Composer Baboni Schilingi and his Paris projects. “A redefinition, from my point of view, of the foundations of today’s music.” Alessandro Mastropietro.
It has been some time since a composer attempted to develop a musical aesthetic which, naturally starting from a personal position, could serve as a key to understanding and thinking through the entire contemporary horizon. The apparent unsuitability of systematic aesthetic elaboration for Western composers since Boulez may be inscribed in the definitive explosion—or exploded image—of languages and styles over recent decades. A young Italian composer and researcher attempts to give this fragmented picture a form through aesthetic theory. [The lower portion of this column is missing in the archived clipping.]
“The book,” the author explains, “comes from intellectual and technical-compositional exchange within the international PRISMA group, founded in 2000 when twenty-five composers in their thirties and forties—from Finland to Portugal and Greece, the United States to Argentina—met precisely to confront aesthetic elaboration. Since Boulez’s historical formulations, that task has been left to critics and musicologists.
“Clearly, although arising from interpersonal action, the outcome condensed here is a redefinition from my perspective of the foundations of music written today, asking first what ‘contemporary music’ is. Critics often call it an enclosed garden, partly rightly: it functions like a Noah’s ark whose inhabitants refrain from tearing each other apart only because survival requires it.”
Baboni-Schilingi starts by analysing composition’s tools as historical and cognitive. Three generations, often unable to communicate, remain active. The oldest, the historical fathers and neo-avant-garde, still belongs to the pencil and preserves knowledge rooted in tradition, while the youngest… [The intervening text is missing in the available scan.]
The discussion also draws on the author’s personal experience of seeking aesthetic direction for composition: from a theory of sound gravitation to a generalised theory, composition by interactive models and finally hyper-systemic music. It concludes with an inventory of compositional techniques. “If an aesthetic must be defined, since music conveys it, compositional techniques themselves do so too; it is therefore appropriate to argue which techniques carry a hyper-systemic aesthetic.”
The next opportunity to hear Baboni Schilingi’s music is 5 December at the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris. Ensemble de Musique Interactive, directed by the composer, will perform a programme devoted to his work for the book’s presentation, coordinated by musicologist Gianfranco Vinay.