Unpublished interview by Gerolamo Sacco with Franco Battiato.
Di Gerolamo Sacco, Franco Battiato
Data di pubblicazione 07/11/2007
Today we rewrite in full the telephone interview between Gerolamo Sacco and Franco Battiato, which took place in April 2007 and was included in Gerolamo's thesis on the History of Modern and Contemporary Music. Gerolamo's thesis was based on a very simple discovery: the discovery that "portable" electronic music (synths such as minimoog, vcs3, etc.) not only brought the creativity of electronic music out of state research centers (such as the study of Phonology) to anyone's bedroom. But also producing revolutionary effects as a total independence from musical literacy to compose as well as, on a large scale, the passage of electronic music from noise and experimentation end in itself on timbre and language to...music "for all and for all", in just a few years. Between 1968, when the first machines for synthesizing sound in a portable version were marketed, and 1971, when Battiato, then an ordinary musician, approached instruments of the genre for the first time, creating a work like Fetus, an entire era would pass. Battiato is therefore the only Italian example of musical illiteracy that begins to write music thanks to the new electronic technology. Here is the interview that concluded this work. February 2007. Enjoy reading!
GS The first thing that came to my mind was: what do you remember about Milan in the early 70's, when you wrote Fetus?
FB I was in Milan from the previous 5 years, from 1965 and this city was like a kind of nest from the beginning, I found a great welcome, I found myself well in short. Then with the new decade, the seventies, an over-sensitive wave started, which produced a movement on the consciences... Then, as it happens, from one decade to the next everything changes: it seemed that there was really an awakening of consciences...turn your head, and discover, suddenly, that many people have regressed towards a primitive ignorance, with tribal personalities and with all the repertoire and consequences that we know well...this is man.
GS Speaking of the music of Fetus, what was the passage, "mental" I mean ... which led the game and the experiment on the synthesizer to become then a journey through time in the music of ancient civilizations?
FB I have this in mind! The rejection of a certain kind of commercial music ignited the spark in 1969, and it was really the participation in "a record for the summer" that triggered this reaction.
GS Really?
FB ...all the singers in the competition, we were waiting for the outcome of the vote, and I felt a strangeness, I'm sorry to use this expression, but I did not feel part of that kind of race. I was completely out of it, uncomfortable, even a painful situation, and I thought: "this is not my way".
I must say that at the time I didn't even have the means to analyze that world. I left Sicily at the age of 19, with those summary studies that give you the school, plus some private curiosity to read.
GS Which ones?
FB From Sigmund Freud to Norbert Wiener, whose book I think was called Cybernetics. At the time, I only thought I would be successful, like all young people or, at least, a good part of the young people. This aspect caused me a crisis of rejection of that music and its values. So I went in search of other genres of music. I found myself imagining an electronic journey, even though I didn't really know what electronics was. I had, as you can say, a prediction of what my life would be like.
Shortly afterwards I read about a new musical instrument in a newspaper, the VCS 3.
GS Your synthesizer!
FB Yes, a Londoner did it: I went to London and bought two of them. He was just born and he didn't even have a distribution yet...they taught me where they sold him: it was a monophonic keyboard connected to an electronic brain (with its envelopes, oscillators and filters), which was in a sort of portable case. I spent months with this thing in ecstasy. I couldn't get away from this instrument anymore. And it was really a journey through time...archaic sounds, Greece, Macedonia, the Balkans...sometimes I didn't sleep at night because of the excitement of this new music, you know?
GS ...I guess... Was this passage suggested to you by the medium itself or did you already have it in mind before?
FB: In the middle, in the middle. In the middle of the thing. You know, we actually have everything inside.
GS I agree
FB there is no thing that you don't have inside but, let's say, it was the means that made me invent the cause.
GS To travel with this electronic instrument the ancient sounds, the harmony in short, then discover his identity as a historical man coincided by chance with a personal growth of man in the present?
