Many musicians write their scores on paper or via computer and occasionally discuss with colleagues by drawing lines and making signs as mathematicians or physicists do. I like it, but for me it has never been like this. It is true that in my sound explorations I have composed acousmatic music with the overdubbing technique, I have enjoyed writing some graphic scores and recently, at times, I love to organize and program music through a literary and poetic description, but in general I have no interest to write music or to fix too restrictive procedures, I prefer to organize and express my musical ideas by playing them directly, or to think of a specific ensemble of musicians. As an improviser I am totally involved in this way of thinking and making music, a process that leads to instant composition. Anyway, what I learned about music, about its grammar, I then forgot.
The sounds of the drum kit have a horizontal but also vertical trend and reading, there are overlaps, contrasts and unisons, it is in itself a small orchestra, rather than rhythmic, it is sound. At some point, I was really inspired by piano music, for example that of Béla Bartók, of Cecil Taylor, Glenn Gould’s interpretations, the prepared piano of John Cage. But also by saxophonists John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. These are just a few names but of course there are many musicians who have inspired me, and they also come from very different fields. I have never considered the music in which I was involved, yesterday as today, as entertainment music: this generically leads to leisure outside the self, instead I am interested in music that goes inside of oneself, that is born and turns into our most intimate sensations, in our deepest and most unfathomable feelings. I share the idea of sound as a need and not as a consumption. Cecil Taylor said that “most people have no idea what improvisation is… It means the magical lifting of their spirits to a state of trance. It means the highest perception of oneself, but the self in relation to other forms of life”. It’s beautiful. Research is a path that has no end, it is made up of study and knowledge that germinate into us and this also concerns the public who wants to discern: if the path is more important than the destination, it is because the path itself changes people improving them. The real purpose of beauty is to improve people.
I think that all today’s music should not be written in full, it is old (but not ancient) because the sound of a musician – or at least the musician and performer as I like to understand it – needs a certain creative vitality that improvisation can nourish and bring out (the nature of improvisation allows connection with other unfathomable worlds). Ultimately, this is the reason why, among other urgencies, twentieth-century composers opened their music to procedures of indeterminacy and began to work on aleatory strategies and then on improvisation, albeit under strict control. And jazz music began its extraordinary adventure and metamorphosis in the same century! In fact, this music has given a notable contribution of signifiers to Eurocentric art music, which, having overcome the extreme harmonic evolution of Wagner and the serialism of the second Viennese school, can be found in what followed after the Second World War, the so-called post-Webernian integral serialism, whose procedures, however, had somehow become impoverished of metaphysical meanings, that is, starting to lose meaning in a holistic vision (because nothing is separable, as quantum physics also teaches us, everything is interconnected and mathematics, in this case in music, not having conscience and free will, can only express something partial, as the physicist Federico Faggin somehow suggests. Without consciousness, music loses depth. As if to say that mathematics is not enough for music). Thus jazz did not leave indifferent Stravinskij, Milhaud, Šostakovič and many others. But they are probably musicians like Scelsi, Messiaen, Skrjabin, Satie, Cage and Stockhausen who, albeit very modern in their languages, are among the first great moderns to look at the ancient world with new eyes, looking for its secrets and lost implications: in doing so, they traced new paths that led them to conceive a new music, unheard, so to offer again a wider meaning of sound and its practice. Questions all implicit also in many jazzmen, such as Sun Ra, Taylor, Coltrane, Coleman, Graves, Don Cherry, Evan Parker, the musicians of the A.A.C.M. and so on.
From ancient Egypt to ancient Greece, from Africa to India to China, we discover how sound and music were thought and lived, and it is magnificent that today physics confirms the relevance of such knowledge, so present in our ancestors who recognized music as the expression of the higher spheres, of the astronomical laws, of Creation. As Giancarlo Schiaffini states, in the West classical music dedicated itself with such ardor to writing for only three centuries, but this was not the case previously. The most ancient traces of musical notation come to us from the Egyptians, from Spanish Moorish sources, but it can be said that, in the Western world musical writing, was born above all as a political requirement of the Holy Roman Empire, when Charlemagne decided that the Church should express itself with a single voice, it means that every dominated people did not have to sing with their own linguistic inflections and improvise with their own cultural parameters, the more than four thousand unwritten liturgical songs. It is already an affirmation of globalism. Thus were born the first attempts at writing that anticipate the pentagram, such as adiastematic notation, diastematic notation, and then square notation, also called Vatican notation, a way of noting Gregorian chant. One would think that musical improvisation is a danger, a public enemy for the West. Yet this practice cannot be stopped and so it has always found the possibility of manifesting itself in some way, as in Baroque music, at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The complexity of the modern world definitely needed a new declaration of intent, of misunderstandings, of paradoxes, in every field of the arts, everything had to be destroyed and reassembled. Sure it’s a long story, but the fact remains that we have a huge body of ideas behind us. This can give anxiety to a musician – what is the new field to investigate? Is there really a virgin field to explore? What can I do? – but changing perspective, it also gives great freedom. We ignore it, but when we play with stones in the hands to producing sounds and rhythms, we are playing a piece called Stones (from Prose Collection) composed by Christian Wolff in 1969! To date in music, nothing has been overlooked. However, one thing will always remain unprecedented and unrepeatable: the human being, each human being. What is truly unique and peculiar remain ourselves, as long as we are willing to know ourselves and ‘free ourselves’. I like to think, that this is the field to investigate, it is there that our sounds can be found (sounds that we can relate to the history) and it is a way of knowledge: here is a research to explore. Today’s musician should not fear or feel too uncomfortable about the implicit authority in certain musical environments: as Sylvano Bussotti stated, “there is no dividing line between serious music and not. If there is any difference, it is historical and determined in any case from not-so-fundamental circumstances. In any situation, it’s about simply evaluating a product, whatever it is without bias.” Sound is vibration, it reaches the living but also the world of the dead, of the unfathomable, it is a ritual but also intellectual manifestation. The universe is a multitude of vibrations where everything is related, specular, everything is one.
