Under 40: Jacopo Baboni Schilingi. Craftsperson, artist and researcher, the Italian composer who theorises “hyper-systemic music” has lived in Paris for years. By Marilena Laterza.
From the “transcendental doxological regime” to [a few words of the opening are not legible], Jacopo Baboni Schilingi recounts his thirty-nine years as a remarkable mind and highly sociable person. One of the few composers of his generation able to live from commissions, he left Italy shortly after twenty. Today he lives in Paris to be near his children Arthur and Clément, but works worldwide, teaches at various institutions, founded associations, worked for Tempo Reale and IRCAM and collaborated with writers, architects and visual and video artists. His CV teems with theoretical texts, software and music for concerts, films and installations, without preventing him from loving certain wines and giving dinners for friends. Passionate ingenuity: Homer, the West’s earliest poet, would call him polytropos.
“My image of myself as a researcher, without any frustration, is of an exile,” he begins. “I belong to the minority still able to write fugues, who enjoy examining a chorale and rack their brains analysing Beethoven to investigate the difference between theme and subject: shared, recognised know-how that interests very few people, who lack the resources to sustain it. But my musical thinking also involves craftsmanship.”
Craftsmanship of writing, as in Anima-Phoenix for orchestra, string quartet and electronics, performed in May by the Orchestre d’Île-de-France; or of programming, as in Fractal Flowers, the recent iPhone app with no score but lines of code; or pure experiment. In August he will travel to Brazil for Terra incognita, an interactive installation with immersive 3D, enormous screens enclosing 240 degrees and generous sound, in which a general public “travels” by moving its arms.
“The craftsperson mixes materials, tests and corrects; precisely because they correct, no craftsperson can lack humility.” Quite different from Jacopo the artist, who “must be ambitious. In a city centre or a house in an isolated village, an artist carries a utopia: pushing the verifiable until it can no longer be verified.” He combines researcher, craftsperson and artist without fragmentation, “rather as women can simultaneously be mothers, loving partners and professionals”.
How does he approach such different kinds of music? “It is a question of awareness. Writing a quartet for a concert hall, I know my interlocutors. Unlike iPod listening—walking from Wagner to Björk with a click—a concert is ritual: queuing for a ticket, sitting and waiting require writing that reverberates with the participating public. For an interactive installation I address the average person who watches football every Wednesday. Genres differ according to place and audience.
“Mozart knew few would deeply interpret the Dissonance Quartet, yet wrote it as an intellectual act. He included a double choir in the Coronation Mass, an already ancient technique, because he addressed listeners able to appreciate it. And The Magic Flute was written for people grasping a certain melodic level. Yet it is always Mozart.”
One becomes curious about his method. “For notated music, I have put away my Picasso-like ‘blue period’ of dry, purely acoustic music. Now my pieces always include electronics, because I like it and because it guarantees three times as many rehearsals.
“I generally begin by writing letters with paper and ballpoint pen, theoretical and emotional, between dream and reality, to friends with whom I feel intellectual affinity. Around the fifth or sixth, when I cannot develop my ideas verbally any further, I start drafting the piece on paper. Form is decided beforehand, like architects knowing whether they are designing an airport or cultural centre. The letters become singable, reproducible, memorable themes: in this I am almost Puccinian. Finally I develop them using software I created, applying traditional rules musical history teaches, from pitches to voice-leading, until the piece reaches a final fixed state.”
The music remains readable enough for him to attend rehearsals without a score. “If I, who wrote it, could not memorise it beforehand, how could audiences approach it on a single hearing? Its listenability reconciles with my theoretical texts’ systematic rigour because I believe spontaneity is not found but must be defined.”
Convinced his generation must regain social awareness, Baboni Schilingi developed his hyper-systemic aesthetic from the observation that “even the world’s most intuitive composer applies stylistic patterns. Appropriate analysis can calculate how often a rule recurs. While rules are applied unconsciously, we speak of ‘intuition’; when conscious, we have ‘music made through calculation’.” That might sound unlistenable, yet includes Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. “Put very simply, awareness of rules and patterns lets me introduce taste not afterwards but as the starting point of calculation-based music.”
PRISMA’s members share this aesthetic. An international “node” of composers he founded in 2001, it seeks to avoid “the dinosaur-like quality of some cultural projects. We have no hierarchy and deal directly with institutions hosting meetings in return for lessons. We meet every three months—no webcams; we remain biological beings, and human contact is fundamental. Each presents a piece through its stages, from project to final score and a recording after performance. Everyone studies and discusses its premises and realisation: healthy criticism.”
An almost cost-free exercise resisting the crisis. “I constantly receive petitions about ensembles or production centres closing. Signing is the minimum, but I am nearly forty and want more proactive collective action. Some peers still think they can break through freelance and cling to the last rock. Soon we will all be in the water and have to swim.”
For him, contemporary music’s crisis cannot be blamed on stock-market collapse. “First, its strongest supporters are around eighty and, for psychologically understandable but ethically questionable reasons, will not hand over. Then there has been no strong relationship between dissemination technology and performance. Today we watch ‘contemporary’ music with approaches to staging and audiences less innovative than Nono’s Prometeo in the early 1980s.
“Except for Stockhausen, Boulez and Xenakis, who continued writing texts, musicology separated from composition. When semantic study of the score detaches from semiotic study, crisis follows—as if today’s physicists could study only steam-powered cars. Finally, unable to renew its aesthetics, contemporary music redefined itself within research centres. When computers with G3 processors appeared in 1997, offering anyone research-centre capabilities at home for little money, those financing that supposedly innovative, experimental activity began turning off the taps.”
He repeatedly thinks of masters, “bearers of a transcendental capacity for knowledge who live in permanent meditation”, alongside pupils in “an alchemy of intellectual consonances through writing, analysis, listening, travel or dinner”. He names three:
“Ivan Fedele, to whom I owe craftsmanship, the courage to admit me at thirteen with a graphomaniac’s mass of scores, and ‘spontaneous, free emanation’—no stinginess in sharing knowledge. Brian Ferneyhough, ‘master of dialectics’: I could not bear being unable to read his scores and studied with him for four years until I could rewrite rhythms à la Ferneyhough. Finally Luciano Berio: ‘Your next piece must be vertical,’ he would say. A festival would immediately call: ‘Maestro Berio wants you to write for this ensemble and insists it be vertical.’ Then he came to the concert and we discussed the score. That is how he taught me aesthetics.”
To hear and see
Music and images: www.baboni-schilingi.com. Fractal Flowers 2010, an iPhone application by Miguel Chevalier and Jacopo Baboni Schilingi. Further reading: Jacopo Baboni Schilingi, La musique hyper-systémique, Paris, Éditions MIX, 2007.