FB Absolutely. Even if apparently everything develops along parallel roads, they are always two straight lines that sooner or later meet. I must say that this allowed me to discover the nature of the experimenter. This tool gave me the opportunity to know this vice (laughs)! In '70 I recorded the astronauts of the apollo...
GS Apollo 11?
FB Yes the one on the moon, an apollo (laughs), and I put it on its own track of Fetus along with the air on the fourth rope of Johann Sebastian Bach. But I felt it in my mind very slow, not as it is usually performed: "tu tu tarara tara tira ta..." (sings) - the original was like that and I didn't know how to slow it down, then there were no means we have today. So I put weights on the turntables until I found what seemed to me to be the right metronome, then I poured all this on a tape, on a Revox, and combined it with the voices of the astronauts. A sort of experiment that was fifteen years ahead of the "samplers"! I combined all sorts of them. I had a Bauer organ, it was a valve instrument. By discovering it you could, with a screwdriver or even with your hands, tamper with the valves and correct the intonation. I made sequences in a piece of my "Clic" record that looked like choruses; the chorus effect was a slight mismatch in intonation between one tube and another. And I also worked a lot in this respect on the piano. I had bought a vertical plane that I really reduced to a minimum. You know that when you lower a key, the hammers act on the strings, which are three for each key, except for the last lower keys that have only one string. I took many strings off that poor piano...in the three strings, I took off sometimes the lateral one and sometimes the central one, and then worked with the key on the intonation of the others. On the last octave of the bass, on the other hand, I altered the intonation by lowering the string to obtain a strong drop of sound, completely removing its normal tension. When I hit the fret, the hammer hit the loose string that produced a low (descending) sound, and the note fell. Then I would record on tape, cutting (erasing) the head of the sounds, which then became pure electronic sequences. They always asked me "...but where did you get these sounds from? This can be heard, for example, in "Cantiere di un infanzia", always at Clic.
GS Ma in "Mechanics"? The choirs?
FB No, those are real. The wife of my producer (Pino Massara), Rossella Conz once made a sound: "oou" as a lyrical soprano ... so she was in the room during the recording of "Mechanics". A raw voice, not cultivated, but that enriched the song.
GS I introduce you, because we will talk about it, Mcluhan
FB I value it very much...sometimes when you see a certain face, a certain look, in short difficult to be wrong...(laughs)
GS Beautiful man! But above all he says that an incorrect use of technology leads the man to get narcotized in it... And this is a very important theme for what I'm writing. What do you think?
FB If you make a conscious use, as conscious must be a man, you have immeasurable help. Even more so now, that there have been real miracles in the field of technology, by music I mean.
GS Available
FB precisely
GS A resource then!
FB That's right, I'd say!
GS I too am convinced of this. I'm talking about it in my thesis, and that's why I asked you the question. I find it interesting that according to Mcluhan an incorrect use happens when the man does not recognize himself in these possibilities, does not notice this wonder and... you forget that such an object is an extension of itself! Or is it not?
FB This is also true, because precisely with his amazing intelligence man understands that there can be no identification between human and technological, does not recognize technology as a source ... as part of its roots.
Technology is not.... like seeing a sunset! (laughs)
GS So, the theme of Fetus...
FB A reaction to those love songs so forced...
GS I thought it was a kind of Pinocchio
FB No, the first thing I needed to do was take care of "something else". In fact, I sang about everything, mathematical formulas, chemical ... I felt a kind of freedom that forced me not to align with the "rhymes kissed" (laughs), then you can do it as a game.
I remember, by the way, that once a famous singer-songwriter said "but the songs must be love songs, if not what they are for": it's curious that a living being must say such a bestiality (laughs)! But why do I have to talk only about love? What is this dogma?
GS Who said that!
FB I'm not saying that.
GS No! In a general sense, I meant "who said that love..."
FB (laughs) I thought you wanted to ask me who.
