Sergio Armaroli
1. FAMILIAR LEXICON
In my personal library dedicated to the relationship between music and science I keep a precious little book with a characteristic yellowish color due to the wear and tear of time that deals with Musical Acoustics, published in 1912 by Ulrico Hoepli famous publisher-librarian of Milan, 1) written by Alberto Tacchinardi: a distant relative of Pietro Grossi.
I have always used this precious little book as a popularization tool during my musical acoustics classes, and exhibited it like a relic before the astonished eyes of my young students. The beauty of this small text, the first one printed in Italian and dedicated to acoustic-musical science, lies in its direct, passionate language, that of an authentic „amateur“ in love with the science of sound. I have taken pride in this very pleasant liaison by cultivating it almost in secret in my solitary path as a musician and teacher, treasuring a passionate and scientifically conducted approach to knowledge, in an attempt to invent myself each time, in the convex mirror of the class and the students, practicing a scientific dimension of analysis and listening and of music-making within a shared family Lexicon: that of the „Grossi family.“
That of Pietro Grossi’s lineage is in truth a discourse on method, a scientific method that from its beginnings, from Leonardo da Vinci to Galileo, has nurtured a thought deeply grafted into real phenomena and processes and through observation to then be described in symbols and abstract models. Pietro Grossi connected with this very noble tradition by passing through a positivism populated by passionate amateurs, such as Alberto Tacchinardi, who would see their heyday in the nineteenth century.
Pietro Grossi will also apply this method to teaching from the assumptions of an active pedagogy, think of John Dewey for example, of Anglo-Saxon matrix, thus creating an extended family including his classroom and his students all. This is the family lexicon of a creator, musician and composer not only electronic, always stretched forward in a continuous work around the idea: that of a whole man.
In this attempt to form a „scientific mind“ in the musician learner, in a strongly hostile educational context such as the traditional one, this premise by Tacchinardi himself is revealing of an analytical and objective modus operandi 2): „Dear Readers, You certainly know a good number of people who profess the Art of Music; well, I would like you to ask them some questions, e.g., this one: what is the octave interval? and collect the answers. Some, I would bet, would answer you that the octave interval is composed of 12 semitones, the semitone being half of the tone, which in turn, is… two semitones! Others … and so on, not only for this, but for any other similar question you might wish to put to those same people; so much so that you could easily convince yourself that musicians, in general, know very little about the physical science pertaining to their Art, and very little about realizing sound phenomena and sensations. “
The tone of the writing is polemical, sarcastic, sometimes ironic; all aimed at demolishing a false science, such as music-theoretical science based on suggestions, laziness and absence of experimental verification, in the light of a positivistic culture that has always placed Science as a Method made of observation, experimentation and verification at the center.
Tacchinardi writes: „I certainly do not want to place, to Art, absurd limitations, reducing it almost similar to a scientific discipline: it is, I believe, of a very different nature than science. This, however, on the other hand, always has close relations to the means of which Art makes use, and is necessary and of the greatest use for the technique of it. “
The intent is not to substitute science for Art (written with a capital letter) but to ground, therefore, musical, instrumental and compositional technique scientifically on a solid and verifiable basis.
This necessity will characterize the entire generation that, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, will find itself engaged in constructing a new language, musical and artistic,
objectively oriented towards scientific research and a method experimentally founded on the sense of hearing, in listening and in comparing sources (we think, in this regard, of the
pioneering and systematic work of Arnold Schoenberg expressed in his Handbook of Harmony not forgetting
the pioneering work of Edgard Varèse and his succinct and highly effective definition of music as „organized sound“ ). And only after noting that: „What is lacking, then, it seems to me,“
writes Alberto Tacchinardi again, „in musicians, is that preparation which only a comfortable, elementary, flat study of Acoustics can give: such a study, giving clear idea of the
physical facts which originate sound… makes the musician aware of many and many things of which, perhaps, before he did not even ask himself why…
In this familiar and proximate, all-Florentine context, 3) the thought and personality of Pietro Grossi was born and developed, who, after World War II, would help define a scientific and objectivity-oriented attitude to making (art/music) in an extended and u-topian (in the sense of „without place“) and utopian (in the broader sense of hope) sense. 4)
Pietro Grossi was a sublime cellist, composer and split artist-researcher, with an „amateur “ 5) but not amateurish approach, torn between a tradition experienced as a dead language and a telematic-digital future all to be built and designed.
