Nicoletta Lucatelli · ScuolAmadeus
In March, a preview of the educational activity that Tempo Reale, Berio’s research centre, is launching with RAI.
Tempo Reale, the Florentine music research, production and teaching centre directed by Luciano Berio, will launch a new pedagogical season next autumn covering computer music: children’s musical literacy, computer-music courses, talks and a CD-ROM series.
To preview this unusual work, a workshop for ten children takes place on 25, 26 and 27 March in Studio C at RAI’s Tuscany regional headquarters in Florence. The centre’s education director Jacopo Baboni Schilingi and assistant Thierry Coduys work with young pupils during school hours, opening the third day to parents, teachers and the press.
Inspired by approaches at IRCAM, Paris VII University and Hungary’s Bartók Seminar, the programme will also be offered from 2000 within Rome’s Città della Musica, designed by Renzo Piano and hopefully completed by then.
“The aim is collective and individual musical learning in a space equipped for sound experiments and an innovative grasp of music through computing,” Baboni Schilingi explains. Starting points are “new teaching methods for six- to eight-year-olds: discovering timbral categories, linking sound and graphic representation, recognising sounds and instruments, synchronising audio and video, transforming, locating and spatialising sounds, and relating traditional instruments to possible computer interactions”.
Another important aspect is professional training for young composers, the new generation of computer-music teachers who must be able to work in production studios and children’s education. Activities also include courses for non-musicians, school talks and teaching materials.
Contemporary music in primary school
Webern, Berio, Kurtág: taboo for primary pupils? An introductory-listening initiative at Trento’s Festival Internazionale ’900 shows otherwise. Francesco Serpetti and Maria Paola Zannoni led it, with drawings by Luigi Paganotto and translations by Maria Grazia Turri. Over about an hour, roughly 250 children per session, repeated five times, interacted through performance and playful deconstruction/reconstruction of music by Berio, Bartók, Gubaidulina, Kurtág, Stravinsky, Satie and Webern.
A somewhat futuristic musical Arcimboldo guided the meeting by recounting a dream, from which the facilitators highlighted particular moments. “Perceiving a sound or image and linking it to imagination and experience is among childhood’s most natural events,” they suggest. “It is a route to an effective approach to art.”