INTERVISTA: DIALOGO I°

Raymond Gervais: Very little is known here of your activities as a composer/performer/”musical designer” and so on. Before we discuss your more recent activities and productions, could you tell us anything of your background as a creative musician?

Mario Bertoncini: My background is not exceptional at all. I was interested in visual arts when I was a kid. I had a natural talent. I could draw, I did a bit of sculpture, … not painting; I didn’t react to colors very much; - drawing, - lines, yes.
My father had a different idea about my future, which was neither that of a painter nor of a musician, in his mind. He was always objecting strongly against music, although he had a very broad culture and was a bit of a musician himself.
I stopped drawing as soon I could finally manage to devote myself to composing and playing piano with the help of my mother, who had excellent musical qualities but no real professional training – and for sure not very much influence in the inflexible patriarchal structure of the family.
Actually music has wiped out every other possible activity. I was fourteen when I put myself in this trap. Everything was radically cut off from that point. Everything except reading and, of course, my scholastic duties, you see, Latin, ancient Greek, History …
I was afraid I could never achieve a technique. Thank God I was helped by a natural kind of flexibility in my hands. So, very quickly, but with a lot of work, I can assure you, I became a concert pianist.
I was mostly playing what at that time was contemporary music. I fought for Stockhausen, I fought for … I had to fight even for Bártòk. In the early fifties in Rome, I remember, to play the music of Schönberg, Webern and even Bártòk was considered a revolutionary attitude, mind you. It’s amazing for how little you may be considered a revolutionary and for how little you are not.  A superficial impression, and people are quite ready to put a crown on your head or … to chop it off right away.
In any case, those were my official loves in the roaring fifties, I mean the Viennese and then the Darmstadters. But had I dared to talk about my private loves at that time – as you know young people tend to be promiscuous -, I could have confessed my devotedness to the poetry of Pérotin’s Organa or to the perfection of Chopin’s Préludes. But I had to wait 25 years to give such a confession its polemic power.

R.G.:	But what was the role of piano in the development of your compositional ideas?

M.B.:	You want to know whether I am a composer-pianist or a pianist-composer, I suppose? …

R.G.:	Oh no, I didn’t mean that …

M.B.:	Very well. Actually, indirectly, piano was determinant for my development; I mean not the instrument itself, with the weight of its glorious classic-romantic literature which could be really misleading for a composer of today, but the practical experience related to the problems of performance. If I ever succeed in giving a convincing answer to the problems of musical or even theatrical form (and every time I consider  a piece finished I have this illusion), that will also be because I have been looking at those problems from my perspective as a player. I believe that composition turns out to be far more real that way: the “rise and fall” of classical studio tape-music demonstrated that the Promethean ambition of composers to get rid of the intermediary role of the player between a musical object and its reception, or – say – to give up the flexibility and richness of human gesture for the sake of an abstract and illusory concept of precision, was false and produced just the opposite result: clichés, predictable and limited solutions, in one word, boredom.
Not more successful was the tendency of forcing the performer to imitate the exactitude of the machine and to renounce the flexible evaluation, on his part, of given instructions, that is to say, to renounce expressing his feelings. After all, what else is feeling and intuition   but partial suspension of evenness and rationality?  The mechanism of emotions and the hand of man are imperfect, the machine is even: let’s acknowledge their limitations and take advantage of both of them without mixing their respective roles. Norbert Wiener, who for being the father of cybernetics  was above all suspicions, said once that if a human being is forced to perform the limited functions of an ant, not only he will not be a man any more, but will not even be a good ant. And God knows how many clumsy ants our scores have been swarming with for almost thirty years!

R.G.:	You said that you loved Chopin, but you did not perform so many pieces of his in concert, or did you?

