Jacopo Baboni Schilingi’s Nuova pratica — English

Michèle Tosi · 2 March 2020

[The introductory sentence is not sufficiently legible in the archived scan.]

ResMusica: What were the stages of your training?

Jacopo Baboni Schilingi: I trained at Milan Conservatory, studying theory and writing first, then composition, which I began at fourteen with Ivan Fedele. Very early on I was attracted to new technologies, which I learned about, still in Milan, in the MMT studios—Music, Machines and Technology—and at AGON, the computer-assisted research and composition centre founded by Luca Francesconi. At the end of my Milan training, aged twenty, I began entering composition competitions and applying to institutions, particularly IRCAM, where I joined the composition and music-computing course after military service in Italy. After two years’ study I was recruited as a research composer and worked in IRCAM’s studios from 1991 to 1997. At the same time I obtained a postgraduate qualification in twentieth-century musicology, then a doctorate under Gianfranco Vinay and Georges Molinié.

RM: Those fields of study gave you substantial grounding and a reputation!

JBS: Luciano Berio did indeed invite me to collaborate with Tempo Reale, the research centre he founded in Florence in 1987. I was responsible for education, developing it over seven years. I opened five electronic-music studios in Italian cities including Florence, Milan, Siena and Rome, thanks to generous donors. I knocked on foundations’ doors and learned to talk to sponsors. But I did not want to continue after Berio’s death in 2003: the task had become too heavy and I wanted to keep time for my [end of sentence missing in the scan].

RM: And you left your country permanently to settle in France.

JBS: I was looking for a conservatoire teaching post and learned that Jacques Clos, director of Montbéliard’s national music school, had a considerable budget and wanted a creative department including an electroacoustic studio. I immediately applied and found myself heading seven teachers in a creation department unique in France. I also founded my own production and dissemination structure, Ensemble de Musique Interactive, a company devoted to [end of sentence missing in the scan].

RM: It was also a period of reflection, leading you to address contemporary music’s situation and the composer’s place in society.

JBS: In 2003 I wrote my manifesto La nuova pratica, initially in Italian, deciding to translate it into French in 2007. First I express my concern about creative music, particularly music incorporating new technologies, which has ghettoised itself and distanced itself from the general public.

The generation of Nono, Berio, Stockhausen and Xenakis felt the need to leave conventional concert venues and occupy other spaces, renewing audiences and diversifying listening situations. The 1970s generation, dealing with heavy, expensive tools such as IRCAM’s famous 4X, confined creation to the few institutions able to accommodate it, again cutting itself off from curious listeners eager for technological advances who do not always have the desire or means to join the “specialists”.

I belong to the next generation: laptops and integrated software that can travel anywhere and produce real-time sound transformation in a few clicks. So I decided to meet audiences by creating my own company and remembering my teacher Berio’s phrase: “There are no small concerts.”

Today I work with the luxury industry, major brands such as Chanel and Hermès, which I convinced to support projects financially without intervening in my aesthetic choices or creative content. Three string quartets with electronics, including a Chanel commission, were recently performed in Japan in a space that was not a concert hall, before an uninitiated audience to whom I had introduced the programme. Despite the programmer’s fears, they responded very well.

My aim is to have my music performed in places not designated for contemporary music, reaching the widest possible audience. Meeting leather-goods house Camille Fournet in 2015, which sponsored me for four years, was decisive. It enabled concerts worldwide and the development of my own technology—a belt and sensor gloves—seen in the performance-concert on the Grand Palais staircase during Artists & Robots [the final date is not legible].

RM: Let us turn to your music. You say you are a composer and performer…

JBS: Absolutely. I like being onstage with the musicians, operating my computer, since my instrumental or vocal music always includes live electronics. Being active during the concert matters to me. I was onstage with the dancer in TERRA, the Grand Palais performance, wearing the movement-sensor gloves made in Fournet leather. I also wear, twenty-four hours a day, a belt in the same orange leather, placed at chest level, capturing my heartbeat and breathing and enabling sound to be emitted at every moment from the data collected.

RM: Wonderful interactivity! But you take the encounter with listeners further by making the act of writing itself public.

JBS: To explain, I must go back to when I began writing scores with Finale and Sibelius, after practising careful, authentic handwriting. The computer let me compose anywhere while travelling, corrected mistakes and allowed me to erase and begin again without qualms, until I realised the soul itself was detaching from my music, which was becoming uninteresting. I even removed a movement from my Second Quartet, which was being premiered, just after the dress rehearsal—much to the dismay of musicians, who dislike being unsettled at that stage.

RM: That crucial realisation transformed your working method…

JBS: It was 2007, and I wanted only to return to handwriting, to the identity-bearing art of calligraphy that is part of my creative gesture. I first sought a suitable paper without being entirely satisfied, until my partner suggested writing on her skin. That first experience was an initiation. I rediscovered the beauty and sensuality of the gesture, and the depth it produces. Composing on living material entails responsibility towards the person you work on. Concentration must be total because crossing out is impossible. An accident must be taken into account but cannot be corrected.

For me writing on skin is a sacred act, accompanied by a ritual repeated each session. This new practice could be called “breathing together”: while I trace lines, symbols, notes and expressive indications on a body, the model breathes with me, at the same tempo and rhythm. Initially I feared discussing it, especially in the “overdressed” world of music, where eroticism has no currency. Then I photographed my partner’s inscribed back; the images circulated and interested galleries soon contacted me, encouraging me to publicise Bodyscore and extend it through performances.

RM: You mean you write on skin in public?

JBS: For many reasons I will not address here, I felt the need to write before witnesses. With my models’ agreement and a charter setting out the conditions, I decided to make writing public. The performance prompts many questions, including technical details of musical notation—drawing clarinet multiphonics, violin harmonics and so on—something unimaginable at an ordinary concert. When the performer is invited, audiences hear the premiere of music just written before their eyes. That is how I intend to reclaim spaces contemporary music has lost, placing the public at the heart of composition. I am now thinking of teaching writing on skin.

RM: You needed a way to preserve a trace of this perishable writing, since it can all disappear very quickly…

JBS: As temporary tattoos washed away with water, this new practice’s only chance of survival lies in photography. I trained in photography and invented a new genre of black-and-white reproduction called identigraphy. First I decide the body’s position, not just for legibility but to strengthen and affirm the expressivity of the passage concerned. My models know the project well and collaborate with respect and care. I have just returned from Japan, where Chanel organised an exhibition of about sixty photographs that now hold my [end of sentence missing in the scan].

RM: On 9 March you have a commission from Perpignan’s Flashback company, initiated by director Alex Vert. What is the forthcoming work?

JBS: First, for practical reasons I always produce a PDF score for performers. But of course I began by writing on a model’s skin. The original Twin Peaks project, referring to the television series by Mark Frost and David Lynch, brings together three composers, two performers—violin and cello—and a video artist. The hour-long multimedia show with electronics links three pieces and involves site-specific work unlike anything I have done before.

I will co-write the music with the performers, who must play without a score. They supplied very detailed specifications, describing imagined gestures, movements and playing situations to which I must bring material and development. I am very excited by this subtle combination of notation and improvisation, giving full meaning to my concept of “interactive music”.

RM: Do you have other projects in preparation?

JBS: I am also working on a long-term composition entitled Alias, for which I have invited five women creators to collaborate. Alias refers to the five elements of Chinese cosmology, from which I imagined associations with music: music and dance, music and ashes, music and earth, music and water, pure music… I live in a feminist environment and have become aware, as a man, that we must make a move. Alias is a tribute to women’s status, a celebration of women.