Gianluigi Mattietti
He writes music on bare skin but hates the Italian system’s trading of favours. He is composing Quartet N.5 for Chanel, but studied with Fedele and Berio. Among many other things, Paris’s Grand Palais now awaits him.
“It all began as an erotic game, ten years ago, when I had written my Second String Quartet. At the dress rehearsal I realised an entire section did not work, which gave me food for thought. I was living with a Fine Arts student. Seeing my disappointment, she jokingly said, ‘Write the new piece on my body.’ I did. Writing on her, I understood what had happened with that quartet.
“Some years earlier I had begun composing directly on a computer instead of paper. That produced a perverse phenomenon connected to Delete or Undo. Crossing something out with a pen to say ‘I do not want this bar’ is one thing. But repeated Undo means you no longer know what you did not want; you keep erasing without preserving a trace of what came before. That is impossible when writing music on a body.”
Jacopo Baboni Schilingi began studying composition at thirteen with Ivan Fedele, who remains a principal reference alongside Luciano Berio, Klaus Huber and Brian Ferneyhough, whom he calls a “master of dialectics”. At twenty-two he moved to France, attended IRCAM and soon developed a personal musical language closely connected with programming, based on structures and processes created using software he invented.
Ten years ago he began making body scores, written directly on models’ skin. He found a creative dimension directly linking body, writing and gesture, allowing the score to breathe and the composer to rediscover the fertile potential of error and the unexpected.
“It is a slow, costly process—I must pay the models—requiring maximum concentration. I have imposed a kind of ritual. When I write eight to twelve hours a day, no phone call or text message can interrupt. I do it as a performance, often open to the public, always before someone or under cameras’ gaze. I do two body-score sessions weekly, continually developing preparatory material before drafting the piece without changing the writing method.
“I realised writing is simply very slow improvisation not delegated to muscle memory. If you make an error while writing slowly on skin, you can say, ‘This accident is fertile; I want to spread it through the piece.’ It is like carving marble: a wrong blow can be integrated into the work.”
We ask whether there is interaction with the models and how the score is transcribed.
“I write with pens on naked, reclining models, making many decisions according to how they breathe and react emotionally, adapting to accidents the body, unlike paper, can produce. Much depends on how these people return a form of emotion to me. Sometimes emotion makes them cry. Each body differs, breathes differently and has a different ‘scent’; I perceive the skin’s tension and perspiration.
“After each writing performance I photograph the notation to preserve it before transcribing it into a score. Initially the photographs were crude. On Gianfranco Vinay’s suggestion I began making professional photographs and trained in photography. They are now exhibited or projected in concerts. This too recentres the body, demonstrating that bodies exist.”
The photographs of these scores on bodies—Identigraphies—have become cult objects. Exhibitions have been held for years, including Contact Gallery in Rome from 20 June to 20 July. Chanel commissioned a new string quartet, to be performed in Japan in 2019, and also requested a new photographic series to project on Tokyo’s Chanel Tower and exhibit in Kyoto.
“Richard Collasse, Chanel Japan’s director general, decided to revive Coco Chanel’s tradition of commissioning musicians such as Stravinsky. I am writing my Fifth String Quartet, entitled N.5 in tribute to the house. I am writing it in Japan, where a residency allows every writing session to be filmed and photographed.”
Always attracted to multidisciplinary projects, Baboni Schilingi has composed for films and made installations with artists including sculptor Arman, architect Pier Luigi Copat, writer Yannick Liron, poet Jean-Pierre Balpe and multimedia artist Miguel Chevalier. He has explored interactions between electronics and instrumental writing, recognising choreography and performance as fundamental features of twenty-first-century musical languages.
Until 9 July, ARGO, a generative, interactive music-and-video installation created for Artists & Robots, can be visited at Paris’s Grand Palais. Its duration equals the composer’s life: since June 2017 he has worn a breathing sensor made by American engineer David Kuller. It converts respiration into digital data, then real-time images and sounds based on preset models automatically and continually regenerated.
“Compared with the sterile, technological direction avant-garde music seemed to take, where musicians play like ‘typing instruments’, I think there is now a widespread search for identity and physicality. That is why I created gestural interfaces controlling sound, and why I created ARGO, lasting my lifetime. On my chest I wear a sensor capturing my breath and every gesture, wherever I am, and turning them into music.”
On 19 June, Grand Palais also hosts Terra, a music-and-dance performance with PeiJu Chien-Pott. Here too the dancer activates percussive sound files through breathing, while the composer controls her bodily movements, conducting her like an orchestra and creating an intimate, dynamic bond between music, breath and choreography.
Alongside sponsors, Baboni Schilingi’s unusual artistic activity receives support and stimulation from genuine patrons—figures absent in Italy, at least in contemporary music. Jean-Luc and Françoise Déchery own Camille Fournet, the historic house specialising in handcrafted leather goods.
“For four years I have had true patrons. I use ‘patron’, not sponsor or commissioner, because a patron pays the artist, not the work, out of love for that artist’s activity. I met the Décherys at a small festival in Caromb, southern France, where I conducted my pieces. Impressed by the music and interactive installations, they proposed investing in my creative work. They created an association funding me regularly, enabling me to pay models, buy video and photographic equipment and organise tours. They also became Grand Palais patrons.”
For the Décherys he also created Pianorama, a visual device at once handcrafted and technological, tactile and sonic, based on leather straps of differing colours and textures. Visitors touch them to produce sound.
“It is a kind of piano, again based on skin, our body’s largest organ, conveying so much information—for instance when shaking hands. Skin and breathing are, to me, two testimonies to living beings and human emotion.”
Also in June, at Radio France, the Leonis Quartet will perform De la nature du Sacre, a 2012 quartet inspired by Stravinsky’s Rite. Another spectacular example of interactive music, it has a prominent, noisy, percussive electronic part linked to instrumental gesture through a sophisticated synchronisation system.
In the coming months Il Saggiatore will publish Baboni Schilingi’s third book, following La musique hyper-systémique (2007) and Six modèles d’analyse herméneutiques (2008). Entitled La segnatura: il maestro e l’allievo, it includes interviews with Berio, Fedele, Stockhausen, Boulez and Jonathan Harvey.
“I retrace my experience as Berio’s and Fedele’s pupil and as a teacher, which began at eighteen at Milan’s Civica. The teacher–pupil relationship is profound. For me it is another kind of writing: writing in students’ memory. I owe Berio enormously; he gave me many opportunities. But after his death I distanced myself from Italy’s contemporary-music world, which I never liked.
“First, performance quality: at best there were three rehearsals before a concert. I began saying no to that system and founded my ensemble. I decided to reject every form of favour-swapping, a rampant phenomenon nobody discusses. In Italy, where my work is performed at most once every four years, everything runs on exchanging favours. I defend my freedom: if you perform my music, let it be because you like it, not because I can give something in return.
“I oppose this arrogant, incestuous favour-swapping environment, also devoid of enjoyment or orgasm. It is a kind of Noah’s ark, where different species coexist and everyone stays quiet for fear of being thrown out.”
Captions: ARGO-2018 at Grand Palais until 9 July; the Pianorama device for Camille Fournet; Terra with PeiJu Chien-Pott, principal dancer of Martha Graham Dance Company, Paris, 19 June.