M.B.:	If you want to achieve something you have got to renounce something else. It is the law. The phenomenology of all human activities consists of recurrent phases of renunciation. If you want a revolution you have to cut off the King’s head, no matter how beautiful it is. You have to renounce the positive aspects of Court – beautiful women, blossoming arts etc. – if you wish both a President and a Constitution, isn’t it so?
Some times there is also the case of somebody who does not have anything to renounce, but that’s another story. (laughter)
No, seriously, look how many times somebody, who didn’t have the weight of the past on his shoulders, just for that reason happened to find something extremely valuable! How many discoveries were made that way! This is to me the way Terry Riley discovered what later, with rational and systematic application, Reich called “phase music”. Do you think that Terry, in the sixties, really meant to light a petard under the seat of the established avant-gardists? Did he really want to deprive the last generation of the Gods of Darmstadt and their nymphs of a legitimate, pompous and slow-decaying “Dämmerung”? No way. He knew the keyboard and how to repeat evenly and hypnotically on it the simple melodic patterns he fancied; he had access to “Indian” music which he could find in polychrome records together with fudge, sandalwood and kimonos; he might have heard some concert by Cage or La Monte Young. But simply that was the only way  he could possibly express himself in music, and he did. That’s it. He went straight there, and hit the target. You would be surprised to know  how many composers, in Europe, are taking sight and firing at the same target these days. People are crazy about that: in phase here, out of phase there … Many a composer is trying to force his entropic stream of solid, post-serial vocabulary into the minimal graciousness of thin, repetitive patterns; like that older fellow, not thin any more, who tries desperately to fit again into the suit he was wearing the day of his marriage … Time passes. It will come here too. It will be nice if, in a few years, some of the most established North American Universities institute a chair in Minimal Music, with mark-lists, bibliography, exams and the whole lot.
But to go back to Chopin, and to your question, his music was my secret love: you don’t want to share your secret love with hundreds of people, do you? Well, for fifteen years I did not play one single note of Chopin’s music in public. Nor did I perform many other pieces out of the “repertoire”, so to speak. To myself, the rational explanation was that I did not want  to repeat passively the “reading” already made  by  Cortot, Gieseking and other great performers who sort of exhausted  and discovered all possible details of those pieces, so that I preferred less exploited areas of compositions. But the reality was somewhere else, I suppose. I simply was not ready yet. If Vico has been right in his theories about history, I had to go through at least four successive revolutions  of musical language   from  1850 - say – to 1950 before I could figure out the possibility of renouncing the envoûtement mentioned by Boulez in the fifties and be ready to bring simple, even relationships back into the morphology of the music I was trying to compose.

R.G.:	You brought out the concept of recurrent phases of historical events the philosopher  G.B. Vico  established in the XVIII° century, as applied to changes in style and morphology of music; when you mentioned Chopin, you might also have implied – polemically – the reference to the principles  of that music in your organization of musical material, which, on the other hand, is supposed to be extremely advanced    and – forgive me – “avant-garde”. Could you perhaps explain to me how you manage to conciliate those contradictory lines?

M.B.:	I’ll willingly forgive you for using metaphors, even those abstracted out of military terminology, so far as  the role of a metaphor, like any other code, is that of transmitting information and therefore helping comprehension. But I am not sure that I am able to grasp fully the conception implicit in this word, today. For more than 70 years that metaphor has been applied to  the eversion of artistic languages, to define the very provocative effect of their evolution. Does anybody today feel provoked by any visual or sonorous production?  Avant-garde, from time to time  was synonymous with meaningful deformation as opposed to pleasant forms of expression which were all assimilated drastically to oleography. Do we think any more that an object, no matter whether a piece of music or a sculpture,
in order to be considered valid has to be necessarily  both ugly and incomprehensible? The times of the “troubar clos” of the Provencal  poets have gone by; nor the various modern repropositions of their cryptical assumptions   do still keep their validity. If it is true that we are watching the agony of Art, which is about to be swept away by the acceleration of modern society, after having disoriented its lovers with the most incredible grimaces, Art, like the heroine of a corny movie, seems to say: -“Here I am, beautiful and unveiled. Take me, and that be the last time.” – So I don’t have to conciliate anything. If we are not avant-garde because we use some of the ingredients of the past (but enlarged as through a magnifying glass, do you remember  “l’école du regard”?); or else, on the contrary, if our action succeeded in abolishing a recent tradition and its weary clichés (but isn’t that exactly what Chopin did?); and if we strictly apply the theory of recurrent historical phases, we could conclude that we are at 360 degrees of phase from Chopin. That is to say at 0 point, or ready to start again.

R.G.:	In this sense you would then consider your research as a sort of going back, no matter how antithetical both terms are and how ambiguous that would sound.

M.B.:	In a way yes. Only, there is no ambiguity in that. History does repeat itself, but new forms are generated by the repetition of basic principles. Look, consider any possible aspect of human evolution; I bet you would not be able to find that many principles. Consider History, for example, or Politics. For centuries the alternative has been between liberalism and conservatism – don’t be shocked  by my over simplification, please – and even now, with our enormously intricate  spectrum of overtones, I  am tempted to reduce our problems to two main categories …

R.G.:	Schönberg once said that the progress of musical language is irreversible …

M.B.:	… Yes, he said that but he also based his discoveries on very old principles: thematic development, counterpoint. The account balances. He skipped back one period of musical thinking and – this is the real point – he imposed such a radical transformation to the borrowed models, that surely you would not take his music for a repetition of previous experiences!