Today I don’t believe in purely formal musical research, also this is old stuff and, to some extent, it is blameworthy marketing. In the fiery decades of the avantgarde of the early twentieth century and the second post-war period, the ‘discourse on the evolution of musical language’ was essential, necessary, but today, does it really make sense to think in those terms? Can we still talk seriously about Neue Musik? Or New Thing? Personally, I would not be able to be comfortable in certain luxurious intellectual bridles. As Stefano Scodanibbio wrote, “today we are no longer afraid of accepting influences and reminiscences, of remembering our past and our emotions.” Now the process is again subordinated to the result and the categories apply generically. I humbly look at my research as a whole, at my imagination as a man and artist who lives in a very difficult historical period, made up of great contradictions and dystopias. We cannot ignore that enormous heritage, that immense and transversal musical legacy which as a whole already provides everything necessary to create that reserve of technical possibilities that helps us to organize our music. Future frontiers, of course, will continue to be provided by digital technologies with all their variations, such as the use of artificial intelligence, algorithms, but without the free soul of artists they will only be cold kitsch expressions, inevitably linked to the academic world who generated them.
Jazz is certainly among the most interesting types of music born in the last century thanks to African-American culture: for its technical qualities, for its ability to evolve, for its marked expressiveness, for its creative and passionate instrumental taste that pushes to virtuosity – which in Eurocentric music finds a vague similarity in chamber music, the one played by high-class families as Berio would say, or the folkloristic one played in popular taverns. It’s a must to consider jazz to be cultured, as art music. The musicians of this music who have fascinated me so much and continue to do so (and of whom I have a lot of LPs) are many and among them there are certainly those who have consigned it to history such as Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane (everything from the so-called classic quartet up to the latest formation), Ornette Coleman (everything), Sun Ra, Miles Davis (but not everything), Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor (everything!), Eric Dolphy , Albert Ayler, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton (everything!), Sam Rivers, Steve Lacy, New York Art Quartet, Archie Shepp (up to a certain point), Paul Bley, and then from the end of the sixties the English (Incus Records), the Europeans (Free Music Production, Ictus Records) the Japanese, the Ganelin Trio from Russia, lots of stuff, up to today’s musicians (my colleagues).
The past century has offered many other interesting music. Without going to its roots, rock is one of these and has fascinated me throughout my youth, in parallel with contemporary classical music, electronic and later jazz (I think it was around the age of twenty-five that I stopped with rock and its surroundings) . Here I retrace the stylistic currents and some of the groups of this music that most attracted me and which historically followed each other with great speed since the ’60s: Velvet Underground, 13th Floor Elevators (for me the greatest psychedelic rock band ever), Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Stooges, MC5 (the first live album!), Captain Beefheart, Jimi Hendrix, Soft Machine, Pink Floyd, Henry Cow, Led Zeppelin, Area, Can, (I also include Kraftwerk here – at seven I was a wild fan of Radio Activity which at the time could be heard on all the radios), to the punk of the Germs, Sex Pistols, Black Flag, Cramps, Tampax, etc. However, post-punk and the no wave scene are the seasons that I experienced most closely as a teenager, with Tuxedomoon, Contortions, Neon, Suicide, Birthday Party, Pankow, Lounge Lizards, PIL, Gronge, This Heat, Chrome, Bauhaus, Pop Group, Clock Dva, CCCP, Cabaret Voltaire, Joy Division, Wire, The Ex, the industrial music of Throbbing Gristle and its international undergrowth, Einstürzende Neubauten (only until ’87), the Dada creativity of bands like Die Tödliche Doris and F:A.R., then Ruins, Sonic Youth pre-major, Primus, Soundgarden, the hardcore punk of No Means No, Fugazi, Bad Brains, Rollins Band, etc. I became passionate about many groups of rock in opposition such as Art Bears, The Work, Art Zoyd, Cassiber, Skeleton Crew, MCH Band, Plastic People of the Universe. Outside of rock: acid house and techno with Autechre, Aphex Twin, Orbital, Orb, Underground Resistance, Armando, to name just the most illustrious names. All these groups are in their own way disruptive, exploratory, original. However, I have never had a passion for singer-songwriters, Latin music, disco and hit parade music. Honestly I only see two ways to exist, mainstream or underground: there is no middle ground, whoever claims this is lying or naive. In any case, Alongside listening, I’ve always been interested in books about music: musicology, history of music, sociology of music, musical non-fiction, I really like biographies, correspondence. And together with books, it is above all my LP collection that makes me particularly pleasured, assembled over years of passionate research and selection.
