Makis Solomos

Analysing Audible Ecosystems and Emergent Sound Structures in Di Scipio's Music

This paper discusses the possibility of analysing (in the musical sense of the word) Agostino Di Scipios ‘audible ecosystems’. The first part is focused on the notion of the audible ecosystem and its theoretical counterpart, the idea of emergent sound structures. With this last idea, higher levels of a musical work (for instance, the macroform itself) appear as an emergence from lower levels. As for the notion of the audible ecosystem—analyzed here through the live electronics solos named Audible Ecosystemics—this is achieved through interaction between the performer, the electronics and the environment. In its second part, the paper tries to define an analytic image of the resultant sounds of the audible ecosystems. To do so, we use the concept of imprint (empreinte in French) as it is analyzed by Georges Didi-Huberman. Then, we go back to musical analysis and argue that a musical analysis of Agostino Di Scipios audible ecosystems involves an analysis of the relationships between what we have listened to, what we can only imagine and the compositional techniques themselves. Before concluding, the article shows an example of this way of analyzing by taking a sample at random from the piece Audible Ecosystemics 3b.

Agostino Di Scipio: Audible Ecosystems

We are living today in a world, where sound is everywhere, and at every moment. One could think that this situation realizes the musician’s most beautiful dream. But this is not the case; on the contrary, this sounds more and more like a nightmare. Why is it so? As the phenomenon we are referring to when we say that sound is everywhere is only rarely an aesthetic phenomenon and, even more, it is very often a kind of reified, frozen entity, with no human (subjective, bodily, spiritual, meaningful, etc.) content. If, for twentieth-century music, the main question was, as Varèse said, to ‘liberate sound’, for the music of today, the urgency is to ‘take care’ of sound, and to deconstruct its reified manifestations. The Italian composer Agostino Di Scipio makes an important step towards this direction, by criticizing the idea of sound as an object, i.e. as an entity with no interactions with what surrounds it (space, the environment, the listener, etc.):

An introduction to Horacio Vaggione's musical and theoretical thought

In the 1980s, Vaggione began coupling his compositional work with theorisation that can in many ways be described as conceptualising the issues at stake in recent music. This article attempts to summarise and comment on this conceptualisation by proposing an overview in five parts: Interaction—Vaggione develops the idea of complexity as generalised interactivity; Time—his reflection on time defines sound as a dissipative structure of energy and elaborates a multi-scale approach; Morphology—this concept provides the means to bridge the gap between material and form; Singularities—at the heart of Vaggionian thought lies his interest for the ‘saliences’ and ‘details’ that constitute morphological singularities; and Object Networks—Vaggione thinks of music as the interlocking of three levels (with variable degrees of temporal size), figures, objects (in the informatic sense of the term) and networks. In conclusion, this article addresses an essential question for Vaggione: the operative.

Xenakis e il “circolo granulare”

Many ways start from or go through Xenakis. One of these ways is the granular paradigm. In this paper, I will start from Xenakis, suggesting that, in his aesthetic, this approach is a “theory” in the ancient meaning of the word, and searching for the constituent elements of this “vision”. Then, I will try to incorporate the granular paradigm into a musical historicity, searching for his becoming inside other aesthetics, in particular with Horacio Vaggione’s and Agostino Di Scipio’s music.