While most of his colleagues were at least sympathetic with various leftist causes, the Italian composer Luigi Nono (1924-1990) was a devout Communist who believed that art must be of service to social progress. Nono had no compunctions combining the avant-garde compositional techniques of the mid-20th century (integral serialism, indeterminacy, electronic sound production, and tape collage) with explicit political messages. This stance put him in conflict with figures such as John Cage, whose happy-go-lucky embrace of anarchic individualism Nono saw as naive and politically dangerous. His 1964 composition La fabbrica illuminata (The Illuminated [or Englightened] Factory) was one of the most striking manifestations of Nono’s politically committed approach to experimental music. Based on texts by Giuliano Scabia and Cesare Pavese, this piece for soprano and four-channel tape incorporates manipulated sounds from the factory floor and the noise of political demonstrations. Nono intended La fabbrica illuminata as a “sonic diary" to record the inhumane treatment of auto workers in Genoa, Italy. But Nono also wanted to intervene directly in the struggle: he envisioned his music being piped in over loudspeakers during the workers’ protests.
In a compositional milieu where so many artists succumb either to the Scylla of late-romantic necrophilia or the Charybdis of bloodless avant-garde epigonism, it is refreshing to discover music that uses the old classical instrumentarium to novel effect. Such is the work of the Italian composer Franco Donatoni (1927-2000).
Like so many of his European contemporaries, Donatoni cut his teeth in the 1950s at the Darmstadt summer courses, a crucible of avant-garde musical thought. Here he was introduced to many of the major figures of the scene, such as Stockhausen, Berio, Boulez, and Cage. Although Donatoni viewed Cage with suspicion, he shared the American’s radical critique of compositional agency. His response to the crisis of ungrounded subjectivity in contemporary music was not to be found in chance procedures, but in a systematic process of recomposition through rules of substitution and permutation derived from the parametric analytical principles of serialism.
Donatoni’s music is generated by the ruthless cannibalization of earlier works, as fragments of scores are subjected to permutational schemes in order to form new material in a manner inspired by the alchemical process of sublimation. (Musicologist David Osmond-Smith’s description of Donatoni’s techniques includes such graphic anatomical metaphors as “cancerous proliferation” and “dismemberment.”) This method could of course be brought to bear on any music, not just Donatoni’s own. For example, his 1967 composition Etwas ruhiger in Ausdruck (1967) is based on a multidimensional analysis of eight bars from Arnold Schoenberg’s Five Piano Pieces, Op. 23, No. 2.
While the transmutation of pre-existing material follows certain strict rules, its subsequent rearrangement into new configurations is done more or less according to taste. Following the moment-to-moment logic of musical transmutation, without a preconceived vision of how the composition is to unfold, Donatoni sought a musical flow that emerged from the very notational labor of composition, from the “juggling” of notes and proportions to which critics might attempt to reduce this eminently writerly form of music. For Donatoni there is no such thing as creation, only transformation: He declares, “I am not an artist but an artisan.”
After a fallow period in the early 1970s, in which he battled a spell of depression aggravated by the deaths of his mother and his old mentor Bruno Maderna, Donatoni returned to composition. Rejecting the conventional model of composing big orchestral pieces that were performed once and then forgotten, he now focused on producing works for soloists and chamber ensembles with whom he had a direct personal connection. His music from the late 1970s on is marked by deft complexity and cerebral playfulness. Algo IV, one of the last works Donatoni wrote before his death in 2000, is derived from the earlier work Algo, a 1977 piece based in turn upon the recomposition of a guitar lick by Django Reinhardt.
Italian-born composer-producer Doris Norton is one of the unheralded champions of early electronica. Norton’s music from the 1980s occupies the stylistic intersection of synth-pop, industrial, and techno music.
Long before launching a solo career, Norton was the voice of the Italian progressive rock band Jacula, led by her husband, Antonio Bartoccetti. The group released two albums in 1969 and 1972. Norton’s own work began to appear in the 1980s. Some of her earliest tracks, such as “Eightoeight” and “Underground” (both 1980), with their syncopated drum machines and clockwork sequencer lines, strikingly anticipate what would later be known as techno. (These tracks bear comparison to Charanjit Singh’s legendary 1983 record Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat).
Norton’s mid-decade releases are classic musical documents of the dawn of the PC era. She embraced the personal computer as a musical instrument uniquely capable of realizing her artistic visions:
In the late sixties I had already conceived computers as “personal.” I have always trusted in the benefits of solitude; [being] alone means freedom… What’s better than a “personal” computer for materializing ideas, by oneself? [source]
Albums such as Personal Computer (1984) were sponsored by Apple (and featured the company’s logo prominently on the cover) while Artificial Intelligence (1985) was purportedly created entirely via computer keyboard, whence the MIDI information was fed to a Roland JX-8P synthesizer. Later albums Automatic Feeling (1986) and The Double Side of Science (1990) were underwritten by IBM.
