Ciro Longobardi - Agostino Di Scipio: Concrezioni sonore (2019)

Across the XXth century, creative musical thinking has increasingly focused not only on the organization of sound, but also on the generation and production of musical sound itself: in that direction, the role of electrocoustic composition has been fundamental, if not crucial. One might view Agostino Di Scipios work as belonging to such creative musical framework. It shows a remarkable maturity in compositional conception, characterized since the beginning by two peculiar traits: a definite sonic imagination just as harsh as much captivating and a special interest for different sorts of systems, that Di Scipio embeds in his works as instances of reality (historical and present) in an interplay of interactions of both experiential and conceptual nature. The piano, seen as a complex cluster of cultural references with its complicated mechanics, with playing techniques of both traditional and experimental origins, with the grandeur of its repertoire born across the centuries and still practiced today is an overloaded token of historical reality for todays composers, keen or not to take over its implications. The five works collected here (representing Di Scipios entire piano oeuvre, as of today) seem to reflect various manners of conceptualizing and re-shaping the piano, by situating it in a hyper-system of live electronics means. Underlying is a strategy of feedback, a web of interactions among different components of non-linear and adaptive nature a web that ideally extends itself to potentially also include innumerable other systems in its instantaneous and unforeseeable feedback dynamics, and thus open to an ecological aesthetics.