couple of years, I believe, I found that first landing point in avant-garde music. And all the rest of the musical landscape was calmly set aside.

How did your conception of composition change during your time at the Conservatory?

The move to the Conservatory was formative in the long run, and Alvise Vidolin was the one who made that connection. My first encounter with work in computer music, that is, with music computing, which is what was taught back then, often struck me as rather cumbersome; we worked with punch cards, with extremely lengthy notation for individual sounds, and all of this seemed rather unfruitful to me. I longed for direct contact with sound, and instead much of the time was spent in analytical-design phases. As time went by, and through later experiences, I came to understand how much all those analyses and instructions, necessary to get the computer to work and to ask it to generate sound, implied a subtle examination and a knowledge of the principles of sound, its breakdown into controllable, assessable, modulable elements, which over time became an encyclopedia of knowledge – not only about sound – but above all about morphology and structure. The sciences of sound, acoustics, psychoacoustics and many other scientific models thus became the real spark, initially almost unconscious, that instilled in me a vision of the complexity of compositional mechanisms. Of the need to demand from every choice the real substance of what it promises, rather than letting oneself be guided by unreflected impressions and suggestions. This shift happened gradually, with every small step, with every rung marking an awareness of possibilities previously unknown.

What do you consider the most evident results you achieved with extraordinary albums like “Wechselwirkung” and “Metánárkōsis”?

It's hard to assess results in the abstract, what they are and how they came about. It's hard to evaluate works that, to my ears, can only appear as signs of a time gone by and transformed. However naive they may seem in certain respects, their outcome was nonetheless to stand as small fulcrums independent from the noise of trends, as constructs exemplary in their own way of an autonomy from references, preset schemes, myths and models of yesteryear, whether those of “serious” music or those of “popular” music, of markets and of more or less avant-garde work. Years later, they do indeed strike me as works that managed to carve out an undeniably distinct space of their own, especially when considered within the panorama that later unfolded over time, without overstating the point, of course.

What was the modus operandi and instrumentation used to make “La Mutazione”?

“La Mutazione” was made roughly in two phases. A first phase, in which the basic elements were still the synthesizer and a set of sounds recorded from objects and environments, placed in a relationship that was almost a mutual counterpoint. And a second phase, in which there was a gradual broadening of the field of action and of the acoustic spectrum, with the addition of increasingly heterogeneous elements, with sonorities built and processed on magnetic tape, concrete sounds of many kinds, which led the initially simple structure to expand and modulate within a rather frenetic mix, proportionate to the materials themselves. It was, in the end, a matter of two new combinations with respect to the original conditions: on one hand, the arrival of new technologies, a multitrack recorder, an 8-channel mixer, a reel-to-reel recorder, which made it possible to approach and handle sounds from more angles, to deploy them across more active and composite fields, including the parameter of space; on the other, a kind of clear fusion, a hinge point between two sonic universes that occupied my interests at the time, the German electronic music I came from and the contemporary electroacoustic research I was drawn toward.

What consequences can following the path of abstraction, in the arts in general, lead to for those who choose to pursue it?

I think, first of all, it produces a broadening around the meanings of reality. Or, put another way, it entails the need to learn things from many disciplines, from different sciences and different fields, in order to master the mechanisms underlying abstraction. To abstract doesn't mean to move away, it doesn't entail a departure from matter. In fact, exactly the opposite happens, because it's a matter of condensing matter within its own distinctive dynamics. It's a matter of unfolding the workings of those generative mechanisms that lie within the single form. One thus finds oneself vis-à-vis with the very reasons of matter, their implications at various concrete levels that stand out against the universe of phenomena. There's nothing crudely hallucinatory about it, no mysticism of the symbol. To abstract literally means to extract, to draw from an observable origin the matter suited to weaving a space, in our case a sonic one. It's a wholly physical, material action, and it's precisely in this materiality that meaning arises.

Is it possible to leave political thought out, even from instrumental music like yours?

