Andrea Agostini

Dull Catastrophes and Love Songs: a Tacit Artistic Research Project

Sound Example 1: A trailer combining segments from the various songs of the album.

Sound Example 2: "Never Let Me Go", the initial song of the album.

Contemporary Music Composition as Concert-Oriented Practice

Musical works belonging in the realm of contemporary music inhabit an institutional environment where the almost ubiquitous outcome of the musical composition is a score meant to be performed in a concert setting by a group of musicians. This informs a whole constellation of technical and aesthetic choices, including the strict compliance with the pre-selected structure of vocal and instrumental groups (if I am writing for four voices, there is no way I can have a fifth one at any point); the observance of all practical, bodily and material requirements of performers (I must leave a singer the time to breathe and a flutist the time to put down the piccolo and take the bass flute); the accordance with the relative dynamics of various instruments and voices (I cannot expect a solo violin harmonic with the mute to be heard above a fortissimo played by four French horns); and so on. Even a cursory survey of any book on the history of contemporary music (such as Griffiths 1995) or the catalogue of any established contemporary music composer shows that musical works are almost invariably defined and classified by their personnel.1 Likewise, in all the academic institutions I am aware of, the teaching of composition reflects this paradigm, as students are prompted to write for string quartet, orchestra, or flute and electronics, with the understanding that the finished composition be meant for a concert performance. The adoption of electronic technology may weaken the above-mentioned traits through integration of amplification, fixed media and live processing. Nonetheless, the fact that compositional choices in contemporary music (with the obvious exception of acousmatic music) are strongly influenced by the institutionalised expectations attached to concerts performed by live musicians is in my view so finely ingrained in the practice to remain essentially taken for granted, unaddressed, unchallenged and even unnoticed.

Popular Music Production as Acousmatic Practice?

Conversely, popular music production is often aimed firstly and foremost at the recorded medium. The composition and arrangement of rock and pop music works frequently happens in the recording studio and through the mediation of recording technology. Already in the mid-1960s, in albums such as Revolver by the Beatles (1966), the vocal and instrumental performances constituting the backbone of the musical work were altered and augmented by all kinds of intervention of studio technology, such as overdubs, tape loops, montage and electronic processing of sounds, at once exploring the affordances of the recording process and explicitly taking inspiration from the practices of avant-garde electronic and tape music (Di Scipio 2010, p. 235). 

Such creative approach to recording technology has become the norm, rather than the exception, in popular music throughout the subsequent decades (Moorefield 2005). There is debate on whether this should be seen as an added value or a disservice to the authenticity of the music, also in the light of the fact that such heavily studio-produced works can be difficult or impossible to reproduce accurately in concert situations (Cook 1998).2 My point of view is that the debate is sterile, and the discourse should rather start from the specific ontology of each musical work and activity, whether performative or reified into a recorded artefact.

From a purely technical point of view, this kind of recording-oriented approach to popular music production is not very different from the composition of acousmatic music. In both cases, sound materials are gathered, edited, processed, assembled and mixed in order to create a musical object that is meant to be listened to through loudspeakers in the absence of the original sound sources. The respective technologies themselves are, if not exactly identical, at least widely overlapping.

On the other hand, the creative approaches to the sound materials are quite different. The vocal and instrumental functions (such as bass, rhythm, melody) that permeate popular music composition are generally mostly irrelevant in the acousmatic practice, where materials obtained from musical instruments and the human voice are just one option among the unlimited breadth of the sound sources available to the composer (Smalley 1997). Also, the adoption of such materials in acousmatic music often happens in the form of a reference to some external, immanent, “found” sound object (see, for example, Pentes by Denis Smalley), or as raw material whose ultimate destination is extensive processing and manipulation (as in Gesang der Jünglinge by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Songes by Jean-Claude Risset or Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco by Jonathan Harvey). In popular music production, with the significant exception of electronica, the primacy of vocal and instrumental sources remains usually unchallenged, whereas the palette of their timbral, articulatory, polyphonic and orchestral potential is augmented by extensive use of recording technology (Moorefield 2005). Of course, this is a highly simplified view of a complex topic. Edge cases, exceptions and hybrids are numerous, and the extent to which the acousmatic and popular practices have not only cross-pollinated but also caused ripples in other contexts cannot be underestimated (Demers 2010; Fronzi 2013). Examples of such blurred areas include the relation between strongly post-processed orchestral extra-diegetic music and electronic sound design in films, as in the work of Jóhann Jóhannsson; the wide adoption of compositional attitudes reminiscent of musique concrète and Elektronische Musik in electronica; and the pervasiveness of hyper-realistic and non-realistic sound manipulation in many classical music recordings, starting at the very least from Glenn Gould’s groundbreaking experimentations.

