Jacopo Baboni Schilingi, La Signature. Mimésis, 682 pages, €40.
Jacopo Baboni Schilingi’s La Signature is a hefty stone—682 pages—thrown into the pond of contemporary music, or “so-called contemporary” music, as the author calls it throughout. The publication combines essay, autobiography and fiction in the form of fables, interspersed with interviews with Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, Stockhausen and Jonathan Harvey.
Baboni Schilingi, an Italian composer born in 1971, began writing music at six, entered Ivan Fedele’s composition class at fourteen and was admitted to IRCAM at twenty-two. His works are performed worldwide, and he is also active in music education. His field is electroacoustic music and music computing. He is far from indulgent towards this “so-called contemporary” music. He dates its decline to the early 1980s, identifying a kind of academicism among musical neo-avant-gardes that endlessly repeat earlier generations’ models without inventing very much.
Baboni Schilingi had a moment of revelation at a concert by young composers of different nationalities whose music reflected none of their countries’ cultural particularities. A kind of compositional smoothing produced a succession of identical musical languages, made up of formulas going round in circles. According to the author, “Academic activity is activity that obeys rules and laws ossified by time, […] a way of doing things with no collective necessity, which is dispensable, […] the result of an activity using the sociocultural values of a bygone era without adapting and translating them into its own time.”
He denies “so-called contemporary” music the self-appointed designation of “learned music”, since no intellectual listens to it. This music is learned only for composers themselves. Grouped into a rootless caste, they live on subsidies that seem to be their entitlement. The author contrasts this with self-financing music under the heading “Pop”—film music, jazz, soul, rock, funk and so on—arguing that it is much more inventive than “so-called contemporary” music and sets much higher standards, both in its often uncompromising craftsmanship and in performance or pure creation.
Baboni Schilingi observes that “so-called contemporary music too often adopts a social attitude that is mannerist, rather than artisanal.” But he also acknowledges that “Pop” music “does not withstand analysis”: “This music tells the world’s story, but does not explain it.” It “glides over the world”, without an anchor, “without roots”.
This book is not merely critical. The author offers twelve “ways out” to stem the crisis and rediscover the path of creation. One may of course disagree, but they have the merit of being constructive. Some passages retrace music history. Baboni Schilingi surveys it and summarises the succession of schools and movements and their connections. With precision and erudition, he dissects both the contemporary and historical musical worlds. Naturally, any resemblance to the world of “so-called contemporary” art is entirely coincidental.
Philippe Ducat