Pietro Grossi would have wanted to study as an engineer, foreshadowing that unity between art and life that we can trace in Goethe’s late work as coming out of a dimension of marginality of the musician and of music as a pure mechanical art, to bring musical intelligence back within the quadrivium of art and science: as knowledge, acquaintance, and not as mere practice. 6)
We can say, in other words, that Pietro Grossi will find himself moved by the daemon, genius and spirit, Pythagorean that has in measure (quantity) and detachment (quality) its end.
The relationship between music and science, between music and mathematics, 7) has been investigated many times always noting a deep hiatus between musical practice and music as abstract thought. Even the American composer John Cage will move within this, seemingly, irreconcilable relationship finding in silence an ultimate epistemological and ontological passage. From silence Pietro Grossi will elaborate a practice of art, in the extended sense, „by and for oneself“ anticipating post-modernity and the fluid and connected contemporaneity according to a methodology: „Extemporaneous, ephemeral, beyond the sphere of others‘ judgment. “
Beginning with Pythagoras, who will give rise to the whole system of Western scientific and philosophical thought; thanks to an almost intuitive exploration of the relationships between whole numbers and the lengths of a string 9) a parallel reflection to the pure musical fact (as a spectacular datum, extraneous to the real speculative and philosophical dimension) unravels until today, which has always sought to re-find an order, a harmony, a measurable and quantifiable objectivity beyond the purely subjective sentimental and aesthetic fact.
One particular case is striking and that is that of Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) a mathematician and music theorist remembered today for, among other things, defining the modern notation
f(x) to denote a function.
Eli Maor writes: 10) „Because of its intensity and the colorful personalities of its protagonists, the eighteenth-century vibrating string debate prefigures that over the nature of
quantum mechanics in the 1920s. Like the string controversy, the quantum mechanics debate centered on the question of whether nature, at the subatomic level, is discontinuous or
continuous. Should an electron be considered as a material particle or as a wave, or perhaps as both?
The wave-particle duality involved almost all the major theoretical physicists, pitting Werner Heisenberg’s discrete matrix mechanics against Erwin Schrodinger’s continuous-based wave equation (which in turn may have been inspired by a musical analogy, Louis de Broglie’s image of electrons orbiting the nucleus of the atom in waves of discrete frequencies like those of a violin string)… [All these scientists] practiced what we might call „mathematical music,“ taking the Pythagorean obsession with numerical ratios to new heights. Euler, at just twenty-three years old, wrote an extensive treatise on music theory, Tentamen novae theoriae musicae (1730), in which he attempted to assign a numerical score to different chords according to their degree of „pleasantness.“
It was an ambitious undertaking but, to quote his assistant and future son-in-law Nicolas Fuss, „it was not very successful, because it contained too much geometry for musicians and too much music for geometers.“
This is the mental and familial context of Pietro Grossi, who tried to revive and practically live „a Pythagorean dream,“ but, paraphrasing Eli Maor it is necessary to ask, whether in today’s „[Has all this] had any influence on music? The Pythagoreans had their dream of subjecting music to mathematical rules, but music has followed suit, remaining-with some notable exceptions-immune to the influences of mathematics, its great intellectual counterpart.
The much-acclaimed affinity between the two has mostly taken place in one direction.“ With respect to this problematic hiatus Pietro Grossi does not give a solution if anything he opens up new perspectives, horizons dramatically denied, disregarded, betrayed but always in the direction of the march of a true emancipation from the purely mechanical and practical datum.
2. MATHEMATICAL MUSIC
We can see how Pietro Grossi’s apparently provocative spirit actually concealed an attempt to free the musician from the practical use and slavery of what he would call, with extreme realism, inert instruments; that is, the mechanical instruments commonly called musical.