No, it certainly isn't possible. But it's not a matter of political thought in the sense of a position taken within the political spectrum one happens to live in. It's rather, first and foremost, a matter of civic engagement, of responsibility toward the civil community, whether local or global, a responsibility that can be expressed in many ways and that the music one makes inevitably embodies in its structures. Every choice one makes has its own repercussions, even on a “political” level, since it determines the construction of a universe of reference, which in turn constitutes a model for interpreting reality according to personal schemes and narratives. So every composer chooses which materials and forms to work with, and none of these choices is ever neutral. Regardless of the author's own intentions, they display various degrees of hierarchy, and different modes and structures of relation within the forms one works with. It's therefore natural that these respond to specific worldviews, to distinct manifestations of a habitat or milieu that is thereby proposed, or at least made recognizable, through them. One cannot hope to escape all of this. Even the most solipsistic artist speaks to the world. And he doesn't need to do so through his own language: his actions speak for him.

Why do a good many composers active in the post-industrial and power electronics genres rely (also) on violent imagery?

That's something that has personally never concerned me, but I think it's one of the less interesting facets of some of the avant-garde movements that emerged in the '80s. I've always disputed, for instance, the idea that noise, as a sonic notion, should be associated with a cheaply negative vision of reality — a morbid vision, more inclined toward adolescent-style seduction than conscious artistic choices. Of course, there are also good reasons for engaging with the macabre, and not just recently — reasons that arise, to some extent, from a conflict with society's smug, sanctimonious mediocrity. In the music you mention, these reasons have very rarely been in evidence. Instead, much of it very quickly became mere stereotype and cliché, a kind of blasé neo-conformism, a sort of counter-affectation and a cult of irrationalism that I neither understand nor admire, even though I see it's extremely widespread.

Even today, within the field of German composers who came of age between the 60s and 70s, Conrad Schnitzler remains one of the most important figures yet also one of the least cited.

Conrad is a point of reference that should be indispensable within musical and artistic research in general. However, he never cultivated his public image in a commercial way; he always operated in total freedom of action, without constraints, without deference, without closures, and this inevitably kept him somewhat on the margins — at least of widespread fame, which aims at the easy simulacrum, and far from the systems of the industry of exaggerated representation. Even when he made more accessible music, he never gave himself over to the market, never concerned himself with it. His was, first and foremost, artistic work in the broadest sense; his entire life was built on that principle. Music, which became central to his activity, was the means through which he founded his own autonomous cultural vision and the idea that everyone should have their own. Many people probably don't realize it, since they picked up their models from later generations, but it is around Conrad Schnitzler, to some extent, that many movements in European experimental music rose to public prominence and were able to build their careers. Much of this traces back to what he did in the late '60s in Berlin, where he founded the famous Zodiak Free Arts Club, together with other collaborators such as Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Boris Schaak — a unique hub for the Berlin avant-garde movement and beyond. Schnitzler should be studied thoroughly and without hesitation, setting aside narrow interpretive frameworks, because it's precisely there that Conrad would prove his stature.

From a subconscious standpoint, when a composer records an acoustic sound and modifies it, what is he actually asserting, at a deep level?

In making music, one doesn't assert something. It's rather a matter of signifying — that is, setting a signification in motion through sound. Processing a sound, altering some of its parameters, for instance, is above all a process necessary for the purposes of composition; it's about being able to reach certain conditions that the sound didn't originally offer, and this, at least in my case, without ever distorting its dynamic and morphological “contents.” The way I modify a sound, when that happens — because in my music there can also be sounds exactly as they were recorded, even if their generation and recording occur through extended methods — my approach is fairly simple: I never apply what are called plug-ins, meaning prefabricated effects for sound processing (granulation, frequency modulation, etc.). Every treatment I apply happens directly with the sound, not on top of a sound. For me it's often a matter of bringing out certain characteristics of a sound's material grain — maybe microscopic or less obvious ones — that strike me for compositional purposes, and then emphasizing them, magnifying them, accentuating them. Observing the details of a reality that may be less immediately striking at first glance, yet is absolutely present — indeed often the active core of that phenomenology — is the main task of a composer of electroacoustic music: bringing the intricate mechanics of microstructures to the ear's attention and giving form to their relationships.