R.G.:	Actually what you said would explain  the general contour of pieces like  CIFRE, for piano, which you wrote in the early sixties and the more recent CHANSON POUR INSTRUMENTS À VENT, which appeared ten years later, in 1974. I mean that both pieces, in spite of their complexity as far as the micro-structure is concerned, are in the macro-structure very clear and even openly appealing to an aural conception of beauty which has been banned, as you pointed out, by the avant-garde in the recent past and which, in the case of CIFRE, must have been quite provocative more than ten years ago, among certain circles of contemporary music.
Can I ask you to whom did you address pieces like those, to what kind of audience, I mean?

M.B.:	I’ll try to answer your question considering the elements which are eventually common to both pieces, contrary to the fact that they are sensibly different – ten years do mean something, especially at the speed rate of our epoch – and to discuss the pieces de-composing them as if they were formed by three separate layers, or levels of understanding: material, formal aspect, destination (meaning).
In 1962, after having written SEI PEZZI PER ORCHESTRA and VOCI SOLE for 72 mixed voices, I definitely quit  both serial organization, in its historically rigorous and direct interpretation, and pre-calculated  combinations of instrumental gestures. I wanted to start from scratch and I began experimenting with sounds, directly, using acoustical media. Almost in the same period, a little earlier actually, I attended an electronic music course in Holland, with G. M. Koenig, which reinforced my curiosity for electronic sound synthesis but, at the same time, also my suspicion for the actual results of the already classical studio technique. Back home, with all the doubts which, on the other hand, I was not able either to develop or correct practically because of the inaccessibility of electronic equipment, I started using piano as well as percussion instruments, as I said, to get  possibly a “different” repertory of sounds, which could provide me with both a personal palette and what I would call a theatrical distortion of the original meaning of the instrument I was experimenting with.

R.G.:	Don’t you think that either experimenting with sound or with pre-assembled units or codes (language) is the same thing; I mean don’t you agree that as far as the process of imagination is concerned both methods may have the same final value?

M.B.:	No doubt. I did not say that the old Masters where not good because they used not only a common language (happy days!)  but often even pre-constituted elements or themes borrowed from other composers; nor did I try to compare the value of either method: all I wanted is to describe the difference of composing “after” and “before” the sound, i.e. to extend the value of a language accepting the official code or else to start  elaborating a piece not from the organization of the sound material, but from the discovery of the material itself.

R.G.:	Did Cage influence you in that research?

M.B.:	Of course he did; although indirectly, since I knew very little of his music at that time and concerning the prepared piano technique he discovered, it was too personal,  I thought, to be repeated literally. In fact what interested me then was to find a peculiar sonorous connotation for each piece or group of pieces, a specific sound material which should not be considered a “technique” or else – to repeat a horrid term, unfortunately very common among musicians – an “effect”, but what would have instead the value of the first step in the process of a specific composition.
I was, and I still am, interested in producing a long-sustained  band of sound apparently fixed at the surface, but actually extremely flexible inside, with a rich  and always changeable texture of harmonic  and dynamic interactions.  At the Dutch electronic studio, among other experiments which I never dared to consider as compositions, I have been trying to produce such bands in various ways, but the result was unsatisfactory. Nothing was living inside those textures;  their changes, for not being periodically driven by the machine (voltage controlled modules had not yet appeared) were surely the result of the “hand of man”, but in its most disappointing manifestation, as it is revealed through a potentiometer!
On the contrary, both cymbals and piano, “bowed” in two different ways, as well as gongs and tam-tams excited with similar methods and through friction, provided me with fields of possibilities on which I did have enough control, but at the same time a certain amount of surprise derived from the unpredictable reactions and interactions of the various elements involved.

R.G.:	I assume that the quasi-theatrical effect you mentioned before was due to the surprise the audience had just seeing a piano or a set of cymbals on stage and hearing instead sounds, the attack of which was so different from what they expected, but “coloured” by the resonance of the already known instrument.

M.B.:	Yes, that was indeed what happened. Naturally, later on, pieces like CIFRE, TUNE, QUODLIBET etc., started traveling around from Roma to California, via Tokyo, Osaka and … Frankfurt so that their sound, picked-up  as “effects”, was repeated from time to time by various composers; also due to the fact that I was the first person to betray my own theory of unique materials to be used only once, as I used those techniques extensively in the Improvisation Group NUOVA CONSONANZA, which I joined in 1965.
As a result of that, the freshness of those materials declined up the point that once – precisely last february, after a concert in Buffalo, when TUNE (1965) for cymbals was performed – a reviewer wrote that the piece was a catalog of commonplaces of percussion instruments, or something like that. I don’t pretend that a provincial critic could be absolutely informed (“who is this guy Bertoncini, where does he come from? …”), but for me, to be taken for a plagiarist of myself was quite an experience, I assure you!

