We know that in music we have long referred to two large macro-areas, the one which deals with ‘relationship’ and that which deals with ‘sound’. Under the second aspect it must be said that composers have increased their interest in goals that involve various physiognomies of what can be delineated as ‘sonicity’ of the composition: creating a sonic environment is nowadays a complex affair especially if we include technological advances in our analysis. Barry Truax argues that technology makes listening more analytical and ‘...it takes the sound out of time and allows it to be repeated as well as subjected to machine analysis that renders it visible... (Truax, Acoustic Communication, Ablex 1984, p. 148). Repetition is naturally not to be hought with the brain of the music minimalists but as instinct, flow, regulation of images. Some of the most productive ways of highlighting the sonic environment are those of engaging for instance in the expansions of live electronics, of going deep into the spatial conditions of performance venues or to create bridges of understanding of sound in relation to the gestures of the performer, who will have to treat the effects of conventional or unconventional techniques to establish the boundaries of sonicity. Carlo Sampaolesi (1997) is a young accordionist born in Castelfidardo, particularly attentive to what has been said so far. He is fully immersed in the flow of thought of the contemporary elite, very close to composition that makes use of electroacoustic aids and in favour of a musical aesthetic that is able to pour complements ‘sound, energy and space’ (a triad of terminology he uses, which as many know, has undergone a strong theoretical expansion in the last twenty years); if anyone wishing to delve deeper will realise how the accordionist has profitable contacts with sound artists and in particular with Mattia Parisse, an excellent composer and tutor of the sonic art, with whom he is implementing new compositional approaches to the accordion based on hacking common objects; these, coming into in contact with the performer's skin or applied to the instrument, manage not only to produce different timbral contents but also concretely broaden the compositional perspective. Today, however, for Sampaolesi there is a tasty CD entitled Space Is Only Noise (published thanks to a providential crowdfunding) that collects 4 compositions obtained with digital electronics (i.e. without physical extensions performed on the instrument), written by 4 Italian composers who have given a lot of their time and effort to overcome the usual procedural processes that govern composition for accordion with live electronics: Maurizio Azzan, Giulia Lorusso, Tommaso Settimi and Carlo Elia Praderio worked diligently with Sampaolesi to realise and perfect of their compositions, with the accordionist engaged in the search for his own identity that is expressed with such competence, physicality and a gesturality developed in relation to the responses of the live electronics used. Azzan's Il Buio è Volume Pieno focuses above all on dilations, to be understood not only in the classical meaning that naturally derives from the opening of the bellows but also in the search for sounds on the instrument that provoke divisible events; Con Moto by Giulia Lorusso goes on a full excursion on the instrument to stimulate the response of the electronics (the act of shaking, rubbing on physical parts, etc.); in Come Fendere un'Ombra by Settimi, the analysis shifts to frequencies and the ability to keep them well in the midst of a sound background that would make sound sculptors envious, and it is the composition of the lot that most allows a lunge into corporality and a complex and unpredictable reflection on how to connect a space of music and technology with a sensory connection, something that was even the subject of a choreography by Mashiro Tamura, appropriately captured by a video that you can see here; Praderio's Dorsale, on the other hand, contributes to the practice of the accordionist's practice of applying pressure to buttons and bellows as a consequence of a right dynamic of forces coming from the engagement of each part of the body (fingers wrists, chest and feet movement). In any case, the need for ‘sonicity’ seems to me to be an indispensable principle here: Azzan and Lorusso bring to their training background the electronics studied at IRCAM and the ability to use live electronics (with Max-MSP) in an engaging way because timbre transformations or instrumental expansions are perfectly calibrated with what is the underlying thought of the compositions, something that in doctrine is also referred to as sonic thinking; Azzan's sonic thinking is to find valuable hints in the dark through sounds or noises, just as Lorusso’s stands out in the ambiguity of man-technology sources because in the end what remains without confusion is only gestural traction. Settimi instead studied in Graz with Marko Ciciliani and his piece with Sampaolesi uses the SuperCollider programme: the electronic manipulation tends very much to noise, to granulations and fragmentations and represents a further example of the ‘malleability’ of composition, a concept that can actually be taken from the theory of constructions and materials; the composer and performer enter the sound material, create lamellar formations, stratifications and sonic thinking in large quantities (that of penetrating a shadow in music is an activity that has certainly given much thought composition from Boulez onwards). Praderio teamed up with Mattia Parisse for the electronics part of Dorsale: the work on the sound takes the form of a series of extended chords and notes that gradually enter gradually enter a circle of sound expansion; the electronic part, in taking into the established frequencies, is able to give further evolutions, to create multiple contours. It is almost impossible to pass a negative judgment on the interpretation of Sampaolesi, since these pieces were the subject of a long and very close collaboration with the composers, to the point that one can almost declare their emotional co-ownership. What must be emphasised is the topicality and beauty of the music that is the fruit of related languages, each ascribable to archetypes of sonicity that, despite the simple fluidity with which the music arrives, are complex and successful. Credit must also be given to Parisse, who during the recording of the CD took care the electronics of the tracks by Azzan, Lorusso and Praderio. With Space Is Only Noise, another interesting chapter of music for accordion solo and live electronics as a fissure between boundaries of skills and genres, as generational interstices between a score and the world multifaceted and affordable world of sound. Ettore Garzia - Percorsi Musicali
Other reviews
Marco Maria Tosolini - Il Gazzettino