22 November 2024 · Michèle Tosi
Born of the experience of a composer now in his fifties, Jacopo Baboni Schilingi’s La Signature is his manifesto: a kind of stocktaking of twenty-first-century music intended to reopen the debate on contemporary creation.
The book is substantial, its argument ranging widely across the artistic domain while taking “the crisis of contemporary music” as its central concern. The author divides his work into two equally long “acts”, first setting out ten causes of this “malaise”.
He particularly deplores the disappearance of systems—“a reverberation of the world”, as he explains it (cause no. 6)—and the abandonment of complexity (cause no. 7), repeatedly returning to the relationship between “muscular power” (those who decide and finance) and “utopian power” (the artists who create).
Act I is punctuated by four “interludes”: dialogues conducted by the author with four figures from the musical world whom he knew and who, sadly, are no longer alive: Luciano Berio, whose assistant he was in the 1990s, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez and Jonathan Harvey. With these four peers, he discusses questions essential to him, touching on systems, formalisation, perfection in art and more. To treatise and interview, the author adds storytelling: three tales, presumably from his own pen, run through the book, giving the argument a metaphorical, even poetic dimension.
Act II proposes twelve ways, plus one, out of the crisis. The author calls for new concert formats (nos. 4–6) and a fundamental reconsideration of programming, including “hyperludes”, admitting that he sometimes declines invitations when the proposed evening is not devoted entirely to his work. Founding one’s own collective (no. 6), always working with young people (no. 8), and working as a team (no. 12)… He also advocates new models for artistic residencies, funding and teaching. In short, a programme as demanding as it is committed, intended to break the deadlock and “rekindle the flame of utopian power”.
On the book’s black cover, one can make out a model’s naked body, on whose skin Jacopo Baboni Schilingi now writes his music. These bodyscores are performed live, in events that make the act of writing public: a way of remaining as close as possible to listeners, who can also hear the music that has just been written before their eyes.