R.G.:	I can imagine it was! In any case the truth could easily be ascertained just looking at your scores and their relative year of composition, some times dated, like  QUODLIBET (1964), by an international composition prize …

M.B.:	… Yes, or CIFRE, which was published by Source magazine, Davis, with a detailed explanation of the sound production … But that does not really matter. I just mentioned it to underline the importance that, at a certain moment, specific material may have for a composer, so that eventually he tends to identify his activity with that material.

R.G.:	Is this the case of the “Aeolian sounds” you used in CHANSON?

M.B.:	Yes, it is; although I used those sounds in another piece, called CHAIN REACTION, realized in collaboration with kinetic painter Peter Sedgley. The same principle is also at the basis of VELE (sails), a project  I realized for the Berliner Festwochen 1974, which involved Aeolian harps, more than seven meters in height, rotating on their axis  and placed outdoors to capture the wind and modulate its sound inside a concert hall.

R.G.:	You also told me that you are working at a piece which would employ all those materials together and therefore you would consider it as a sort of “quotation piece”. But about the “Aeolian pieces”, so to speak, could you explain how those instruments work?

M.B.:	First of all they are not instruments. Your lapsus linguae was pertinent: they are pieces instead. An instrument is a flexible medium which provides for different aspects of sound and, by the way, even gives the player the possibility of performing various pieces of music showing different features or styles. On the contrary, with my units you only have the possibility of performing one piece, exactly the one they were built for. And the consequence of such characteristic is that the compositional act, the choice on my part, was already built-in the unit; which therefore I tend to consider itself a piece, or else, as an analogy with visual arts, a “sound sculpture”.

R.G.:	I understand that you want to imply also, as you once told me, that your “units” should not be confused with “sound sculptures” in the current meaning of the term; so that they should not be considered sculptures which produce sounds. Nevertheless just looking at the picture of the big “wind-harp”, for example, one gets the impression  of pre-conceived visual rhythms as one of the various possible meanings of the piece.

M.B.:	Exactly. Only, those visual rhythms were not controlled from an aesthetic or visual angle, I don’t pretend that: they were the functional result of my musical requirements, the consequence of my compositional choices in term of pitches, tone-colour, mode of attack and so on. I have no difficulty in admitting that when I first had the idea of VELE I counted upon the plastic impact that those large objects in form of sails, placed along the profile of a hill, could have when observed from a certain distance: but their plastic effect consists in visually describing the phonic action of the wind, its rich and flexible rhythmical breath, which is then transferred into a code and conveyed into an articulated musical event.
Even the slow rotation  of the object, due to the subtly  changing pressure of the wind, mainly has the function of changing the angle of incidence of the air stream and therefore producing rhythmical changes as well as variations of tone-colour and polarization of pitches.
In this sense my activity is similar to that of a maker of  “sonorous sculptures”, only of opposite sign, so to speak: he produces  a sculpture the Nebenstimme of which is sound; I compose a piece of music  which is underlined by a number of inevitable visual results.