Conceptually, the acousmatic practice is stronger than the popular approach to recording technology, as the former challenges traditional definitions of music through the legacy of Pierre Schaeffer’s concepts such as objet sonore and écoute réduite. On the other hand, I find it interesting to look at the relation with recording technology from the vantage point of vocal-instrumental composition, as an instance of post-acousmatic (as opposed to strictly acousmatic) practice (Adkins 2016). From this perspective, conceiving the object of musical composition as something purely intended for live performance may be seen as a self-imposed limitation, at a time in history where music is primarily heard in reproduced form (Philip 2004).

Conceiving the Work

In 2008, I started harbouring the idea of an instrumental work for the recorded medium. The idea originated from the reflections mentioned above, as well as some broader considerations. These included the growing difficulty to create new concert music within a cultural and economic climate in which public funding and general interest for contemporary music are dwindling; and the related observation that a highly coveted outcome of a satisfying performance for many composers of my generation is the recording, which, as new compositions do not always outlive their premiere, is often the only way a new musical work can reach its potential audience. On the other hand, I have long been keenly interested in the creative use of recording technology. Not only had I already composed various works of fixed-media electroacoustic music, but also experimented with self-producing recordings of rock music, both autonomously and with various groups, always considering the recording and mixing phases as fundamental parts of the creative process.

The first draft of an artistic proposal for a contemporary music work specifically conceived for the recorded medium was written in 2012 with help from the late composer Carlo Ciceri, at the time a member of the artistic committee of the Italian ensemble RepertorioZero. This text, aimed at convincing producers to finance and program the work, introduced two crucial ideas.

Firstly, two versions of the work would be produced: the recorded one, and a different one to be performed live. This was deemed necessary in order for the project to be potentially considered by concert producers, as we were not (and even now I am not) aware of any institution financing ex nihilo recordings of contemporary music works. Although I initially considered it a compromise, this requirement helped me better delineate the compositional strategy: I started rethinking the recording process not as the outcome of the compositional phase, but as one of its steps. Ideally, the compositional and recording processes would fully overlap: I would write materials for the musicians to record; assemble and, however roughly, mix them in the multitrack software; and use the result as a basis for conceiving and writing more materials, in an iterative process. Such an approach would require the continued presence of the musicians in the recording facility, something hardly possible, at least for economic reasons. Nonetheless, some kind of integration of the compositional and recording processes, even in a less-than-ideal form, would prove to be an enriching opportunity. The recording would be not only the object to be eventually presented to the audience, as opposed to a live concert, but also the outcome of the compositional process, as opposed to a score. Strictly speaking, the role of musical notation would be that of a private communication with the musicians, and the ontology of the work would be subsumed by the recording, rather than the score as it is usual in notation-based music. This would mirror what happens in recording-based popular music: the work is both symbol- and sound-based, as on the one hand traditional concepts of pitch and rhythm define most of its essence and recognisability, whereas on the other hand notated materials, if existing at all, are not meant to be publicly available and whoever may want to refer to the work in the future will have to do it through the recorded medium. 

