I should start with considering the dynamic nature of the system consisting of the performer and all the components of the musical instrument. An interesting point of departure is the cybernetic perspective in Herbert Heyde’s Grundlagen des natürlichen Systems der Musikinstrumente (1975), very well described by De Souza in his book Music at hand. Heyde develops an organology that is grounded in cybernetics, a scientific approach which boomed in the 1950s, which investigates systems in general – technological, biological, psychological, or social – focusing on a system's abstract structure and behaviour, instead of its material properties. Heyde divided into basic categories all the components of an instrument. For example, a string or a drumhead are transducers which take energy from some activator, such as the violinist's or percussionist's hand, and change it to sound. This energy can pass through a mediator, such as a bow or a drumstick. Controllers, resonators and couplers may then modify the signal; other categories of modulators and amplifiers belong specifically to the domain of electric and electronic instruments. According to Heyde, any musical instrument can be constructed as a subset of elements from the general musical instrument system called Ganzsystem. A musical instrument is thus intended as a system of inputs and outputs, which transmits and transforms a signal. Within this perspective, the piezo becomes a component of the system, and it can be intended both as a transducer (if hit to produce a sound), a mediator (if used i.e. to scrape a string) and an amplifier (if simply placed on the soundboard of the instrument, but also in all other cases in which sound is produced through the piezo, which at the same time amplifies it). But more significant is the fact that the piezo, as a functional component of the system, becomes part of a structure of connections between all components, that Heyde calls “energetic, material, and informational couplings”. In fact, in Heyde's cybernetic approach to organology the single functional elements involved are less relevant than the whole structure of connections between all components, which is what makes each instrumental system distinctive. The relevance of his perspective lies in the acknowledgment of a certain continuity between the mechanical and the organic: performer and instrument are integrated in a circuit, in which aspects of control and technique can be distributed to the technology.
As De Souza highlights, sound production conceived as the transmission and transformation of energy has not to be considered as a one-way process. Rather the flow of energy in the instrumental system happens in plural directions: actions are converted into sound and sounds give feedback about the actions. The system is interactive, even in the absence of technology. Multisensory feedback participates in shaping both the perception and the production of sound. Auditory feedback is fundamental, for example, for intonation or tuning. But also visual and tactile feedback is essential. Information flows from the touching hand to the touched hand, which finds the resistance of the object as an important tactile feedback. Hence, the connections between playing and listening, and the direct coupling between action and perception, generate a form of cognition based on sensory experience, which is not only embodied, but also ecological, i.e. situated in an environment. Knowledge about sound comes from what and how we listen, we touch, we see, within these interactive systems; and the ongoing feedback relationship between the different agents of each system, whose nature is primarily perceptual, happens within an environment, which is both natural and cultural. This ecological perspective avoids the subject/object duality which reduces the instrument to a physical object operated by a human subject; rather it observes the relationship between the instrument and the performer, taking into account the complexity of the feedback network, as well as practices, repertoires, institutions, social discourse, etc. The instrument has to be seen as “something which comes attached with actions, we must understand the instrument-as-played, not the instrument-as-constructed or -observed.” (Habbestad, 2017, p. 317). So, as a technological object, the instrument comes to the musician not only with its own design, its physical and material features, but with a set of operations or actions that can be performed on it. These possibilities for actions are what J. J. Gibson called “affordances” (Gibson, 1979). In his ecological approach, any object is seen primarily in terms of affordances, as a thing I can use: a chair is seen in terms of the possibility to sit or stand on it. Affordances imply a complementarity of agent and environment.
The musical instrument, as an object, tends to reveal certain affordances while concealing others. It provides the performer with a series of relational features that remains invariant through changes that enable body-sound coordination, its own topography reveals a specific mapping between actions and sound material. Instrumental practice generates distinctive motor and perceptual patterns and habits, in which the performer with her/his body, and the tool, react to each other. The learning by doing process activates a kind of knowledge based on making, in which techniques and technology complement reciprocally. As De Souza observes, the "poietic know-how may belong not only to tool users but also to the tool itself” (De Souza, 2017, p.24), or rather instruments “know” things for their users:
The piano, for example, “knows” a certain pitch-class collection: the notes of the equal-tempered chromatic scale. But it does not present twelve undifferentiated steps. Instead, it materially highlights particular tonal structures endemic to Western music. Its physical opposition of a diatonic white-note scale with intervening black-note semitones corresponds to the notational culture of natural and chromatically inflected pitches, and the resulting pattern of twos and threes functions as a visual and tactile reference point for the player (De Souza, 2017, p.24).