While the beat-oriented style of Norton’s music aligns her with such global fellow-travelers as Yellow Magic Orchestra and Kraftwerk, her championing of the PC as a tool for self-sufficient musical creativity also connects her to more artsy musicians such as Pietro Grossi, Laurie Spiegel, and the League of Automatic Music Composers. Norton’s predilection for the bright, glossy timbres of early digital instruments also recalls Hubert Bognermayr and Harald Zuschrader’s bizarre 1982 one-off Erdenklang.
While her music remains largely out of print and inaccessible, Norton’s early records have recently begun to receive the inevitable rediscovery treatment. Her 1981 album Raptus was re-released in 2011 by Italian label Black Widow Records, and her other albums from the early 80s are likely soon to follow.
Active from 1972 to 1983, Area was a pioneering Italian group that creatively synthesized currents of American popular music such as jazz and funk with experimental tendencies in song form and sound production. Led by the Orphic incantations of vocalist Demetrio Stratos, Area featured a rotating cast of musicians anchored by the core group of Giulio Capiozzo (drums), Patrizio Fariselli (keyboards), Ares Tavolazzi (bass and trombone), and Paolo Tofano (guitar).
Crac! is Area’s third album, following Arbeit macht frei (1973) and Caution Radiation Area (1974). Although they disbanded within a few years of Stratos’ untimely death in 1979, the group’s early records earned them a spot on the legendary Nurse with Wound List, a hugely influential catechism of underground music circa 1980.
“Mela di Odessa” (The Apple of Odessa") opens with a noisy burst of chirping electronic tones, atonal guitar noodling, and a raucous drum solo, leading into a driving jazz-rock texture topped by a piercing electric keyboard solo. Stratos’ trademark wordless vocalizations occasionally double the instrumental parts, leading through a frenzied labyrinth of improvised passagework. About halfway through, the mood changes quite suddenly, as the the drums and bass introduce a funky, off-kilter groove. Twittering electronic noise, Stratos’ spoken words, and brassy interjections–including a quotation of “Taps”–bring the track to a highly ambiguous close.
In his liner notes to the 1990 re-release on Cramps Records, Franco Bolelli writes: “To sink one’s teeth into the Area apple is to experience a taste which is neither the penitential taste of the avant-garde nor the tamed taste of the spectacle. Area has proven that the poetic and the experimental is not at all difficult and suffering. Indeed, it can be energetic and contagious.”
In the dubious estimation of musical common sense, the 1970s are typically represented as years of sorrow, a vast artistic wasteland. The unfortunately prominent developments of adult contemporary and disco helped stain this decade with the reputation of slick, soulless overproduction. But– aside from the fact that there is a time and place for Giorgio Moroder and yes, even Barry Manilow– beneath the surface, the 1970s is one of the most rich and varied periods in the entire century, spanning everything from the brilliant funk/soul fusion of Curtis Mayfield in the U.S. to the groundbreaking works of “acousmatic music” presented in France by composers such as Francois Bayle and Bernard Parmegiani.
One of the most fascinating phenomena of the decade is the international diffusion of progressive rock, which had been launched by a handful of (mostly) British bands in the late 60s. Prog rock, with its classical and jazz influences, its sophisticated song structures, and its expansion of the sonic palette beyond the tired, guitar-dominated sound of conventional rock, quickly spread across the European continent, and took on distinctive new forms far removed from its often cloying and affected Anglophone incarnations.
One of the most impressive products of this development was Banco del Mutuo Soccorso (roughly, “Bank of Mutual Aid”), an Italian prog-rock band founded by the brothers Vitorio and Gianni Nocenzi in Rome in 1969. Their eponymous debut album was released in 1972. Later that year, Banco recorded what is widely regarded as one of the defining works of the genre, a concept album inspired by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and entitled simply Darwin!
“Cento mani e cento occhi” (“A hundred hands and a hundred eyes”) is to my ears the album’s highlight. At just over five minutes long, the song is quite compact by prog-rock standards, but its modest length compresses a multi-sectional, developmental structure of compelling dynamism, from the pseudo-classical fanfare of the opening to the stripped-down, two-chord intensity of the outro– all of it held together by the powerful operatic vocals of singer Francesco Di Giacomo.