If you had to assign a specific moral value to your entire body of work, what would it be?

The ethical position of music is a very complicated question. I don't think it can be simplified in any way without falling into the sin of banality, or that of self-indulgence. In my case, I can glimpse the meaning of complexity — the engine of the whole world and its workings — as what permeates my musical and sonic activity. Complexity is the awareness that every phenomenon of reality is not determined by the hasty sum of A plus B, by the reduced causal line from A to B, but is always a composite of its historical evolution, a product of the phenomenal ganglia that permeate it and the thousand contributing causes that determine it. And there are many degrees of complexity, many levels and stratifications — a bit, if you like, like the “gnommero” that Carlo Emilio Gadda describes and uses in his fiction, seen here mainly in its physical impact. It's something that teaches us not to take the world as it appears to us for granted, but rather to try to explain its processes as far as we can, and not to handle it in a reductionist and opportunistic way. And this seems to me an important ethical (and epistemological) lesson. As the title of a book by René Thom puts it: “Predicting is not explaining” (“Prédire n’est pas expliquer”).

In the new millennium you released two albums that pair your name with that of Tiziano Dominighini. How did you work with the unreleased material you recovered?

My musical collaboration with Tiziano had ended in 1983; our lives had taken different paths and our contact had gradually become sparse, very much so. His death in 1997 obviously closed that chapter for good. The recovery of material we had worked on between 1979 and 1981 was mainly driven by a few contingent factors — commissions, requests — but this made it possible to free that material from mythological oblivion and set it in motion by offering it publicly. That's how some of my recent works came about, which I could only co-credit to Tiziano as well, even though he could only be present in purely sonic form — which is already a great deal. The two works were different in nature: in one case I assembled existing material, our very first recordings, in a philological way, respecting their condition and purpose, while still taking into account certain elements to which I gave an order that had been lacking; in the other, I carried out something that hadn't been possible in the past — that is, completing a project of sound placement, recovering the sounds we had recorded and inserting them, under particular threshold conditions, into new environmental recordings made specifically for the purpose, which matched the intentions of the original project. In neither case was it a matter of generic nostalgic or anthological recovery. If anything, for both works, the driving motivation was to find out whether, and to what extent, their reality was possible — or whether they would instead remain mere attempts on paper (on tape).

When you compose, in what way do you care about others?

Every composition arises from material needs tied to sounds and their relationships — timbral, structural, morphological. No other motive comes into play, except the will to compose. No relationship, adjustment, or orientation toward others comes into it, not even toward myself. What matters is the sound and its form. A public form, of course. Sure, sometimes there are “commissions” that I respond to, but only in specific terms — that is, in relation to the scope of the request (record label, festival, etc.). In practice, this has no bearing whatsoever on the development of the composition. Here one would need to bring in the concepts of the Model Reader and the Empirical Reader developed by Umberto Eco for further clarification. Eco distinguished between the Model Reader — which we might call the Model Listener — and the Empirical Reader (Empirical Listener): the former corresponds essentially to a hypothetical reader/listener to whom, to some extent, one addresses oneself in one's activity as composer/author, while the latter is the concrete reader/listener, the one who actually experiences and lives the composition in fact. The author thus tends toward a listener with characteristics such that they can grasp all the nuances the author wants to put into a composition, and this is the only addressee to whom the author can, in some sense, turn, if he doesn't want to end up in the furnace of the music industry and its commercial prerogatives. But this model listener is an unfindable being; there exist only empirical listeners, with all their knowledge, their limits, their history, and their more or less correct interpretations. So it's impossible to think of taking that into account in any real way. Compositional activity is therefore certainly directed toward the “outside,” toward the civil community, but it must refuse to try to live up to the expectations and myths of specific groups or “ccliques.”

What do you love most about collaborating with your brother, composer Massimo Toniutti?

