Jacopo Baboni Schilingi · Muska, nos. 7–8, July–August 2004, pp. 22–23.
Composer and researcher Jacopo Baboni Schilingi lives between Paris and Florence, working at IRCAM and Centro Tempo Reale. A composition professor at Montbéliard’s music school, he is a prominent Central European music analyst particularly concerned with morphology. His doctoral work seeks to establish a morphological theory based on redefined fundamental concepts, providing a consistent foundation for contemporary morphological theory. We questioned him during a working meeting in Florence.
When did music become your guiding principle?
I began in childhood and adolescence. At seventeen I still composed by ear, which I no longer do. That is uncommon; Beethoven used it, though he knew the tonal system and its rules thoroughly. Later I studied with Ivan Fedele at Milan’s Civica and approached things systematically. For years I studied theory and began developing my own, Musical Gravitation. Until 1995 I studied while writing it.
When I went to IRCAM I wanted to publish the book as a graduation thesis, but that would have required formally completing musicology studies, including four years of varied subjects not directly related to music. I did not pursue that. At IRCAM I presented it to Hugues Dufourt, who suggested a doctorate. I enrolled not from a wish to study but through circumstances.
What is morphology?
The logic of organising musical material, and a crossroads of structuralism, information studies and what the text calls conjunctivism. Structuralism describes musical phenomena through mental structures; the second approach studies how a phenomenon is perceived, recorded, organised, classified, recognised and interpreted; information studies considers phenomena’s form and informational content, the relationship between the symbol and what it signifies.
Organised and connected morphologically, these disciplines explain much about music. Morphology is part of my research, not a compositional technique. My technique is composition for interactive models. Any technique can be formalised: it organises material through functions consistent with counterpoint and other period-specific rules. Interactive-model composition applies them through computers. The material’s organisational logic is morphology.
It asks whether musical semantics exists, a perennial question. Until now the answer was no: Berio, Boulez and other great composers denied it because do, re, mi, fa, sol say nothing. Georges Molinié, whom I follow, introduced “semantics of the unsayable” by comparison with linguistic semantics. Language distinguishes what can and cannot be verbalised, and he applied that to musical language.
Emotional meaning is not transferred directly, yet sensations and feelings have semantics. Love, anger and other emotions are expressed through bodily gestures or vocal dynamics rather than words. Molinié highlighted this previously neglected semantics. Prosody precedes words: a child before speaking uses symbolic sounds to express needs, emotions and moods and respond to the world.
Musical semantics addresses expressing a thought, idea or concept; morphology studies how to express a musical phrase so it is received as intended and conveys emotional meaning. It studies constructing self-descriptive figures with the same content whether heard once or a thousand times.
You begin from the thesis that music is judgement. Is it therefore entirely intellectual?
Yes.
Yet we have just discussed emotion. How do you connect the two?
Music has three aspects: the composer’s, the score and interpreter’s, and the receiver’s—the listener or audience. These correspond to creation, reading and realising the score, and reception. “Music is judgement” is possible from perception’s viewpoint. For me music is also expression, sometimes politics, a social act or love: all belong to the composer’s sphere.
Crucially, music is judgement for the listener. Judgements concern phenomena already past. Based on memorised information I form an opinion. Two essential criteria are causality and necessity. What differs between a Beethoven symphony in concert and as a mobile ringtone? The latter lacks necessity and causality: it is a symbol or sound, not music. Only when both criteria operate can we speak of music.
What changes is the judgement formed from hearing and perception. Treating music as judgement means it can be redefined at every moment, changing its meaning. Every listening moment redefines the past. Some moments are emphasised to facilitate redefinition; between them we feel nothing musical has happened. Many techniques enable this writing.
Music perceived as passing much faster than its actual duration—mental time compression—is rare. Certain Liszt, Beethoven and Schumann works express that temporal ellipsis; it never happens in Bach. It concerns the relationship between metre and perceived time. Mozart used a cumulative technique permitting it, but examples remain rare.
Noam Chomsky said people are born with latent linguistic structures enabling us to learn very different languages. Not different languages’ foundations already inside us, but, for example, the concept of the sound ‘a’, redefined by each language’s context.
I addressed this in Concubia nocte, lasting twenty-four minutes but perceived by listeners as much shorter, around fifteen. The explanation is morphological: successfully combining the three disciplines, particularly information theory, creates self-explanatory musical material. This is precisely the semantics of the unsayable. Knowing music is defined retrospectively, we can use that as a technique, a strategy…
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