The process of uncovering, absorbing, and finally, mastering what the instrument "knows" requires time and practice. What usually happens to beginners is to interrogate more experienced performers on their playing techniques. That is the reason why the musical instrument never presents itself as completely neutral: it comes to the performer with layers of embodied practices and idiomatic gestures, specific to different repertoires, genres, historical practices, and traditions. Instruments reveal traces of users' actions, and their idiomaticity is maintained and negotiated within communities, through shared practices, abilities, affordances and perceptual habits. As distinctive musical dialects, instrumental idioms emerge from the interaction between players and instruments, and the latter are shaped in coordination with their development as technical objects, their affordances, and player habits. Idiomatic gestures become part of the vocabulary of the performer, whose sense of agency relies on pre-reflective actions and consolidated motor habits. In fact, the sense of agency - which implies intentionality and awareness about decision-making and control - is experienced more as a general intention, while more detailed decisions are often avoided during the performance because intended as a kind of overthinking. In case of unexpected changes of instrumental affordances, and so of new connections between action and sound, an instrumentalist's sense of agency can be reduced. Alteration of the auditory feedback implies a moment of disruption in the usual feedback network between instrument and performer. In the context of my research, the introduction of piezo can be considered as an element of interference, which alters the established and consolidated connections within the interactive system of the musical instrument.
As already observed, from an ecological perspective, affordances exist independently of the agent's need or skill, even if affordances and abilities are usually co-defined. Technique and technology coevolve in a space of open possibilities, since any tool can always be used in unexpected ways: a chair never forces its user simply to sit in it, but for example, it can offer the possibility to hide behind it or use it to close a door. The same happens within the context of musical instruments, whose technology and technique flexibly coevolve, as elements of each are adjusted or modified. As a composer, I am usually keen to explore instrumental affordances, searching for ways to go beyond the sound possibilities that the instrument has been designed for. Therefore, at least in the first stage of the compositional process, I tend to provisionally assume the role of the performer, trying to play the instrument myself, in order to get a personal experience of its possible affordances, while testing possibilities to distance myself from the established instrumental practice. My attempts have to be understood as a praxis that is shared amongst a larger community of musicians and performers. In each particular historical moment, the adoption of transgressive behaviours has stimulated the creativity of different generations of artists (Barrett, 2014). But in the context of contemporary music, this mode of searching has become almost constant. Many musicians, composers as well as improvisers, tend to extend or to operate at the edges of the sonic possibilities offered by the instrument, changing or forcing its original design features, looking for new means of expressivity. De Souza dedicates an entire chapter of his book Music at Hand, to “voluntary self-sabotage”, the praxis of musicians to alter instruments on purpose, as a strategy to “surprise, resist, or provoke its player” (De Souza, p. 83). The author outlines three principal modes of alteration: retuning, preparation, and redesign. Retuning consists in changing an instrument’s pitch mapping, producing unexpected pitches: a praxis quite diffuse among string instrument players. Preparation lies instead in incorporating foreign objects at the site of sound production, in order to produce unexpected sounds, with a certain openness to noise. Indeed, preparation often transforms pitches into complex inharmonic sounds, as in the prepared piano by John Cage, in which preparation produces unexpected noises – metallic or wooden –, turning the piano into a complex percussion instrument. By modifying the body of the instrument, preparation overlaps with the instrumental redesign, which rather consists in reconfiguring the familiar interface of the instrument, by reshaping its known space, while altering its possibilities of interaction.