Eventually, and only after the release or, at least, the full preparation of the recording, a live version would be derived from it, in a form tailored to the requirements of a performance by a small group of musicians — most likely, the core group that had taken part in the recording sessions. The overall process would be quite similar to what happens in many cases in the production of rock and pop music, where concerts follow the release of albums and it is somehow implied that the audience is already familiar with the musical material.

The other insight that emerged from my discussions with Ciceri was that the relation with rock and pop music could and should be embraced from a wider angle. The original idea of experimenting with production strategies inspired by the practices of different musical communities did not initially imply the fact that the resulting work would become a stylistic hybrid: the musical result I had in mind was firmly rooted in the lineage of modernist contemporary music; the fact that things would eventually become much blurrier will be discussed further on, and was absolutely not clear at this stage. Anyway, Ciceri suggested that the work be a song cycle, where song would clearly mean anything from an art song to a rock song, thus enhancing the cohesion and motivation of the whole concept.

The Production

Finding a producer for the work proved more difficult than expected, and the project with RepertorioZero never materialised. In mid-2021, just when I was about to decide to self-produce it, taking charge personally of all the costs, I was contacted by the respective directors of the Icarus vs. Muzak ensemble and the Festival Aperto of Reggio Emilia, who proposed to produce it as both a concert for the 2022 edition of the festival and a discographic album. As the ensemble does not feature a singer, I invited for the role Felicita Brusoni, who is renowned for her vocal technique, versatility and breadth of experience. I suggested scheduling a two-week writing and recording residency for myself and all the musicians involved. The suggestion was rejected on financial grounds — fortunately, because both the composition and the recording processes proved much longer and more intricate than what would have been possible in the residency.

The Pencil-and-Paper-and-Finale Phase

From November 2021 to early July 2022 I composed written vocal and instrumental materials, facing two major compositional problems that seemed to elude any low-hanging solution. 

The first was the fact that most compositional techniques I had at hand seemed to lose relevance when the layering of instruments and their timbral and dynamic control could be infinitely altered and multiplied through computer technology. For example, the contrapuntal density of writing had given way to the stacking of tracks in the digital audio workstation; rhythmic and polyphonic complexity could be achieved through the combination and processing of selected portions of improvised materials, rather than by the careful writing of scores whose ultimate meaning is often some kind of highly controlled chaos; orchestration was to be so deeply influenced by mixing that many details of instrumental technique became irrelevant.

The second, and even greater, problem was the approach to the voice. I was determined to take the task of writing songs quite literally. I wanted to write the texts myself. I wanted the vocal parts to focus on rhythmic-melodic features, rather than timbral or articulative ones: so, even if Brusoni is a prominent specialist of different vocal techniques, I did not want the experimental exploration of vocality to become a pivot of the composition, although she eventually adopted such a wide range of timbres, registers and articulations to fit the character of the individual songs that the cycle became a tour de force of vocal technique anyway. Likewise, I wanted the electronic processing of the voice to be not necessarily strong, as in the typical work for voice and live electronics in which the voice is a generator of all kinds of spectro-morphologically diverse sounds, but rather subtle and precisely tailored to the musical and lyrical content of each song or section thereof. More than with any other instrument, I wanted to take advantage of the recording potential for the vocal parts, through layering, multitracking and unrealistic editing.

All these desires and inclinations, stemming from my own intuitive preferences but also from the specific setting I had committed to, my own Carceri d’Invenzione, pushed the composition in a stylistically hybrid direction, one in which immediately discernible references to popular music are more tangible than I had planned.

Incidentally, it was during this phase that the title of the work, Dull Catastrophes and Love Songs (from now on, DC&LS), was chosen.

Composing Through Performing, Recording and Mixing

The recording process started in mid-July 2022, with the initial aim of having at least a few tracks from the album ready for the concert, scheduled for November of the same year.

Until mid-October 2022, various vocal and instrumental recording sessions were undertaken. During those sessions, each musician would record their instrumental parts separately, following metronome tracks that I had prepared beforehand. This made the captured materials far more flexible for further manipulation than they would have been if performed in a typical chamber music setting, with all the inevitable microphonic crosstalk. I was aware that the interplay between the musicians would be lacking in precision and nuance, but I hoped to be able to compensate for this through post-production, as was indeed the case.