I have a great passion for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach: I don’t appreciate rankings of any kind, but with this musician one can truly say that he is the only one who can be considered “the greatest of all”, the only one capable of holding his own multigenerational, it is timeless, it is mind and spirit and soul, of the brain it is both the right and left hemisphere; I listen to his keyboard music (almost) rigorously played by Glenn Gould. Then with the same passion I go – even if sometimes I let myself go a little with Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn and even Vivaldi – to the second half of the nineteenth century and the entire twentieth century, with a bit of Wagner and Mahler and many others musicians that I really love, like Schönberg, Webern, Bartók, Šostakovič, Debussy, Messiaen, Hindemith, Milhaud, Varèse, Berg, Petrassi, Stravinskij, Chopin, Čajkovskij, Sibellius, Prokof’ev, Satie (his piano pieces played exclusively by Reinbert De Leeuw or Philip Corner, performers like Ciccolini don’t perform here), Poulenc, Skrjabin, Dallapiccola, Ives, Cowell; and then other heros like Stockhausen, Scelsi, Xenakis, Maderna, Ligeti, Feldman, Nono, Donatoni, Bussotti, Ashley, Boulez, Corner, Berio, Evangelisti, Curran, Sciarrino, Reich, Riley, Lucier, Clementi, Brown, obviously Cage and many other lesser-known composers, such as Ernest Bloch, Henri Duparc (sung by baritones such as Charles Panzéra), Jean Guillou, Gian Francesco Malipiero, Kazimierz Serocki, Milo Cipra, Ruggero Lolini, Jacques Bekaert, etc. I’m passing over my favorite performers, I’ve only mentioned a few. In any case, the music of all these musicians, as well as for jazz (or the music I wrote about above), I love listening to my old vinyls. On CD I listen to music produced in the last two or three decades.
From all the music we can learn solutions and ideas that compared to our aesthetics can prove to be stimulating. And it is not certain that they emerge in our works, they can be only part of the process. Knowledge and openness always bring benefits. However, I do not believe, as is generally stated in ‘new age’ – a commercial and sweetened aspect of the initiatory and esoteric paths – that there are positive sounds (vibrations) and negative sounds (vibrations) and that, for this reason, it would become necessary to seek only positive sounds. It is true, however, that water’s memory shows a different morphological arrangement depending on the sound that passes through it, just as we can observe the reaction of the sand to the sounds, when placed on a horizontal plane: it assumes a harmonic aspect, or on the contrary, chaotic, in perfect relation to the quality of the sound it is subjected to. The research of the scientist Carlo Ventura is also wonderful! Anyway, I think if we talk about art, things are different. In fact, I believe that fixing ourselves on only one aspect, the ‘positive and harmonious’ one, in a certain sense involves a loss of balance in itself. With half water in the glass, it is not half empty or half full: it is both! This is the most balanced description. Those aggressive sounds should not be feared, even the most strident noise (as long as it doesn’t damage the auditory system), because I think they too belong to the devachan and they are carriers of imagination and representation, all qualities that are proper and necessary to art. Existence, when explored, brings to light (infinite realities).
In addition to life, nature, animals, art forms (in particular painting and literature), politics is also an essential part of those interweavings thanks to which I have formed my perception of the world and matured my civil and humanist aspirations. But I have never been attracted to party politics, which I consider illusionist and corrupt by definition. I am interested in understanding the world in which I live, knowing its ideas, knowing its facts, I strive to understand its great complexity and for this reason I dedicate a lot of time to delving into topics that can provide me with answers, avoiding mythopoeia without detailed facts, even if I never forget that “imagination is more important than knowledge” (Einstein) and that intellectuals can dare to connect the dots in an otherwise invisible design, as Pasolini taught us. I have always been a free thinker devoted to self-determination, I condemn militarism and reject any form of totalitarianism.
The drum kit! Playing the drums with their ‘tamburi’ and the selected cymbals is more than what music school usually teaches to a drummer: percussion is a bridge to the unknown, both inside and outside of us. This awareness led me at a certain point to devote myself exclusively to this instrument and so I neglected my interest in other musical possibilities, many of which investigated in my old solo records recorded between 1982 and 2007. The acoustics of drums and cymbals, their intertwining, the vibrations they arouse, the joy of playing them daily and deeply, ‘being inside’, have finally prevailed over everything else; it happened that I realized that the drums alone could give me a kind of musical, physical, holistic completeness, which I obviously needed and need also today. The practice of improvisation gives me that degree of complexity that I seek, both in the contexts of solo and ensemble. (Regarding the drums, I refer for those interested in what I wrote in the text of the ‘A Solo Play’ project, on the ‘recent groups’ page of this website).