In cognitive terms, all these different modes of alteration affect the habitual action-sound coupling, and the learned auditory-motor patterns. In perception and memory, sensorimotor integration relies on patterns of co-activation, hence any instrumental modification interferes with the learned connections between body and ear. But such connections are not rigid, and any alteration of the instrumental system tends to activate adaptations and adjustment of instrumental techniques and a dynamical remapping of consolidated motor habits. Therefore any mode of alteration represents an opportunity for the performer to relearn her/his own instrument, and to rethink assimilated instrumental experiences. In such situations, the performer reaches a deeper awareness of her bodily engagement, in listening and feeling the sound differently, while becoming even more conscious of the materiality of the instrument and its potentially endless affordances.
Challenging musical habits is one of the central aspects of the work of Helmut Lachenmann, whose work has been extremely inspiring for my compositional research. Between the late 1960s and 1970s, Lachemann wrote a series of compositions, later defined as musique concrète instrumentale, including pieces such as Pression, for cello, Air, for orchestra and percussion solo, Dal niente, for clarinet, Guero for piano, and many others. In all these works all physical actions support a very precise conception of sound, without being hidden behind it. Rather the focus is on the physical modes of production of sound, which makes the performer, as well as the listener, aware of the mechanical and energetic conditions in which the sounding result is produced, and so perceived. It is the sound of the instrument itself that shows what happens. For example, in Pression for cello, the main focus is on how the bow is moved, in which point of the cello and on which material, with what kind of pressure, if on a string at what distance from the bridge and from the fingerboard, and so on. Lachenmann borrows this way of paying attention to sounds and their mode of production by everyday way of listening, in which objects are shaken or hit in order to know more about their consistence and their material, and each sound, in general, is relevant because full of information about the object itself, and also about the surrounding environment. An important source of inspiration – as Lachenmann recounts in his famous writings Hören ist wehrlos - ohne Hören (Lachenmann, 1996) – has been the typical technique of the musique concrète of recording everyday sounds on tape and using them in musical collages. Lachenmann has applied this procedure in the realm of acoustic instruments, therefore he defines his compositions musique concrète instrumentale. In his work as a composer, Lachenmann explores traditional instruments with the clear aim to develop new performative techniques, forcing the potentialities of the instrument through what is usually defined as “extended techniques”. Thus Lachenmann experiments with musical misalignment, pushing against established auditory-motor associations, while looking for a listening experience in which perception becomes aware of itself.
Coming from instrumental music with written scores, my work has been looking to the western tradition of a quite disciplined instrumentality, in which the adoption of extended techniques is understood not only as a transgressive behaviour, but also as a creative opportunity. Indeed, for me, the importance of Lachenmann's work lies primarily in his attempt of activating a different way of perceiving sounds, highlighting their materiality. Within my research, bringing and incorporating the piezo technology into the western tradition of written scores and disciplined instrumentality is similarly a way to question usual perceptual habits, providing a lens for a closer observation of the materiality of sound. The intrusion of the piezo affects the whole process of music-making, not only the production of sound but also its perception, imagination and creation.
One of the first pieces in which I experimented with the use of piezo is et ego, for classical guitar and electronics. Here I have explored a quite standard use of piezo: two piezos have simply to be fixed on the soundboard of the guitar (fig.2.3.1) as means of amplification. The hyper-amplification of the instrument immediately determines a big change in the usual sensory feedback relationship with the performer, who thus has to react to a guitar of a different kind: all contacts with the instrument, even the smallest and accidental movements, become audible. In this way, the extension of the instrument back into the body of the performer is strongly perceptible, and demands from the performer another kind of awareness and negotiation with respect to her physicality. While opening up a different perspective on the guitar, this kind of hyper-amplification allows for the discovery of new affordances offered by the instrument. When exploring them on the guitar I discovered the possibility of adopting certain gestures, almost inaudible on an unamplified instrument. In this respect, one of the most radical gestures appears for the first time in b. 9 (fig.2.3.2), where the performer is asked to play a glissando with the nail, which would have been barely audible in a usual acoustic situation. Following this, many other sound gestures take advantage of this hyper-amplification the instrument.