GS Oh no, so many people say, he had to make a list for me. But...Frankestein?
FB Frankestein! There was collaboration in some texts by Gianni Emilio Simonetti, of the Gianni Sassi clan. Sassi started as a graphic designer, then began to produce records, until he invented Cramps: a very smart man.
GS He's the one who designed the cover of Fetus...
FB Yes! He did the label some time later, around 1974, or 1975 I don't remember, but first he started as a graphic designer and external collaborator. Little by little he got excited and so he also became a record producer. He had young intellectuals, so-called situationists, Gianni Emilio Simonetti among them. Although most of the lyrics were mine.
GS I didn't know! So basically the lyrics were his anyway.
FB Yes, yes.
GS Some say it's important that "Fetus" is one of the first electronic music albums in Italy. I'm more interested in the fact that it's one of the first albums, maybe the first, of the electronic albums produced in a popular, non-academic field.
FB Io I found myself buying the first VCS 3 for a pure coincidence. Just the first instrument. So the first electronic sequence that was used in the "pop world", let's say, was that of Juri Camisasca's record produced by me. I performed that electronic sequence in a track of that album: the "electronic sequence" had never really existed. I can't say, however, that this is a merit, the credit goes to the manufacturer of this machine, not to me! Saying "the first record of electronic music"? Who cares, it depends on the results you get then
GS Vedi, what interests me, is that your VCS3 was the "mini" version of more complex devices that before 1968/70 used only the avant-garde learned, for example Berio, who had his own study of phonology and had the means to synthesize sound.
FB The study of phonology, exactly. But they were also called "those of the toilet flush". When you entered that place you always felt "sccc sccc sccc scccc"
GS Hahah. What lessons did you learn from this avant-garde?
FB These gentlemen brought us very interesting young signs of change, so a piece of Berio was worth all the pop music to me. Newcomers are always like that. So when you were naming avant-garde composers like Japanese, you didn't even know what music they were doing. Then we found out about the years... There was someone who said that he made a piece for matches and stiletto heels: exceptional (laughs)! This, in fact, could have been really sound nonsense, but it was adhered to for pure ideology. Because in reality the music itself produced by those gentlemen I do not think has left anything interesting.
GS What about the relationship with Stockhausen? Musically?
FB I would put him aside. Stockhausen, but not only...
GS I read in an interview that paradoxically Stockhausen approached him to traditional scholarly music, or rather "to writing, but not to electronic music.
FB It was like that. When I was producing my first records, there was always someone who was at my house studying at the Conservatory. I had a lot of friends, including great pianists. I used to play my works, and one day one of them said to me "do the same thing as Stockhausen! I had never heard it before and so I looked into it.
In 1972 there was a coincidence: Stockhausen came to Milan to do a concert, I went and gave him Pollution. As always happens to fathers, their children were fans: he was forced to lend more ear. After a couple of years, in a magazine called "Melody Maker", it was very famous, they did an interview with Stockhausen that, at the time, was an impressive name (not like today because everything changes ... the Buddhists are right! Well).
Stimulated by this interviewer who asked him "you who esteem as a musician..." Stockhausen replied "the Italian, Battiato and the German..." I don't remember the name, however it was one of the Kraftwerk.
GS Coincidence, even Kraftwerk had set to music the same themes as Fetus...
FB For me it was a moment of glory: "Stockhausen quoted me! A year after this interview, in 1975, he called me, because he had to offer me a part in one of his works, so I left for Germany. He lived in Kürten, I think he still lives there, in a house he had built from one of his projects, I was a guest at his house a week. He took this score, it took two little valleys to turn it around, it was rectangular, huge, more than a meter wide. He said to me, "This is your part. The opera was called Inori. But I said to him, "I can't read. It took him a few minutes to figure out what "I can't read" meant. I repeated to him, "I can't read, I don't know traditional notation! At that point he closed the score and said, "Ein moment".