Our actual, published collaborations are fairly few, after all. Massimo and I are quite different in how we look at composition. Perhaps also in certain respects regarding the responsibility toward sounds, but we've shared, and still share, years of almost daily analysis, dialogue, and observation around music and its purposes, which constantly and mutually force us to evaluate and reconsider our own personal compositional practice. As I said, in the end we've collaborated little in terms of joint composition, and this might stem precisely from the transparency of our dialogues and the minute, ongoing mutual observation. If you like, we could say that the real collaboration takes place before any musical ideas are put into action — it stops right at the threshold, in a prolonged dialogue, and then each of us heads off toward our own territory.

What do you think are the qualities that set him apart, and how do your visions differ?

In practice, his musical activity is shaped more by a kind of critical empiricism, where action — even physical action, marked directly by sound — takes precedence over the theorization of morphogenetic structures. There's a place, so to speak, where the work unfolds through continuous unexpectedness, through manipulation “by ear,” from which formal agglomerations begin to take shape. These take on the nature of gathering grounds where architectures become consequences rather than guides mapped out through vectors, surfaces, and fields, as happens primarily in my case. For me, theoretical activity always accompanies every practical activity; they are inseparable and foundational — they are, so to speak, the dual of matter. In Massimo's case, on the other hand, it's his form of pragmatism that has developed in him a remarkable sensitivity in handling the minute components of those sound groups from which he draws his music, resulting in traits that are very much his own.

The album you would absolutely never have expected to make?

Probably "Counterchronology". The music recorded with Tiziano back then, and we're talking about way back in 1979, was later forgotten by us too, in a way, relegated to the role of small, perhaps vague youthful experiments. I always thought that's all they were and that they'd never deserve any kind of public life. Then, as things go, quite by chance one day, visiting Tiziano after several years apart, probably around 1990, at a certain point he pulled a couple of cassettes out of a cabinet full of odds and ends at his place, with the tracks from that period recorded on them. Something that, almost without thinking, once I got home I exiled among my other old tapes. Many years later, Gianfranco Santoro of Final Muzik asked me for something to release and, I'm not quite sure how, I found myself thinking back to those very tapes, and I figured that going back and trying to give those recordings some kind of finished shape, despite their technical quality, trying to give them a conclusion, despite their "minor" status, so to speak, could turn into an interesting operation. That it could point to the incipit of my whole output, show it in its authentic, nuclear, historically grounded form, something I wouldn't have believed it could withstand. In the end, as you can see, they were right, the materials, to hold out against time and my own reluctance.

You're among those behind the precious box set dedicated to Enrico Piva, "Anticlima": how would you outline the undeniable value of his sonic approach?

I nursed the idea for the Piva box for over a decade after his death. But it was quite difficult to put together, I didn't have some of his earliest materials, even though I owned a lot of unreleased work, and I wasn't sure how to tackle the various layers or how to organize them into an anthology. Then one day, in 2013, talking with some of the people who later became part of the project, I floated the idea, which was immediately picked up enthusiastically, and the research and production work slowly got underway. A long, interesting and exhausting job, digging through everyone's respective archives, memories, and areas of study. I've always been convinced that Piva was one of the few who truly understood certain fundamental issues in sound experimentation, even though he later lost his way, tangled up in his own convoluted philosophies.

What do you want to remember about the man?

As a human being he was also a complicated character, who played, I think in some cases even unwittingly, with a vision suspended between true and false, between what was said and what was merely suggested, between the succession and the substitution of reality, which sometimes led him down rather solipsistic paths. For many years he really was a friend with whom I shared hundreds of pages and tapes full of open-ended, labyrinthine conversations, a person of great knowledge and a very sharp spirit of curiosity, constantly transforming his own field of action, never still, indeed almost restless in his drive to move into ever new territories. As a composer, despite his gradual withdrawal from public life, he was often able to glimpse musical outcomes that were entirely his own, in which the sheer materiality of sound became more and more an intrinsic trait of the composition, in which real elements revealed their visionary side and underlying weave, in which conceptuality became phenomenon even before becoming an object of desire, in unique forms and progressions, right up until they fell silent. There would still be a great deal to study in his work.

What do you ask of your music today?