As Waters (Waters, 2007) points out, the engagement with computers and electronics heightens the sense of mutability between the different elements of the system. Waters observes how the computer – with its associated software – is usually considered as an 'instrument'. But in acknowledging its own agency it can be understood as a ‘performer’, or, in other circumstances, it is addressed as a ‘performing or composing environment’. As 'composing environment', I would add, it might be considered as sharing the role of the score – understanding the score for its function of providing a set of instructions that has to be followed during the performance. In the case of et ego, as well as in most of my works, the electronics poses a similar sense of mutability, suggesting a multiple role. In the programming of the software, a set of instructions about behaviours and parameters concerning how the sound will be processed is defined in advance. Hence, the electronic part is previously composed. And through the code it partially assumes the role of the score. At the same time, in order to evaluate the code and to control all the parameters that can be changed live, an electronic performer is required, who will contribute in a personal way to the musical result, just as any other kind of instrumental performer would do playing her own instrument. Finally, since the electronics is actually producing sounds, it can also be understood as an instrument itself, or at least as an extension of the acoustic instrument, whose sound is processed.
Nevertheless, besides any effort of fitting the electronics in one role or another, I think it is worth noting how it could be intended as an extra layer of interference. The microphones placed on the soundboard of the guitar impart a very specific sound quality to the recording of the close-captured sound – primarily due to the fact that I have deliberately chosen not to add any processing or equalization to the piezo sound, precisely to highlight the perception of a low-fi sound. Its peculiar sound quality is transferred in the recording and consequently, it affects the way the sound is processed. While enlarging the possibilities of the instrument, the use of electronics interestingly affects further the relationship between performer and instrument. In the specific case of et ego – and similarly in other pieces of mine – this is partly due to the fact that most of the recorded sounds – especially in the first part of the piece – are only slightly processed before being reintroduced in the performance in form of playbacks and delays, and this creates multiple layers of similar sounds. By varying and repeating small percussive gestures, the guitar and the electronics contribute together to the accumulation of almost pitchless percussive sounds. This increases the difficulty of recognizing the instrumental or electronic origin of the sound, and at first, that can be confusing for the performer herself (then progressively, during the piece, the percussive pace starts to slow down, leaving space to a slower texture of harmonic sounds, in which the sonic result still depends on the instrumental origin of the sound, filtered through the piezo).
Considering all constraints and constructs in the instrumental system, which evolves as the result of a long process of experimentation and negotiation, the possibility to collaborate with performers becomes very important. First of all, because the performer needs to get familiar with the peculiar technology of piezo, becoming aware of their different usage possibilities and their way of hyper-amplifying the instrument; secondly, because the performer, with her own expertise and engagement, can usually add great value to the results of my experimental moments of improvisation. Through rehearsals and moments of discussion, different performers have provided me with useful feedback about the collected sound material, enhancing the definition of playing techniques and the notation of single gestures.
>> go to 2.4 Inside the instrument
During the piece, the performer is rarely asked to produce sounds by means of plucking the strings, which is usually understood as the principal affordance of the guitar. More often she is asked to treat the guitar as a resonating percussive surface, where different modes of sound production – like hitting, scraping, striking, etc – are activated on various points of the instrument, such as strings, frets, soundboard, generating sounds that are more or less resonant. Some percussive actions have also to be done directly on the surface of the piezos, which become effectively part of the instrument itself: they are no longer just the means of amplification, but they become part of the physical space of action of the performer. Piezos work as interferences and elements of disruption in the usual relationship between the performer and her instrument, and extended techniques allow overcoming the instrument idiomatic constraints by simulating other instrumental spaces and borrowing other instrumental techniques, providing a different perspective on the classical guitar. The performer needs to adapt and tune herself, and her own agency, expressed and manifested in what is often defined as 'expressivity' and 'individual touch', results, as Water suggests,
not only from the physiology of the player, but the complex feedback into that player’s body of vibrating materials, air, room, and the physiological adaptations and adjustments in that body and its ‘software’ which themselves feedback into the vibrating complex of instrument and room” (Waters, 2007, p.2).
Within this altered system the presence of electronics in relation to the acoustic fact poses some questions about the understanding of its role within what we have described until now as the music-making system.