Most of the sessions focused on recording notated materials I had previously given to each musician. On some occasions, important details such as dynamics and performing techniques were left open to experimentation; in these cases, various takes were recorded, representing different options to be selected or combined afterwards, and many of the musicians gave significant creative contributions to the process.

During the same period, I edited and organised the captured materials. Besides the goal of giving shape to the eventual album, this work served as a basis upon which to sketch new materials for further recording sessions, and as an actual compositional phase for the concert version of the score, that is, the only complete score of the work, which was built from a systematisation of the original sketches used for the recordings and complemented by other fragments and ideas originating from the montage and editing of the takes.

On the 13th of November 2022 the concert premiere took place. I had long been unconvinced that the live version would have been as artistically rewarding as I was hoping the record would be, but during the rehearsals I quickly changed my mind. Eventually, a brief segment of the live concert, augmented with significant overdubbing, was included in the final album version of the longest song of the album, “The Forest Song (This Is Not a Form Of Solipsism).” Two other songs, “Chicxulub” and “Fall”, were strongly influenced in their respective album versions by decisions that I originally considered compromises aimed at the live rendition, but eventually proved more effective than what I had devised for the recording. Incidentally, the idea to make the album versions of these two songs closer to their respective concert ones is just one example of the wide-ranging creative input I received from Brusoni, whose contributions reached far beyond her own vocal parts, as she questioned choices of structure, instrumentation, sound processing, mixing and more. In popular music terms, she very naturally took the co-producer role.

It might be said that the live premiere marked the moment the compositional phase ended. I prefer to think that it was just a milestone, whereas the composition continued throughout the whole editing and mixing process. Also, at the time of the premiere, only about a half of the vocal materials had been recorded, as I had largely underestimated the time this would take; the missing ones and a few instrumental takes were added in the following months.

The final months of 2023 were mostly devoted to mixing the recorded materials, in close collaboration with Brusoni and sound engineer Carlo Barbagallo, who had already assisted me during most of the instrumental recordings. Far from being a merely technical undertaking, the mixing phase was a highly creative process, during which more details were added and changed and, more importantly, the very sonic nature of some of the compositions was defined. 

At the time of writing, discussions with a small but very committed Italian record label are taking place. Choices relative to the dissemination of the work are significantly linked to its very essence but, as they do not concern the creative phase proper, they will not be discussed further here.

Sound Example n. 3: An excerpt from the live version of "Raining." This is one of the songs where the difference between the live and album versions is greatest.

Sound Example n. 4: The corresponding excerpt from the album version. Four different vocal tracks, by Brusoni, composer and vocalist Michael Edgerton who lent his voice to this track and myself, are present, as opposed to the live version, which only featured Brusoni's voice. Also, the instrumentation is radically different.

Sound Example n. 5: An excerpt from the live version of "Winter Lullaby." Here, the difference between the two versions of the song is much subtler.

Sound Example n. 6: The corresponding excerpt from the album version of "Winter Lullaby." The vocals and instrumentation are essentially identical. On the other hand, the sound materials have been significantly processed and the singing voice has been layered with a whispering one. Moreover, the notes of the singing voice have been time-stretched, so as to create the illusion of the singer never breathing and convey a sense of unbearable oppression.

Collaborations

Since before the start of the production, I had been wishing composer Daniele Ghisi, with whom I have collaborated on many occasions, to participate in the making of the record. Over the years, Ghisi has honed techniques for building sound collages out of disparate sources, through an approach he calls tabula plena (Ghisi 2017). I asked him to contribute one of those collages for the song “Raining.” Not only did he accept, but also offered to produce another, very different one for an instrumental section of another song, “Song of the Middle-Aged Disillusioned Cynic (You Are Accountable and You Know It)” to outstanding results.