Musical is the attitude, the thought, for Grossi in the transition „from the operational ‚craft‘ stage while maintaining the indispensable balance between the two terms of the thought-instrument equation.“ How can one not see in this appeal to mathematics, to mathematical thinking and to an organized procedurality (we would say today of an algorithmic character and, as I always repeat to my students: of a closed mathematical procedure that has a beginning and an end) the attempt to divest musical art of the sterile muse of expressiveness in order to arrive at the purified thought, at the creative process in action 11) at the codified result verifiable and analyzable.
This appeal to mathematics 12) was to be an appeal to reason in the light of an attempt to found a utopian practice and democratic thinking in avowedly scientific terms where, any procedure, was to be exhibited and imitated, by anyone and at any time without apparent effort and, as Pietro Grossi himself writes, with a „progressive fall of all forms of specialization; provisionality of the value of every experience and acquisition and of every didactic approach; total agility of choice no longer dependent on the arbitrariness of a few specialists. “ 13)
A practical ideal of democratization of music making beyond music itself; and so he adds, „The consequent total fall of specialization and the personal ability to obtain any combination of sound will perforce lead to disinterest in the choices of others or, at least, to an interest no greater than mere curiosity and directed more in a methodological than an aesthetic sense.
3. MUSIC WITHOUT MUSICIANS
Pietro Grossi’s democratic utopianism was born in a bed of culture that has humanistic socialism as its point of reference; the extraordinarily rich one of the Rossellis and Piero Gobetti and the liberal-socialist tradition, which sees Labor (with a capital letter and which will spill over into our constitutional dictate) as the central moment of freedom and liberation and at the same time of positive, purposeful identity and progress.
Pietro Grossi writes: “ In any case, the examination of the past, the present and the formulation of hypotheses on the future of music in the light of the evolution of the instruments available for making music, indicates a pyramid trend that goes from the base constituted by the imposing and widespread manual labor, up to the most perfect „self-operating“ system at universal availability (computer – satellite radio-transmitter) through intermediate stages of automation represented by the technical conquests achieved starting from the old phonograph up to the computer.
The „all for all tireless…“ where it is work that is restored to the dimension of man, humanized in the pleasure of doing, and liberated from mechanical, typified and standardized exercise. Freeing humanity from the yoke of labor: this was the utopia of the new humanists like Pietro Grossi who, seeing in technology a means of real liberation from the drudgery and slavery of labor, designed a society of free men toward the whole man.
A music without musicians is not a paradox but a real utopia of a music liberated from labor where listening becomes central and, around listening, it is possible to see through transparency the creative process and the musical intelligence definitively liberated from its mechanical and performative corollary, through what Pietro Grossi will call „the self-operating techniques „15) and the „related methodologies from the inescapable ones [that] are finding application in its various fields: composition, performance, phonic and musicological research, placing at the limit the operator in a position to free himself completely of any manual burden such as the writing of texts, their performance and replacing it, willingly even in a wide range of decision-making stages „16) and, in this, music is no exception: a model of a broader, inclusive and democratic social project.
4. HOME ART
Finally the „Homeart: art by and for oneself. Extemporaneous, ephemeral, beyond the sphere of others‘ judgment “ 17) where the practical utopia of „an easy art,“ in the prophetic words of another great Florentine „heretic“ like Giuseppe Chiari (a close friend of Grossi himself) finds fulfillment in the playful, amused use of the computer; home art or rather, made at home „by and for oneself“ without the third problem of critical judgment and historical-aesthetic determination, in the words of Pietro Grossi: „. .. suggested by the personal computer, brings to the highest degree of autonomous decision-making conceivable today the aspirations and artistic possibilities latent in each of us. The home, personal space, privacy, can be forged and reforged according to the dictates of the personal imagination and with the help of the ‚artificial‘ one. The ‚friendly‘ use of the personal is a sufficient stimulus to action and more so will be the operating condition of the future. The slogan ‚the computer frees us from the genius of others and enhances our own‘ is thus under interesting verification. „18)
This verification was also actively taken care of by the Erratum space, which I founded and created together with Steve Piccolo, who by hosting the rich and complex Pietro Grossi @101 Attimi di flussi senza fine exhibition of Home Art, curated by Walter Rovere, wanted to recognize in Pietro Grossi a father and a necessary critical master in this confused second millennium. And of this process of „interesting verification,“ we are sure, Erratum will also deal with it in the future: with joy.