And he's been dedicating hours to me all evening! With a German-like determination. He said "now you're 25..." I already had some more...
GS I read this in another interview! She told you "when you're forty you won't be able to make pop music anymore".
FB That's right! As of today I am sixty-two, and that hasn't changed. But it stimulated me so much that as soon as I got home I started to study theory and solfeggio by myself and then harmony and composition by the great master Dionisi. I did almost 3 years with him, plus a few months of conducting, so in those three years I gathered a little of all the knowledge, because always with Dionisi I also studied reading the score and orchestration.
GS What about the dances, the structure of "Sulle corde di Aries"?
FB An album, if I must say right, therapeutic. I came from Pollution, and from a triumphant tour in Italy. Pollution's live was very violent: the frequencies of the synthesizers with oscillators from four to nine thousand hertz and behind an obsessive rock music. Little by little I realized that it was a sort of sabbath, something negative, that left traces of psychic disorders. I stopped, I said once again "enough", in the middle of what, for the entrepreneur, would have been an exceptional success. In 1973 we took part in a pop festival that was held in Venice... there were several foreign groups including Tempest (an English group that was in vogue at the time). In short, the audience screamed so loudly claiming my performance that the impresario forced me to go on stage first. They expected Pollution, and I wanted to ignore them. So I did. I started with a single note, wrapped in a filter. When they realized that there was no hope for me to play anything else, it was hell. That's how admiration can be turned into disapproval in a matter of minutes... the whistles were on the ground.
GS I've always imagined the opposite...How, just "on the strings of Aries"...
FB In fact I didn't play "on Aries' strings" I played an improvisation that was provocative. When I did the concerts alone, however, not in pop festivals, it was often like an initiation ritual. Instead in Venice they expected live those electronic-rock sounds they had heard about or listened to on their records. "Sulle corde di Aries" was for me a journey of purification.
GS Was there any confidence in technology in the 70's?
FB Absolutely, then there was an audience that risked with the artist.
GS How?
FB I did hundreds of concerts improvising completely, no one complained. Today, however, if I did a live concert without proposing even a successful piece, I would be considered a fraud...
GS Everything has changed.
FB There was a wonderful audience in the seventies, who risked.
GS In the thesis that I'm doing I put into play several times This Nietzsche, because he had glimpsed, at the end of '800, a scientific predominance on art that can only be solved with an approach to art of a metaphysical nature, and when I read this I was reminded of the relationship with technology today.
FB True, it was Zarathustra who spoke through him...
GS Do you see analogies?
FB No. But my next film begins with a quote from "So I spoke Zarathustra", a voice from a fake radio that says, "You have walked the path from worm to man, but there is still a lot of the worm in you. In the past you were monkeys, but still today man is more of a monkey than any monkey".
GS What about oriental music? Does it have something to do with the metaphysical approach?
FB Bravo! I hardly used the scales of oriental music, but I used the oriental attitude to write western music! An example is a work I did in 1976 - 1977: "Egypt before the Sands". It's a western work pervaded by an eastern centrality, by an eastern immobility.
GS Because I live the eastern approach, but the basic culture is absolutely western.
FB That's right, it is.
GS So that's why the piece "from east to west" seems on the contrary ...
FB It's true.
GS On the contrary because in spite of the title it starts with a melody, then ends with an oriental dance. Yet to me it seems consistent with the title, because looking at the album as a whole...
FB It's true I agree very much.
GS Mc Luhan says that the alphabet, and therefore the learning to read and write, creates that dissociation between thought and action, which then becomes the difference between a tribal man and a literate man. In the sense that the word is the content of phonetic writing, but phonetic writing has no auditory redundancy, and therefore the world of literati is "cold" and visual, the world of Africans is hyperaesthetic and auditory. Then McLuhan concludes by saying that electromagnetic technology will bring us back into a hearing condition, in which our senses will lead us to organize thought differently, reasoning as we could reason in the archaic, pre-literate era.
