David Toop, The Wire 223, July 2003
David Toop celebrates the work of Italy’s unsung visionary of interactive computer and telematic music.
Thanks to the late Luciano Berio, Italy has played an important role in the evolution of electronic music. Less Celebrated is the Italian contribution to minimalist interactive computer music in the 196Os. The idea seems crazy until you think of Olivetti, Lucio Fontana (0K, half Argentinean). Memphis design and the industrial audio ambience of Michelangelo Antonioni's films. Pietro Grossi was a cellist and composer, born in Venice in 1917. From 1967 until his death last year he experimented with digital media: presenting computer music software at the Venice Biennale in 1970 and in the same year organising one of the first experiments in telematic performance through a telephone line between Rimini and Pisa. By invitation of lannis Xenakis, he presented another telematic concert between Pisa and Paris in 1974. Deeply opposed to entrenched ideas of musical virtuosity, copyright ownership and artisanship, he developed software that produced open, unfinished compositions, then distributed these around the world "to be used for various compositional purposes". As soundscape artist Albert Mayr writes in his sleevenotes to Battimenti: "Obviously his intentions were misunderstood and ridiculed (the golden age of plunderphonics was still far away)." His last works were electronically produced and individually unique books derived from his Homeport project of automated visual processes. If we cast our minds back to the excitable 1990s, when Future Sound Of London were hailed as future sound of the universe for their telematic concert between London and New York, or when Koan, software was praised for its services to generative music Grossi comes to light as an unsung visionary. These two releases come too late for him to enjoy that recognition, yet they give a more realistic historical context to concepts that are not so new or radical after all. The (very) limited edition vinyI release on Die Schachtel is more varied and conceptually more interesting. Progetto 2-3 was composed in 1961 at RAl's Studio of Musical Phonology, Milan. His first electronic composition, it explores combinatorial calculations to produce a kind of endless music that would never repeat itself. In fact, Grossi came to realise that his calculations were going in the other direction, though this error doesn't detract from the fascination of the music or the seeding of future possibilities. Again, the basic sounds of sinusoidal waves are relatively pure and regular, though a slightly tremulous quality gives them a character somewhere between telephone dial tones and a medieval portative organ. Collage, from 1969, in a denser and more hectic piece of complex textures that explores the computer's capacity to produce endless variations of source material. Anticipating the file sharing, remixing and anonymity now familiar within the electronica scene, Grossi felt that anybody should feel free to develop these materials as they wished, and they were presented as works by The Studio, rather than under his own name. The third place, Unicum, was composed in 1985, though there are few clues to place it within the timeline of Grossi’s electronic music career. In 1969 he had designed one of the first interactive computer systems, the DCMP, and as a later development, created Unicum on the TAU 2, a polyphonic, polytimbral audio terminal controlled by an IBM mainframe computer. Grossi was clearly more interested in the process of programming endless automatic music than in any metaphorical or sonic elaboration. Nevertheless, there's a weird hypnotic beauty to this work, a fascination that grows with immersion in the brief bursts of energy, frequency swoops and beat frequencies that wriggle and twist within its very limited range. Listening to its unfolding makes me think of fireflies dancing against an opaque night sky. As to why Grossi should be such an obscure figure, despite his prophetic work, the answer may lie with the zeitgeist of the 196Os. Neither dressed up in Indian clothes nor bent on career building, Grossi just carried on quietly working away at his theories. Late in the day it may be, but I’m happy to discover him.
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