An ever greater attention to detail, not in an aestheticizing sense, but quite the opposite, in a concrete, very concrete sense. A rigor of sound and form, which doesn't mean detachment or rigidity, not at all. A kind of warm radicalism, if I can put it that way. It's a necessity that has developed over time, the need to clarify the many small hinge points within a piece of music, the so-called points of bifurcation that one constantly runs into or inevitably collides with, and to make them ever more decisive for the form, from within themselves. Whether this happens in structures of high density or, conversely, in extremely rarefied constructions, it's exactly the same thing. There's exactly the same nature and necessity at work, namely turning the sonic accidents that appear during the generation of a sound into true foundational nodes, let's say the universal joints of musical structures, and to do that you need to work in increasingly defined ways on what I call mesostructures, in other words the structures that articulate a musical composition. Whether that means, for instance, microtonality in the relationships between frequencies, or variations in density in the relationships between groups and local forms. It's a kind of vividness I'm after, but one capable of setting aside the predictable, colorful exuberance of leaps and flourishes, the easy, attention-grabbing showmanship, in favor instead of a more relaxed relationship with the material, a form of accurate cognition.

If you had to venture a prediction, what do you think will be the most drastic change we'll witness in the coming years?

I haven't the faintest idea, nor even the vaguest one. I'm not fond of the futurology of assisted predictions, that is, predictions based on today's knowledge. They're just vague hopes or frightened mirages. If we look at predictions made in the past, on average only a very small percentage of them actually matched up with the future they imagined. A great many, on the other hand, envisioned epochal shifts that never actually happened, and certainly not in the timeframe or manner predicted. Changes in reality are always made up of billions of tiny lines, of points hopping about each on its own timescale, each with its own development, landing wherever they please without any regard for our futile interpretations. We, for instance, are biologically speaking not all that different from our ancestors of 100,000 years ago and beyond. That doesn't mean we're still the crude (and utterly wrong) image of the so-called caveman, a silly nineteenth-century notion. In biological reality, that man was very, very similar to what we are today, allowing for technological and economic differences, but our physiological mechanisms, the biological ones and often the psychological ones too, differ very little. We find ourselves looking at reality in similar ways. But that, in my view, is an extremely useful and interesting realization.

An indubitable truth on which you've built your existence?

I don't know any indubitable truths. If I wanted to play with words, I'd say I only know real doubts. I think the notion of truth can only be applied to an extremely local level of reality. To very specific domains. And very probably, as we see in the sciences, that local truth will be subject to constant revision, to partial or global reform, to rewriting. That's why I won't even allow myself to state, in that typically bland paradox, that the only truth I believe in is doubt. No, doubt is a useful tool, a mechanism of inquiry, so perhaps it would be better to say that the only thing one should doubt is precisely every supposed truth placed before us. Not in order to dismantle it a priori in favor of other truths that are just as questionable, but in order to handle complexity through constant critique and verification of the data at hand. The world doesn't need truths, closed and immovable schemes. Those are extreme palliatives for insecurities and fanaticisms, but they conceal themselves even from themselves.

The last time a piece of music impressed you?

Interesting question. It's clear that, as time and experience go by, impressions come to take on very different traits compared with the first novelties encountered in youth. Probably, first of all, the very nature of impression and impressionability itself changes. Today it's certainly not impression that guides me, and it barely did even in my youth. After all, knowing compositional mechanisms from the inside sometimes leads to certain involuntary analytical excesses. There's no avoiding it. But it's true that there are still many things that continue to catch me "unprepared", forcing me to work out reasoning and find suitable solutions, on various levels. In recent years, few new pieces of music have been able to push me to revise my principles of writing and planning, so to speak. There are indeed new and interesting sonorities that occasionally show up here and there in recent and contemporary music, new interpretive options, even if often only hinted at, but as far as the morphology of structures and their details are concerned, I find there's a certain stagnation, a fairly frequent acquiescence toward well-known forms, or at least ones already almost codified, with a whole proliferation of genres and subgenres feeding and idealizing themselves. I think it's the result of an excess of practical sense, a kind of verbal diarrhea in the mechanisms and a slowdown in the actual processes of research into form. And music is form.

As a scholar of linguistics, what's your point of view on the woke movement and its urge to change language and disown part of cultural and artistic History, on a global level?