5. OSTN
In the proposed version, for vibraphone and tape, I attempted to enter Pietro Grossi’s sound spectrum of six Ostinati (OSTN) intended as moving soundscapes, maintaining the specific grain of each field as the centre of sound gravity. The vibraphone motor was conceived at different speeds for each field in the search for a vibrant and luminous sound, maintaining, within a sound unit of organic character, two dimensions: figure and background in the dialectic relationship of listening.
In the first ostinato, a constant tremolo from slow to fast covers the entire frequency range of the vibraphone, within the sound field of Pietro Grossi, tending to the extremes with a few single notes „as if illuminated“ in an almost choral of ascending/descending voices.
In the second ostinato a tremolo on a single note dissolves into the sound field in a ‚liquid‘ manner with minor-second leaps ‚in the breaths of the tape‘ with a non-melodic legato alternating between the two voices.
In the third ostinato a large wave determines a constant pulsation (pulse) with motor off, a regular almost rhythmic pulsation that builds, within the sound field, overlapping layers of density within the white noise like a big breath: (R)es-breath – BREATH (big breath) – In-breath: an idea of a ‚melody‘ of white noise.
The fourth obstinate is „the voice of the dead“ or rather: voices of etheric bodies. In the encounter with the suprasensible, a suspension of the will in Feeling takes place. The vibraphone appears in the background ‚inside the voices‘ as a presence: I hear/ between the notes. They are Voices! In the counter-singing.
The fifth ostinato is static with tremolos that fit into Pietro Grossi’s conciliatory and serene sound field.
The sixth ostinato rediscovers the presence of the Will, of a will expressed as free, fragmented improvisation: almost furious but diluting…
In conclusion, the vibraphone is understood as an instrument of distance, in the absence of the performer who re-presents himself, in a path of purification, in the sixth ostinato as an improvisational body.
What prevails is the sound of the vibraphone in the field: for Pietro Grossi.
Notes
1. A. Tacchinardi, Musical Acoustics, Ulrico Hoepli, Milan, 1912.
2. Idem
3. How not to think of Leonardo Da Vinci’s unconscious and decisive influence on the general artistic context, „out of time,“ placing Science at the center as a model, even for painting,
poetry, music and the arts in general. If painting „is a mental thing,“ music… 4. The difference in writing and meaning between „u-topia“ and „utopia“ is due to the poet Paul Celan. 5.
For a definition of the category of the Amateur, see my Artist and Amateur, Manni Publishers, 2019.
6. By this I mean to indicate a very private dimension and of Pietro Grossi’s youth as the writer can imagine it. Pietro’s desire was always to be able to study „as an engineer“ (e.g., he
would take math lessons privately and, throughout his life, study acoustics and computer science as a self-taught student).
7. Where for Leonardo Da Vinci it is nature that speaks the language of mathematics [See: Treatise on Painting].
8. These are some famous definitions of Method by Pietro Grossi himself.
9. In the famous passage through „listening“ to the noise of blacksmiths‘ hammers and their respective frequency/height relationships.
10. Eli Maor, Music by the Numbers, Turin, 2018.
11. A Duchampian influence can be seen in this: the relationship with mathematics and the attempt to „cut off the painter’s hands“; here we could say, paraphrasing: cutting off the hands
of the instrumentalist (cellist Pietro Grossi).
12. Pietro Grossi took a mathematics course regularly despite having no prior scientific training; this was personally confirmed to me by his children.
13. Pietro Grossi, Music without musicians, Writings 1966 /1986, CNUCE, Pisa, 1986.
14. Idem
15. Those that paradoxically today, in the form of algorithms, inversely determine the society of control.
16. See footnote 13.
17. Programmatic definition by Pietro Grossi himself.
18. Statement taken from a poster presenting the Homeart of the CNUCE in Pisa signed by Pietro Grossi, Head of Musicology Department.
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