FB But a serious problem of our time is precisely the return to a dangerous tribalism: today people, most of the people, go towards an ignorance that has precedents in primitive times. A 'total ignorance, there is even the danger of the spread of what some psychiatrists have called the "straight brain", so it all comes down to three main functions: externalize their violence, have a space and get food and their satisfaction. And when one is no longer a being endowed with "higher centres", then certain facts such as what I have called tribalism, but which have little to do with the enlightening sociality and intuition of many Australian or African tribes, manifest themselves.
Prevention, which is an attitude produced by the spread of a certain personality, has a certain kind of priority needs, so the individual no longer understands that there are others to whom you have to give way, to whom you have to give priority. They manifest their ridiculous personality, devoid of any sensitivity, and this is not good.
GS Try, however, to see this hypothesis of McLuhan looking at how you seek these positive and magical aspects.
FB In magic, tribes are governed by a knowledge of others. In reality it is difficult that in a real tribe there is no compassion and justice! It's impossible for a leader to be an asshole like us.
GS Applying all this to technology, for example the fact that the sound comes from the light. This is related to an auditory field, let's say electromagnetic technology, "no time no space" for instance.
FB I think we'll see some good ones in the future.
GS "In electromagnetic reality the efficient causes fall and everything becomes linear". Making such a speech now may seem clear... but because these facts are happening now. You can even think of the internet... it's a huge theme.
FB Today there is a very strong dissociation between the sensational discoveries made by a small number of people and, on the other hand, an increasingly stupid mass of people who follow other people believing to have fun ...
Today there is really...
GS The void?
FB They tell me about a radio where listeners phone and insult: but I say, what is it? And they are happy, they let off steam.
GS Do you think you can make a comparison between the relationship between book and oral word and what there is between score and record?
FB You have to know how to read the score, and very few people who read a score know perfectly the sound it produces. But if you think about the distance between the score and the played work, sometimes there is an embarrassing difference. Take any Beethoven sonata listened to by five different pianists... The music is always that, the performance changes completely, just change the metronome to a song and...
GS Change everything
FB Everything! "Sol sol sol sol mi, fa fa fa re" or "tatata, tatata" (sings the opening words of Ludwig van Beethoven's Fifth Symphony)
The notes are those but the aggressiveness, the spirit, the strength change, we enter the field of what is called interpretation. Interpretation can even change a piece. I've heard adaguses (the same word should be a metronomic indication) that, performed by brilliant and bizarre pianists (Glenn Gould etc...), become something else.
GS A music can have an incredible complexity on the score, but it is not proportional to the redundancy it has. To the ear it could be arid, unlike a simple song, which instead can produce certain sensations...
FB There emotional systems also come into play...
In a song, the personality of the singer, his timbre, the vocal suggestions of his interpretation are not considered.
To say, "Azzurro" sung by Celentano was a summer success. Without taking anything away from Paolo Conte, if he had made that song he wouldn't have reached that blatant popularity that he then reached.
GS A lot of things written on the score... who knows how the "original" interpretation was!
I, personally, get excited when in "Giubbe Rosse" he sings "the cathedral windows of the gazebo"...
FB I like that of the lizards
GS Feel a bit. Pierre Schaeffer says that in electroacoustic music between listener and disc there is a Pythagorean veil, the sheet that in the school of Pythagoras was used to prevent students from seeing the teachers and improve learning.
FB It's not as bad as what...
I have to say that Sergiu Cielibidache, who is one of the greatest conductors of all time, never recorded a record because he considered the music reproduced an indecency. Then, luckily, he died, his son, gave the permission...so we admirers could listen to his masterful interpretations, of Bruckner, for example.
GS Coldly tells me a difference between making music and making films.
FB Absolutely none.
