Renzo Cresti, Musica presente. Tendenze e compositori di oggi, pp. 754–758.
Nietzsche’s famous phrase, “When one writes in blood, one does not want to be read but learned by heart”, seems suited to Baboni Schilingi’s obsessions with writing: its handwritten qualities and defects, and the search for unusual forms such as writing directly on bodies. He was born in Milan in 1971.
“I belong to the generation of composers nicknamed crayon/souris in French—pencil/mouse. […] From six until 2001, when I was thirty, I always wrote by hand on paper. An error, a stroke indicating or rejecting a choice, an erasure: these take time. One learns such concentration that the creative act lasts for hours, although accidents remain possible. It is a physical, physiological extension of the present, familiar to the artist/composer: concentration like a trance. […] A sensual bond undeniably forms between score and body: movements, breaths, hesitations, certainties, impulses, efforts, tensions. […] Accidents occur in delicate areas of creative thought. […] I would rename this writing identigraphy, invoking individual identity. […] Since 2007 I have written scores on men’s and women’s bodies. Experiments became a permanent new writing practice. I write creations directly on naked skin. Men and women come to my studio for me to write music on them.
“Nudity, skin, porosity and proximity implicitly convey closeness and contact, almost hearing skin breathe. I write by hand with ink. But this support, the human body, is anything but ephemeral: I cannot ‘undo’ my writing. Correction is forbidden.” From the composer’s testimony.
Baboni Schilingi studied with Fedele and conducting with Vittorio Parisi. From 1992 he won numerous international composition prizes and worked actively with Milan’s MM&T centre, conducting several works. His compositions are diverse not only in electronic and instrumental means but in combinations with images, including audiovisual installations.
PRISMA—Pedagogy and International Research into Computer-Assisted Musical Systems—was founded in 2001. “PRISMA is not simply writing music but a broader action marking a distinction between composing and musical, sociological, epistemological and artistic research. It seeks to give identity to thought, theory and practice: research groups discussing musical structures.” www.es-crew.net.
His book La musica iper-sistemica sets out his thinking through questions whose answers form an aesthetic exploring interactive models, digital technologies, music’s epistemology and morphology, AI systems and accessibility. Spatio intermisso (temporis) reflects hyper-systemic principles: seeking complexity accessible from a first hearing.
Profils (1995) uses interactive-model composition, a complex system managing musical structures, conceived by Baboni Schilingi and Mikhail Malt. Different musical parameters interact through actions and reactions, creating repeatable relationships by integration, derivation, interpolation, disturbance, simplification and geometric reflection, from which melodic profiles emerge.
Compositions often form cycles. Cinq réflexions pour piano (1995–2005) comprises Réflexion (1995), Deuxième réflexion (1997–2005), Troisième réflexion and Quatrième réflexion (both 1997), and Dernière réflexion (1998). The second and fourth use live electronics and real-time granular synthesis, not merely responding to instrumental gestures but anticipating figures. “Anticipated time” involves prerecording the whole composition in the actual concert hall, then processing it in real time against the concert sounds, accelerating or slowing it and anticipating some piano phrases.
“Cycles arise from wanting to make a composition of compositions. Each is autonomous; within a cycle it gains complexity through metaformal connections, as in Mahler. All cycles differ in conception and form. They connect through pieces belonging to several cycles: a kind of hyper-composition, ‘hyper’ as in hypertext and internet links. My whole output connects with itself, producing consistency and stylistic homogeneity. Cycles are inspired by actual experiences: the death of my second teacher Berio, Nox; reflection on music, Réflexion pour piano; study of matter, De la nature des choses; my passion for notated music’s history, the quartets; birth and rebirth, Phoenix; seeking colours in darkness, Il colore del Buio.” Testimony.
The colour cycle Il colore del Buio (1997–2007) includes Il colore del bianco (1997), for sextet; Il colore del blu (1999); Il colore del nero, Requiem in forma di musica (1999), with eleven instruments and a first string-quartet reference [the printed syntax is ambiguous]; Il colore del rosso (2000), for eleven instruments; and Il colore del giallo (2007), for piano and percussion. Colour’s expressive and symbolic elements stimulate complex structures, each drawing on others in the cycle, as studies in circular form and musical rhetoric. The show Trois Mythologies et un poète aveugle also dates from 1997.
