Paolo Perezzani
He studied with Salvatore Sciarrino. Graduated in philosophy from the University of Bologna.
In 1986 he attended the courses of the Computational Sonology Center of the University of Padua and in 1994 the “Stage of informatique musical de l'Ircam” 1994, in Paris.
Among the various prizes: in 1992 he won the Vienna International Composition Competition with Primavera dell'ima (for orchestra), performed by the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester conducted by Claudio Abbado.
He was assistant to Salvatore Sciarrino's courses in Città di Castello.
He teaches Composition at the Conservatory of Mantua.
How would you describe not only all the music, but the auditory experience of this day and age, including non-musical sounds? In other words, how would you describe the acoustic environment in which we are immersed on a daily basis?
I would describe it as noisy, and not only for the type or quality of the sounds that occupy it. With regard to these aspects - for example, the intensity of the sounds (measurable in decibels) - that characterize the soundscape of our cities, one need only remember that the World Health Organization has been trying for a long time to raise awareness among policy makers of the deleterious effects of noise pollution on human health, providing them with guidelines and recommendations, most of the time to no avail.
To understand the noisiness of the acoustic world in which we live, and to understand the complexity of the ecological problem we’re dealing with, it seems to me no less necessary to consider the invasiveness of another type of "noise". I’m referring to noise in the "informational" sense of the term, as studied by psychologists and semioticians and defined as “information overload” in the cognitive field. This type of noise is caused by our constant immersion in a sort of continuous overlapping of signals (which from the acoustic point of view would be pointless to measure in terms of the greater or lesser harmonicity of their spectrum – i.e. more or less "noisy" – or their amplitude – i.e. more or less "loud". Indeed, it would be equally useless to classify it as auditory, visual, or otherwise). What is important is that these signals, by interfering "noisily" with each other, can make it difficult if not impossible to focus our attention, without which the very possibility of distinguishing and therefore perceiving them is threatened. This is how certain indispensable conditions - silence above all - can be lacking, so that the contact between us and what we send to each other (in the form of sound or in other ways), which we call listening, can be established.
As for what we can say about "all" the music of our time, and even before evaluating the (im)possibility of describing it comprehensively, I would point out, first of all, that an object or substance definable as "music" does not really exist in and of itself. It is not only a matter of taking into account the instability of a concept that has been constantly changing over the centuries, assuming different meanings in function of the cultural frames of reference; what is even more relevant to observe here - also in relation to the previous considerations - is that the our experience of coming into contact with "music" is not so much that of finding ourselves faced with an object (which then could also be only contemplated or known, studied, analyzed... ), but rather refers to the moment of our encounter with it, each and every time, by listening to it: an encounter that, by its very nature, exists as a separate event each time it occurs. For this reason, what is most necessary to try to describe is the current experience of listening, and its relationship to us and to music itself.
What are the cultural implications of this new acoustic reality? If the "noise" in which we are immersed, by inhibiting our own perceptive faculties, poses a threat to the possibility of listening, it would become necessary to reflect on the true gravity of the "ecological" problem that characterizes our time. Because listening is not so much a receptive experience as it is an active encounter where we ascribe meaning to that which we hear: this is the only way to sensitively experience the birth of meaning (at least until meaning no longer seems guaranteed because it comes from somewhere outside the world). For this reason, a society that can no longer or does not know how to listen to itself is a society destined to die: without an exchange of meaning and without listening, a community loses the possibility of continuous renewal and rebirth. It is the end of creation.
How do those who deal with music and listening, like composers, react to this panorama? Responding to the choice of the word "re-act" in the question, it is an important reminder of the fact that the work of an artist always consists in acting, and that the gesture in which it takes form can have the power to leave a mark capable of affecting reality, to a greater extent than current society is willing to acknowledge. Because, by acting on our habits and styles of perception - activating them, modifying them, renewing them -artists (in particular, and probably scientists as well, but we cannot go into this in depth here) build and destroy meaning, helping to create new horizons of meaning (of the world). Today, however, it is useless and (I would add: finally) completely impossible to describe the current musical situation in a unitary or even dialectically polarizable way. Every single artist, more or less consciously, invariably listens and works in resonance with others and with the rest of the world, thus animating it by putting meaning into circulation.
