Agostino Di Scipio Sound Concertions œuvres pour piano et électronique Longobardi Di Scipio

Across the XXth century, creative musical thinking has increasingly focussed 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. I view Agostino Di Scipio’s 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 (the latter themselves understood now as belonging to history!), with the grandeur of its repertoire born across the centuries and still practiced today – is an overloaded token of historical reality for today’s composers, keen or not to take over its implications. The five works collected here (representing Di Scipio’s entire piano oeuvre, as of today) seem to reflect various manners of conceptualizing and re-shaping the piano, by situating it in an 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 unforseeable feedback dynamics, and thus open to an “ecological” aesthetics.