"Points of Time, Points in Time, Points in Space. Agostino Di Scipio's Early Works (1987–2000)", in Makis Solomos (ed.), Contemporary Music Review, Volume 33, Issue 1, 2014, Special Issue: Agostino Di Scipio: Audible Ecosystems, pp. 72-85, DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2014.906699
Résumé
This paper bears on Agostino Di Scipio’s work from the years 1987–2000. Early computergeneratedpieceslikePuntiditempo(1987)andEstensioni(1988)seemtoreflectakindof double artistic individuality. In the first piece, the musical structure is fragmented and the sound micro-structure is split in random particles. In the second (the only piece Di Scipio madewithdigitaladditive synthesismethods)bothsound and the overallmusical structure are worked out in a deeply deterministic way. This dualism returns frequently in Di Scipio’s early career: the qualitative exploration of infinitesimal sonic units with related concepts of ‘granular’ sound, and a formalized approach to the musical macrostructure (algorithmic composition) seem to complement each other. In the winter of 1994–1995, Di Scipio started working with real-time signal processing and live electronics. He started investigating space-related phenomena, and to address himself to composing the instruments (i.e. designing the overall performance infrastructure) as a task different from composing for existing instruments, whether these are usual musical instruments or computational tools. In the new orientation, a more comprehensive view of the ‘performance ecosystem’ turned out to be crucial, and it led to important later developments (the Audible Ecosystemics series of live-electronics works). The present paper investigates these early stages in Di Scipio’s career. It builds on a variety of sources and archival documents, and emphasizes that the composer’s early efforts did not follow a linear path but rather raised issues and implications spreading out fanwise from one specific conceptual knot: the one concerning ‘emergence’ (‘sonological’ and ‘formal’ emergence).