In this context, the act itself of composing strongly relies upon the instrumental system and its evolving features. Indeed, adopting the technology of piezo has changed my personal compositional practice, driving me to a different approach, that slightly resonates with that of David Tudor's "inside electronics", partly described in the previous chapter. As already mentioned, between the late '50s and the '60s, Tudor was one of the most appreciated avant-garde pianists. As a highly acclaimed pianist, he premiered many works by the most relevant contemporary composers – Pierre Boulez, Earle Brown, Sylvano Bussotti, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Christian Wolff, among others – often supporting them in the realization of their works. Right when he was at the peak of his career, he started to look for ways to move beyond this role, clearly feeling the need to affirm his own personal musical conception. Hence, he slowly moved, as Goldman aptly says, "from a compositional-based performance practice to a performance-based compositional practice" (Goldman, 2012, p.55). Goldman individuates as a central moment of this transition, his collaboration with Mauricio Kagel on the piece Pandorasbox, through which Tudor discovered the bandoneon. So named by the German instrument dealer Heinrich Band (1821-1860), the bandoneon was originally conceived for religious and popular music, then exported by emigrants to Argentina, where it was adopted into the nascent genre of tango. Fascinated by the potentialities of the bandoneon revealed by Kagel, Tudor kept exploring this instrument, firstly commissioning new pieces (to be mentioned its work on the bandoneon with Pauline Oliveros and Gordon Mumma), then elaborating himself his own work, creating one of his first public compositions. In 1966 he presented the multimedia piece Bandoneon! (a combine), at the 9 Evenings of Theatre and Engineering, collaborating with the video-artist Lowell Cross, the sound artist and engineer Anthony Gnazzo, and Fred Waldhauer, a Bell Telephone Laboratories engineer. The work was presented with the following note:
Bandoneon! is a combine incorporating programmed audio circuits, moving loudspeakers, TV images, and lighting instrumentally excited. . . . Bandoneon! uses no composing means, since when activated it composes itself out of its own composite instrumental nature (David Tudor Papers, Getty Research Institute (GRI) (980039), Series IA, Box 3, Folder 2, in Kuvila 2004, p.17).
As Goldman recounts, in addition to projections of visual patterns responding to the music, already tested a few months earlier in the performance of Lowell Cross’s Musica universalis, Tudor’s piece for bandoneon included many other elements, like remote-controlled carts bearing loudspeakers that wandered on the stage, and a "vochrome", a set of harmonium reeds fitted with contact microphones, used to filter the bandoneon’s signal, thereby triggering various other sonic and visual events. In such a context, composition tends to overlap with instrumentation. By conceiving the instrumental system as an assemblage of a series of different materials, also using different media, Tudor aimed to set up specific conditions for the activation of a unique sonic apparatus. In fact, Tudor did not explicitly claim the role of the composer; rather, he considered himself as a performer, working within an interactive situation, often created collaboratively. Moreover, the idea that a piece can “compose itself” has to be understood also from the perspective of indeterminate music. From being mainly a performer, involved in the creation of indeterminate works, Tudor got to be mainly a composer of live-electronic works, heavily performance-based.
Anyway, what strikes me most is how Tudor questioned the traditional sense of composition. As Driscoll recounts in his interview (see chapter 1.4 /Appendix 2) Tudor did not think about musical concepts that need instruments to be realized, rather about instruments as suggesting the music one could make. Tudor's DIY approach to electronics always sought an unconventional use of it. He explored affordances of all components of the electronic means and of their interactions, in order to reach different musical possibilities. While creating or manipulating a complex, but flexible instrumental system, Tudor challenged its specific musical possibilities. In this sense, the composer aimed to unveil and respond at the same time to instrumental affordances as much as musical ones. Hence, as De Souza points out, “instrumentation is not a mere adjunct to composition. Instrumentation is instead a fundamental part of composition” (De Souza, 2017, p.108).
In my project with piezos I have clearly experienced how the building of the instrumental system becomes part of the compositional practice. The introduction of piezo opens up for many different and potential perspectives on the traditional instrument, requiring the exploration of new affordances, through which new musical ideas might arise. Building the instrumental system means also to understand the role of the piezo, choosing which kind of actions can be done with it on the instrument, at which points of its physical space, on which components, with which kinds of movement, with which kind of energy, and so on. But also to understand how all sound gestures that can be performed with the piezo could be then integrated with other instrumental techniques, which kind of amplification is required, which kind of relationship the instrumental material might have with the electronic means, how the latter should be programmed, and so on and so forth. So, the whole instrumental system becomes, first of all, a source of material, and thus has to be intended as a compositional tool. Indeed, both the identification and the disposition of different sound materials throughout the piece are dependent on the neat understanding of the instrumentation at disposal and on a sensible distribution of its affordances. Thus, during the compositional process, musical constraints are constantly negotiated through instrumental ones and the other way around. In such negotiation, sound material undergoes a process of definition, in which the perceptual experience of listening fulfils a central role. The mediation of the piezo facilitates the building of a private auditory space, in which I can better frame the instrumental sound matter, trying to become more and more familiar with it, up to the point that I can imagine how to shape it during the piece.
My personal experience finds some points of resonance with David Rosenboom's neuroscientific perspective. Rosenboom clearly explains that musicians are first of all listeners, “who through intensive practice can become hyper-aware of how they parse sound and construct endogenous musical memory engrams”. For “master creative listeners”, listening can be “elevated to the level of composition” (Rosenboom, 2014, p.2). Compositional processes can be thus understood as advanced forms of technical listening, which comes as a learned skill. Moreover, Rosenboom, assuming the Cage's definition of music simply as “organization of sound” (Cage, 1937), also suggests that “a fundamental form of musical intelligence might be described as active imaginative listening to what each listener chooses intentionally to regard as musical” (Rosenboom, 2014, p.2). This form of active and imaginative listening matches with my understanding of the compositional practice: through the definition and the exploration of the musical instrumental system, I identify what I intentionally choose to regard as musical, and I build a piece with it. Each work is thus primarily intended as a possible listening experience.
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