The least that can be said is that the panorama is enormously jagged, and that today there certainly does not exist, if it ever did, anything like a common language. Nor, on the other hand, does the reduction of music to a language seem adequate to render the meaning and weight of its presence in society.
How does the music of our time relate to this aspect of the acoustic world in which we live? And above all, could this be true for all the musical forms of the Western world of today? We could certainly cite several composers of the second half of the 20th century in whom, in a more or less conscious way, a sensitivity to the themes we have touched upon is evident. But since it is impossible to make a list here, which would necessarily be incomplete or in need of infinite clarifications, what we can say is that there is a sort of shared urgency in the most important and innovative compositional experiences of recent decades, which can be traced back precisely to the question we discussed earlier: the centrality, or perhaps the need to reactivate (or rescue) listening (I’m thinking of Nono, Sciarrino, Lachenmann, Grisey...). Hence the need to think of composing as constructing (which takes us back to... composing) sound "for" listening, not just directing or addressing it “to” listening, but also and above all in the sense of wanting to activate or, indeed, reactivate listening itself (there is no substantial difference between these possibilities), opening it and ourselves to new possibilities of the world. As for the reference to "all the musical forms of the Western world of today", here we need to widen the scope of our reflections well beyond the limits we can allow ourselves, taking into consideration first of all the massive quantity of musical production with evident commercial aims and limits. That said, it would be curious if, in the world of "general equivalence" (to use Marx’s expression), only music was granted the possibility or the privilege of escaping the destiny of being reduced to a commodity. As such, there is a lot of musical merchandise around the web and on television. However, this fact should also be placed within what Jean-Luc Nancy has long defined as a radical mutation of our civilization, whose multiple signs are so many manifestations of what not even the word "crisis" would seem adequate to capture its radicality. On the other hand, the meaning of the term "mutation" is quite different from "transformation": the latter concerns the passage from one state of things to another (with the inevitable "crisis" of the previous state) and this process can sometimes be cyclical in nature. Instead, when a "mutation" occurs in a system (for example, in the genetic system of a living organism), then we certainly move away from the starting state, but this time towards the openness of an unpredictable series of infinite possibilities. If our time appears to be an era of mutation, then we have no choice but to try to read what is happening, knowing that what it opens towards is the same non-predictability of the future that we have always known, to which, however, has been added our loss of any illusion of some underlying necessity, or logic, or progress in history.
If we limit ourselves to a single observation, or an attempt at a "reading in resonance" of these musical phenomena of wide, indeed planetary consumption, what strikes us is their unexpected proximity to certain aspects we touched on when reflecting on the situation of so-called "cultured" Western music. For is it not true that even the most commercial musical products are focused on sound and the search for the optimization of its perceptibility (harmony, for example, is substantially absent, and even the melodic aspect is often reduced to very few fragments...)? Without any pretense of anticipating evaluations, indeed urging the need to study the question in greater depth, it seems to me that this already means that, beyond other aspects - for example the ubiquitous presence of repetition (aimed at facilitating an immediate understanding and therefore conducive to immediate commercial exploitation...) – there is probably something common among the different musical expressions of our time and, as has largely been the case in all previous ages, its recognizability could become more apparent when observed from a sufficient historical distance.
What would a strategy of sensitization to this aspect look like at the cultural level? With regard to the various aspects that we have touched upon, starting with the general ecological urgency that opened the discussion, I believe that anyone who has anything to do with music (composers, performers, teachers, organizers, musicologists, etc.) must recognize their responsibility for a task that I would summarize at this point as follows: working in favor of listening, ensuring that it continues to exist, so that the desire to listen to each other is not extinguished.
The openness towards which the ongoing mutation projects us will either include or not include the existence of a society and a human world. If we wish to side with the first option, it is necessary to be aware that without reciprocal listening, without exchanges of meaning, without the constant creation of meaning (which perhaps we can expect especially from artists), even this possibility could be lost to us.
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