Berio’s project for compulsory schooling. A teaching team is already ready to begin in September. Leonetta Bentivoglio · la Repubblica · 28 March 1999.
Florence. Computer music could enter compulsory schools. This is the promise of a fascinating educational project devised and promoted by Luciano Berio’s Tempo Reale centre, presented yesterday in Florence’s RAI Studio C, filled with computers for eleven children from Fiesole’s music school. After only three days they demonstrated that they could compose a short film soundtrack.
“Since the Greeks, music education has continually changed,” Berio says. “Pedagogical criteria varied, but connecting the body, through instrumental technique, with intellect—body and soul—remains central. Italy faces a radical crisis in all this. Ours is a first step towards a new conception and dissemination of music pedagogy: simple, but potentially consequential.”
It begins with Tempo Reale’s education department, covering computing applied to music: children’s literacy, courses for composers and non-musicians in multimedia. From 2000 it will also be based in Rome’s Renzo Piano-designed Città della Musica. Its director is young Milanese composer Jacopo Baboni Schilingi, based in Paris, where he worked extensively at IRCAM, the musical-research centre founded by Berio and Boulez. Berio now enlisted him “to launch in Italy the experimental project I have already developed in France with 150 children”.
For now aimed at six- to ten-year-olds, the methods complement conservatoire teaching and offer initiation filling compulsory schooling’s “disastrous” gap. “Ours will be a kind of constructive musical guerrilla warfare,” Berio warns.
“Based on play, exploratory listening, visualisation and interaction,” Baboni Schilingi continues, “the project stimulates interest in sound, music and instruments by creating a concrete and fantastic universe.” Games explore timbral categories, sound–graphic associations, audiovisual synchronisation and recognition of sounds and instruments in an exciting computer-sound gym, “where the computer bridges learning with acoustic instruments”. Berio adds: “Computing connects the acoustic fact with the musical one.”
With Apple Computer Italia and Digidesign as sponsors and support from Florence’s education authority and municipal public-education department, a teaching team and department are ready to operate from September, including “expeditions” into public schools. The ministry should soon recognise it as a pilot project to spread to other Italian cities. To explore that possibility, Berio and Baboni Schilingi meet Minister Berlinguer in Rome tomorrow.