Another person I involved in the production is sound artist and electronic musician Lemmo, who allowed me to include in “The Forest Song (This Is Not a Form of Solipsism)” excerpts from one of their fixed-media compositions which, serendipitously, fit perfectly the long instrumental introduction of the song.

I consider these as real instances of co-authorship, however guided by my artistic direction: both Ghisi and Lemmo have received composer’s credits for the respective songs. This collaborative approach, which also includes the broad creative, if not fully authorial, contributions from Brusoni and, to a lesser extent, the other performers, once again echoes practices typical of popular music, where a single work often has a long list of authors and featured artists. It is an approach I find extremely satisfying, from both the human and the artistic point of view. I often lament the loneliness of the contemporary music composer: however jealous I am of my own artistic vision, I have always enjoyed working with other artists, and some of the works I am most proud of are based upon collaborations of some kind.

Sound Example n. 6: The sound montage contributed by Daniele Ghisi to "Song of the Middle-Aged Disillusioned Cynic (You Are Accountable and You Know It)."

Sound Example n. 7: The corresponding excerpt of the full album version of "Song of the Middle-Aged Disillusioned Cynic (You Are Accountable and You Know It)."

Sound Example n. 8: The electronic part that Lemmo contributed to "The Forest Song (This Is Not a Form of Solipsism)."

Sound Example n. 9: The corresponding excerpt of the full album version of "The Forest Song (This Is Not a Form of Solipsism)."

Technology

Musique concrète, Elektronische Musik, film soundtracks and popular music, just to cite a few examples, have been leveraging recording technology to creative ends since long before the widespread adoption of computers in music production. The idea of applying the same approach to a work of written vocal-instrumental contemporary music could in principle have been carried out entirely through analogue equipment. On the other hand, this could not be true in practice for DC&LS.

The deep intertwining of the compositional process with apparently distinct activities such as recording, editing and mixing was only made possible by the integration of all those phases within a single platform, which happened to be my own laptop computer. The iteration that marked so distinctly the multifaceted creative process was one of not only practices but software tools as well: digital audio workstations (Reaper and Ableton Live); the multimedia programming environment Max (also in its Ableton-dwelling incarnation Max for Live), augmented by the toolset for algorithmic composition bach3; the score engraving software Finale; and a plethora of audio plug-ins for sound processing and generation. The exchange of information between all those software tools was at times frustratingly clumsy; one example was the difficulty of having accelerandos precisely matching among them. Nonetheless, the level of interaction between different aspects of the creative activity — sound-based and symbol-based, speculative and performative, formalised and intuitionistic — was brought to an unprecedented level by the all-encompassing application of computing.

It was not only a matter of breadth of scope of the computer technology involved, but also one of computational power. The detailed nature and sheer complexity of the relation between written materials and their electronic montage and post-processing would have been impossible to manage, were it not for the extreme flexibility and power of modern computers and multitrack software. Some songs, above all “What Is This Song About?,” required several hundred simultaneous tracks. It is indisputable that complex multitrack productions were carried out in the analogue era, and that current-day recording technologies do not encourage economising audio layers and processes. Still, the affordances of multitrack computer software were put to intense use here. Moreover, the extremely fine granularity of the editing and montage would not have been practically possible without the computer.

The impact of computer technology extended beyond its strictly musical applications. As the general-purpose machine it has become over the last two or three decades, the computer was essential in less specific, more easily overlooked, but not less important areas. For example, the practical realisation of the work required me to travel across Italy and Europe to record performers in recording and production studios as well as private homes and rehearsal spaces. I can hardly imagine myself hopping on and off Ryanair flights with suitcases full of tape reels, hoping to find compatible recorders where I landed. Moreover, several phases of artistic collaboration, in particular with Brusoni and Ghisi, happened remotely: exchanging files and materials through cloud storage services was crucial, as well as having online work sessions with screen and audio sharing. The computer should then be seen as not just a musical workstation, but the defining infrastructure that enabled the whole creative process. This is especially true considering that the production was carried out on a relatively low budget, which would not have allowed me to work extensively in professional studios and gather all the people involved in the same place for all the phases of the work. All this being considered, DC&LS is a far-reaching example of the extent to which computer technology today can open up novel artistic opportunities for the composer.