GS You adapted immediately
FB Immediately
GS I asked you because in the ancient Greek conception of mousikè, mousikè was an art of the time that involved (besides the language that today we call purely musical) dance, poetry, mime, tragedy and so on.
FB It should be like that!
GS Today everything is separate. Maybe we forgot something?
FB It's separate, yes. It's clear that a person can be more predisposed to one art or another, but dance needs a domination of the body, so no one can really dance without having studied at least ten years, while in my opinion all this does not exist for painting or cinema. These are arts in which a stylistic maturity is certainly necessary, the technique is learned quickly.
GS In music?
FB In music today something has happened. Once the academy, private or public, needed to respect the rules so that, who did not know how to implement them, was considered an amateur. Today, however, it happens that a guy who starts screaming something against society, injustice, or just outside his paturnias, can achieve success and be acclaimed by an audience. I don't think Eminem can play even an instrument, hahah!
GS probably not :)
FB That's right. I have nothing against it but... the more man knows, the more he is worth.
GS I imagine an ancient Greek with a time machine: if he came to the cinema, on his return he would talk about music.
FB In ancient Greece there were brains so fine and extraordinary that if they arrived in some way today would not even make a turn, others instead could burst!
GS You've done both popular and learned music, both live and on record. For listeners this is always strange, almost a breakup. For film lovers, it seems normal that a director can change the form of communication, indeed, they consider it a prerogative. Making both films and songs...any clarification?
FB I deal with my need and my character.
For example, if I had stayed within a certain type of communication, I would have retired by now.
There are limits that cannot be accepted, and remaining there bores me terribly: I need to broaden my boundaries. It's not possible to do the same thing all the time, to sing the same song all the time. At least I try to attend other gardens...!
GS In your personal experience, changing genre has changed the audience?
FB I have to say that a certain audience has remained in all changes. A lot of people had fun.
GS A great audience!
FB Yes! The white boar was a scandal to many people. For seven/eight years I've been making extreme avant-garde music: "What's this doing here" - they said - "does it make songs?
GS The idea comes with the scores and then comes the recording, or with the record and then the score to adapt it live?
FB If we can use the coarseness of the axe I would say that there are two moments. The programming of a record at the table, because you have to do it because it is your job and instead something that comes from an inspiration that is like falling in love. It's not that one says "now I'm in love", it comes suddenly and when you least expect it.
GS I don't question that, I'm convinced of that too. But I was interested in the method, write first on a piece of paper or...
FB Sometimes I start from a lyric, sometimes from a music, exceptionally the two together. I'm a fanatic and I'm for research.
One day I heard that Modugno said to someone about me: "it's a shame, he has a popular streak that he tries to hide".
He had seen it right, but he was very wrong, because an artist has the duty to raise the shot, you can not always follow and satisfy the popular taste. I remember a singer-songwriter, during a television interview, after performing a song, said: "this song I did in two minutes" ... from my sofa I replied ... "you can hear it!".
GS Is there any song whose writing completely changes the approach?
FB Sure, I can think of a song from "Like a camel in a gutter" called "The shadow of light".
I wrote it in about six months. I have, here where I live, a gazebo. I got tired of going there because the Sicilian lands on Mount Etna are stairways, terraces, and every time I arrived up with my tongue hanging. I had a harmonium in there, and I did six months of this wonderful life. From the beginning it was an improvisation: "defend me..." (sings). Every day I would write a sentence and stop, as if to lengthen as much as possible the sacred climate in which I had entered. It took me months: "It was very beautiful".
GS Why aren't the works you do "lyrical", or at least melodic, like the songs? Think of Gilgamesh compared to "The shadow of light", for example.
FB The operas were a very strong experience for me. Usually for the song you have two, three, four, five, six minutes when it's long, even if Dylan has made of docs or thirteen minutes. But it's always a song, so it revolves around a secure structure: verse and recording, at most you make two verse plus recording, a small bridge, it's always the same thing. My first experience with opera, that is in 1985 / 1986, was to deal with what the Germans call "great form". In that case you have to have the ability to cover an hour and a half, unless you do, like some composers of the pop world, who write works but then in fact are songs. You also have to deal with style, which does not trace things from other centuries.