I believe fads exist. Fads never bring anything particularly foundational to the building of societies. They're hucksters trying to besiege the ordinary intelligence of things. So that when, unfortunately, they settle in as a kind of tyranny, for instance, and come to determine the fate of others, their eventual fall, their conclusion, often wipes out much of that series of logical constraints that had been forcibly imposed or passively accepted. This will likely be the case for many of today's fads, as has already happened in the past. Few fads leave behind any real degree of knowledge, and often not in the form they had anticipated. Let's also remember that languages are extremely persistent, even if malleable. Not being a fan of fads, and even less of the current ones and their debates, which are often rather sloppy (I don't follow them and know very little about them), I'll make a few general statements. The problem, then, speaking above all as a scholar of languages, is that many of the recent proposals claiming to "better respond" to seemingly urgent socio-political needs — I'm thinking here, for example, of the debate around language and gender — are derived and modeled on an Anglo-Saxon basis. As such, they lack any serious universal or immediate applicability, particularly to languages with different properties, syntactic and grammatical requirements that are often largely unsuited to the proposed models and their solutions. Not to mention the axiological void that would be created in languages where the notion of gender is something else entirely compared to the Anglo-Saxon one, or that use different kinds of ordering systems for semantic fields (I'm thinking, for instance, of languages with classifiers). But it would also be worth asking whether the "inclusivist" foundations of these models don't actually belong much more to a kind of neocolonialism, so to speak — an attempt at "conversion" to one's own model even where cultural differences involve entirely different occurrences. And in doing so, erasing a form of knowledge found in the world's diversity. I understand that all of this is meant to revolve around the theme of rights, a theme worth sharing, but one that in my view requires something quite different, and on an altogether different scale. The rest has all too often turned into a kind of autocracy of euphemism, a neutralization of every plumb line, every vertigo of reality, which would end up producing only a sort of tiresome and fruitless regularity.

What do you search for today that you didn't search for in your youth?

It's always the same type of path, which on the one hand has obviously become more refined with experience and knowledge, and on the other has also branched out and diversified, so as to try to grasp, as far as possible, every field of knowledge I'm able to approach. Following necessity, not erudition for its own sake. Research isn't merely a tool, it isn't simply a practice on which to validate one's own idiosyncrasies. Research, the experimental attitude, is a continuous path, a part that forges models of reality by studying its phenomena. And knowledge is a field in constant ferment. Of course, things often unfold in periods, in intervals during which certain studies are favored over others. In my recent years, for instance, the study of microtonality pushed all the way to critical bands has forcefully come to the fore, as a form of decomposition and recomposition of sound phenomena at what you might call a microscopic level. I imagine a future period will come, which I neither dare nor am able to predict, in which research will focus more on some different phenomenological parameter. These are the emerging regions of one's lines of research, but research isn't something meant to "find" something else. As Andrea Zanzotto ironically asked: "E l'avanguardia ha trovato, ha trovato?". So the point isn't to find who-knows-what — research is actually an effect, the result of a worldview that unfolds upon the world itself.

What's the most extraordinary aspect of being an artist?

More than in the classic figure of the artist, I recognize myself in that of the researcher. I believe my activity is very close to that of the researcher of all eras, who works on a theoretical and empirical basis, on materials and their morphogenesis. Who projects theories and then verifies their results. In this role, what I find incredible is the space that always opens up before me, every time I start a new work. Or even just think about a new work. There's such a variety of fields of study, elements, things, variables, contributing causes, that the most surprising and intricate step is, first of all, bringing the goal of the work into focus, managing not to fall into habit while at the same time letting oneself be guided by the materials being acoustically questioned. The artist and the researcher engage directly with matter, and if they also manage not to fall under its spell to the point of becoming entangled and subjugated by it, they may be able to draw from this dialogue models that are valid for the reality they live in as well. It's a matter of observing the deep dynamics of matter directly, an approach that remains constant even outside the musical field. But one must know how to ask the right questions in order to get useful answers, and, of course, also learn how to deflate one's own ego.

(09/02/2025)

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