Sound example n. 10: An excerpt from "What Is This Song About?", one of the most densely layered and technically complex songs of the album.

Conclusions and Further Developments

Producing DC&LS has been a difficult task, but an exciting one as well. What in the beginning had been conceived as an experimental project with a focus on the relation between technology and audience engagement has come to touch topics such as the Tower of Babel of musical genres, distributed creativity and co-creation, the respective agency of performer and composer and the very ontology of the musical work.

On the other hand, this was not the first time such topics have been addressed. One notable precedent is Fausto Romitelli’s An Index of Metals, a work from 2003 for female voice, ensemble of electric and amplified instruments, electronics and video in which the tension between contemporary music and rock songs is explored in then-unprecedented ways, at least in the Italian-French context Romitelli was rooted in. Moreover, the first and probably most renowned recording of An Index of Metals, by Ensemble Ictus, however entirely faithful to the written score, has been mixed so as to sound more like a rock record than a contemporary music concert. The influence of Romitelli on my own work is huge, and the first song in the album (“Never Let Me Go”) is a quite clear homage to his music.

Another, less known work I came to encounter a few years ago is Sine Sole Sileo by Edoardo Dadone, a work for voices and instruments conceived solely for recording, and whose score includes various passages to be multi-tracked. The relation with recording technology here is clearly the focus.

In neither case, though, are the performer/composer relation and the composer’s role questioned, nor is the ontology of the work: from these crucial points of view, those two works remain essentially traditional.

As mentioned above, the idea of basing a fixed-media composition (as DC&LS, at least in its album version, can be considered) upon vocal and instrumental recorded materials has prominent historical precedents, including Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto in Auschwitz by Luigi Nono, Hibiki Hana Ma by Iannis Xenakis, and Telemusik and Hymnen by Karlheinz Stockhausen. On the other hand, in all these works the compositional principle is not to “augment” the recorded materials through recording technology all while maintaining their essential vocal and instrumental nature, as much as to create novel musical objects only referencing the acoustic (as opposed to electro-acoustic) origin of the materials themselves. A closer antecedent may be Below the Walls of Jericho by Paul Dolden, based on the idea of creating a sort of huge orchestra from recordings of hundreds of individual lines. Uncoincidentally, the status of this work as an electroacoustic composition proper has been questioned (Di Scipio 2010).

A recent work that was brought to my attention is eye-blink (2021) by Richard Barrett, a binaural fixed-media piece based upon the combination and processing of more or less structured improvisations by the musicians of an ensemble that was unable to work together during the Covid pandemic. eye-blink challenges the typical processes of musical creation in the contemporary music context from many points of view: there is no written score, the affordances of recording technology are explored, as the relation between agencies of the composer and the performer is, in the negotiation between the latter’s improvisations and the former’s preliminary indications and eventual editing and montage.

These are only a few examples of an area of artistic exploration that I think is gaining momentum, especially at a time when opportunities for the circulation of contemporary music works have dramatically shrunk, counterbalanced by the ease of diffusion of recorded music through digital platforms, and the traditional respective roles of composers and performers are being increasingly challenged.

At least as far as my personal trajectory is concerned, I see DC&LS as a turning point. This is not to say that I will reject opportunities to compose music in a more traditional fashion from now on, but I will surely look for ways to fund and produce other works along the lines described in this article, possibly trying to radicalise its most innovative aspects, even though experience has shown that the difficulties to overcome are many.

I also hope that this work, and the reflection that could spark from it, may help define theoretically a set of concepts to be shared among other composers and performers interested in the various topics discussed here. In particular, I would be surprised if there were no other music makers and thinkers willing to engage with similar approaches to music production and waiting for funding institutions and producers to notice that there is a wide, open field of possibilities and a community of artists ready to seize them. DC&LS might be a starting point.