The unfinished Highly cycle includes Spatio intermisso–Temporis (2007), Decode-II (2008), Aura (2015), the Fourth Quartet, Igitur semper (2011), and La dernière onde pour un enfant retrouvé mort sur une plage en été (2015).
The night cycle Nox comprises Prima nocte (2007–2015), for two mezzo-sopranos, harp and live electronics; Media nocte (2007), for mezzo-soprano and live electronics; Concubia nocte (2003), for the same forces; Insana notte (2004), for harp and live electronics, also belonging to Highly; and the particularly interesting Ultima nocte (2015), for two mezzo-sopranos and live electronics. The last uses heterophony, which he explores within hyper-systemic music. Throughout, electronics fuse instrument and acoustic space and permit microtonal work.
Syntax Error! (2000), for bass and fifteen instruments, projects Jean-Pierre Balpe’s texts across screens while instruments stand among the audience. Its twenty-three sections relate sequentially, alternating solos, electronics and voice. Prima sonata (2002, being rewritten), for piano and computer, develops through canons, fugatos and counterpoint in up to eight parts within an interactive context: alongside the score, a computer-performed countermelody is generated.
Baboni Schilingi has pursued interactive models since 1996, also founding PRISMA with composers interested in combining calculation and freedom: Paolo Aralla, Nicola Evangelisti, Giacomo Platini, Michele Tadini, Hans Tutschku, Örjan Sandred, Johannes Kretz, Frédéric Verrière and Benjamin de la Fuente.
Phoenix (2008), for symphony orchestra, string quartet and live electronics, belongs to a five-composition cycle for different forces from soloist to orchestra, all conceived through interactive models and live electronics. Listed works include Anima Phoenix (2006), for symphony orchestra, solo string quartet and live computer; Incipit Phoenix (2008), Second Quartet; Natura Phoenix (2012), for symphony orchestra and solo quartet; and Aura Phoenix (2015), Fourth Quartet. The unfinished Silenzio cycle for solo flute and live computer comprises Quasi un silenzio (2008), Come in silenzio, quasi… (2010), and Quando (non) c’è più silenzio (2016).
Among recent works, Fifth Quartet N.5 (2018) refers to Chanel No. 5, since Chanel commissioned it. It explicitly honours quartets he loved—Beethoven, Ravel, Bartók and Ligeti. Based on the harmonic spectrum, it uses newly devised techniques to create aurora-like timbres merging in an almost tonal but richer harmony. Near the end, a fugue honours the musical history to which he remains deeply attached.
Beyond references to the past and traditional elements, his personality is undeniably original in musical thought, design and writing. Particularly distinctive is writing music on human skin, which disappears unless photographed. www.baboni-schilingi.com.
Notes pertaining to this chapter
19. “I invented identigraphy, also involving photography. First I decide the body’s photographed position, not only to transcribe but to strengthen the musical passage’s expressivity. When ready to compose, I invite a previously selected model, chosen according to what I wish to write. Although a score remains incomplete so an instrumentalist can add interpretation, the model’s position addresses me, not musicians. I want to see my music inhabit a body expressing power, fragility, torsion, effort, grace, eroticism, exoticism, animality, feline and aquatic forms, muscular tensions. […] In China, Japan or Korea they would say I write on Qi or Chi. In Europe I say on people’s souls and spirit, on the energy of the living we call a body.”
20. An official member of Milan’s AGON music-computing centre, he collaborated with the Civica’s contemporary-music section, giving regular computer-assisted-composition seminars from 1993. His interactive-model theory directly relates music, images and architecture. With architect Pier Luigi Copat he completed a real-time interactive modular-space project, the first concrete model realisation. From 1993, as an IRCAM research composer, he developed research and creation and participated in the 1995–1996 educational season.
21. La nuova pratica—La musica iper-sistemica, Photolabo Hassler, Fontainebleau, 2005: “I named my aesthetic research hyper-systemic music: synthesis and development of ideas from musical gravitation in 1987 onwards, strengthened by discussions within PRISMA, Tempo Reale, IRCAM and Montbéliard’s ENM. It is an aesthetic based on compositional systems interconnected through computer-assisted composition and governed by a unifying theory explaining their poietic, practical and poetic aspects. To compose hyper-systemic music means composing models interacting heuristically by predefined rules; controlling them intuitively and structurally; managing psychologically infinite complexity through computer techniques allowing experiment and intuition, precisely controlled by a reference theory. All my compositions from Concubia nocte onwards exemplify it.” Page 43. The book then describes the theoretical foundations.