It's a very interesting work of penetration, beyond the results you achieve. It's a serious, severe job.
For the first six months I was totally out of control, then I started to get some skills.
GS Eh yes, there we are right in the field of classical composition!
FB Eh yes!
GS Two words about the musical situation today.
FB Worldwide?
GS In general
FB Let's start from that American music that unfortunately has a strong influence on the rest of the world. I read an interview in La Repubblica di ieri, by Winton Marsalis, a great trumpeter. He's black. It's nice when the critics come from someone of the same race, if not there's always the suspicion that someone has some resentment. Marsalis attacked, said all kinds of things to these American rappers. I had already foreseen this in 1970 when I was filming for N.Y... But let's analyze the videos superficially...there's always one who gets caught by the backside by moving the backside, some male who touches his genitals, others who give or take drugs etc... On the other hand, there are some signs at this time that give me a bit of optimism. Pollini has entered the pop chart, he has sold almost fifty thousand copies with a record of classical music. Allevi is also on the 50,000 copies. Once upon a time classical music, when it was good, could make ten thousand copies, apart from exceptional cases like Herbert Von Karajan, which involved the whole world.
GS Do you think that music criticism has some task that it doesn't perform?
FB The question would require a long and serious analysis, and this is not the right site ... I can say, however, that music criticism, such as film, or literature, when it is dogmatic, in my opinion, is ridiculous ... and when it enhances commercial success also.
GS I don't like the continuous labeling, especially in electronic music that, by its nature, lends itself... The labeling serves to allow producers to make continuous "clones". They clone following a trend: there is the original record, particular, creative, but then a musical genre name is invented, which serves precisely to propose the same thing in perpetuity.
FB Actually, here the critics in themselves count for little, it's the whole system that wants the boxes. Pop - jazz, pop - funky, that's not the problem, you have to see if you are interested or not in the music that the guy does, whether it's "electro-rock" or "classical".
GS Da Fetus and on the strings of Aries has resumed "aria di rivoluzione", "sequenze e frequenze", "no u turn"... and has proposed them again with some changes. Also timbres, for example when he replaced the string mandola...
FB The mandola was very important for that piece, but then everything can be changed. I haven't done many remakes of songs, but it happens that you realize that that particular song could be "not bad" in some other way, and you try.
GS In Giubbe Rosse, and live in general (I heard them in Mantua, at Palazzo Te) "Aria di rivoluzione" and "Sequenze e frequenze" were amazing! But have you ever thought about doing it again From East to West?
FB Actually not
GS I'll suggest it then!
FB (laughs) Ah I'll think about it.
GS Do you think the popular and intellectual world musically speaking what they can share?
FB I've heard intellectuals with really chip music tastes and the opposite, so you have to see what it means to be intellectuals. For me it's not strange that someone who has spent a lifetime on books, and has done it seriously, can appreciate a certain kind of frivolous or sentimental music, so for nostalgia, or for fun, and then tastes can't be discussed.
GS Some people think today in 2007 that the computer with a MIDI system marks the death of the performer. I wrote that I am against it. What do you think about it?
FB I am also against it. I love isochrony and the correction of "human" errors is a duty for me.
GS As I asked you on Friday about your first intentions in front of the VCS3 synthesizer, what was the first thing you thought about in front of the MIDI system?
FB Mirabilie. Actually it was all natural. When you enter in a certain order of ideas, already as an individual you expect something that then comes along. Except for a new program in circulation that through sampled choirs (phonemes) gives you the opportunity to have a lyrical choir sing the text you want... something absolutely surprising.
GS What is its name?
FB I don't remember, but I'm going to buy it.