R.G.:	I see that you don’t believe in Gesamtkunstwerk! …

M.B.:	No, not at all. At least  I don’t believe in the implicit democratic equalization of its various components. But I do believe in theatre, in musical theatre and in its contemporary neighbouring species  (although usually  grouped under inelegant neologisms  such as multi-media, mixed-media etc.)  provided that their vectors are justified by a function (as far as I am concerned, a musical function); so that all of them are accepted  as parts of a system or a mechanism, instead of being displayed  arbitrarily through often banal and merely decorative associations.
But with the time and space that we have at our disposal, I don’t want to introduce now, as a new topic of our conversation, a crucial subject in general and a very significant one for me in particular, that of musical theatre today. I’ll just mention a reference to an essay I wrote on this subject, unfortunately in Italian: NOTE PER UN TEATRO DELLA REALTÀ (Notes for a theatre of reality could be its literal English translation), which is a sort of  manifesto as well as the theoretical counterpart of the theatre pieces I wrote since 1967:  SPAZIO-TEMPO (1967/69), ILLEGONDA (2968), TEMPI DI PROVA (1970), FOCUS (1974), A NEW BEGGAR’S OPERA (1970, not finished yet) and THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM, also in progress.
The title of that essay contains already one of its main arguments: a “theatre of reality” is not a realistic theatre, which for me is the most unreal, fictitious representation of emotions (i.e. a story) which doesn’t  have anything to do with the actual stage-situation of a particular moment (attention, please: I am referring to contemporary production, in the past the problem was solved with an accepted code of semantic associations and its adequately ciphered musical elements), nor is a sterile exercise which gratuitously juxtaposes various parameters, failing therefore to communicate anything to anybody: it is a ritual which tends to display a complex potentiality of communication to be “read” as a sort of feed-back between actors and audience, with symbolic ambiguities, through a coherent system of clues (optical, gestural, phonic etc. …)
A gesture, a sound, a light, a word, all elements should be linked together by some concrete justification. 
Please, consider the state of ballet today. With contemporary music, based on asymmetry and on the subtlety of complex rhythmical patterns not reducible to a basic, periodic pulsation, dance turns out to be a gratuitous association of sounds and movements: either a gestural decoration of a preconceived piece of music, or an arbitrary interpretation of a choreographic action by means of musical stylemes  which, for having been deprived of their original clarity, have inevitably lost their semantic power as well.
The Prince and the Princess have been deposed from their throne: you don’t want to watch the evolutions that their valets and maids are performing, with gloomy faces, in the empty Palace … You want to have new, healthy people to tear down the castle and build something new in its place!
What could be a solution for the coupling of a physical gesture and a sound event? A one-to-one relationship, when the music is fast the action is also fast? That would be pure stupidity. Or else a criterion of contradiction?

R.G.:	… Merce Cunningham and Cage proposed independence …

M.B.:	… And it was beautiful, great, good enough for one moment or for a group of pieces, but you cannot  establish a new line on a negative element; because having music and dance evolving in parallel motion, totally independent from each other is a negative statement: a necessary one, which shows an extremely legitimate intolerance for the conventional and chaotic present situation, but a sort of abdication as well …
My God, I am afraid that my … theatrical intemperances, due partly to my English, partly to the lack of concrete evidence of a piece, risk sounding far less “real” than the description of a “theatre of reality” should …

R.G.:	No, they don’t; I followed your vehement protest and I wonder whether  and to which extent it is connected with Artaud, for instance, or in more recent times, with Grotowski …

M.B.:	Well, had you added the “Living theatre”, for sure you would have picked-up a triangle of theatrical experience that had a very deep meaning for me; and concerning Artaud, I tend to interpret his conception of the cruauté in terms of reality: what else is in fact his devotion to the rigour of the ancestral theatre of Bali, but an act of faith to the musical discipline as well as an attempt to ground a real, functional theatre?

R.G.:	Your environmental theatre piece SPAZIO-TEMPO, created in Venice  in 1970 by the Biennale in collaboration with the Teatro la Fenice, is an example  of functional theatre. In that piece, which I don’t dare to call a ballet, the dancer/mimes produced their own sound, which was therefore strictly connected to their gestures.

M.B.:	Yes, they were modulating a “sonorized” space, an environmental situation of acoustical as well as electronic sound sources, both musically and visually …
They were not dancing on top of music, but generating the music, like a percussion player able to use his whole body … Actually I was always tempted to consider them simply  “instruments”, per absurdum, percussion instruments played by the cues of the conductor who, by means of a special code, displayed them in time, in a sequence of musical events, like a puppet-showman.

R.G.:	And that brings us back to musical form …

M.B.:	Yes, and to my promises, made long ago …
I must say that the problem of musical form “a fait couler beaucoup d’encre” in the past twenty years, indeed. Alea, open or closed form, what should and what should not be determined. Choice. Randomness. The heads rolled easily down from the scaffold. Today a Jacobin, tomorrow a Girondist: not to speak of the Royalists, exterminated long since, thank God.  Polemics, dramatic questions, categoric answers: before and after, a lot of pieces.
Cage - again – sent us one of his disarming smiles from the pages of the BOOK OF CHANGES and gave his contribution to the chaotic situation   with a question which remained famous ever since: “… what has been composed?” -, in a particular piece of music, he meant. You won’t be able to figure out how many answers he got.
Many a Procrustean bed  was set up and ideas tried according to a comparison with new-born archetypes …

R.G.:	You are describing an attitude known under the name of academicism, are you?

M.B.:	Yes, you are right, a new academicism; no wonder that the young generations, fed up with all that, started protesting energetically and asking for more concrete, real problems.  Such a protest happened to be itself a dogma, sometimes: “… you MUST ignore my orders …”, and things of this nature.
By the way, all that belongs to the past. Only one point is still echoing the obsolete querelle between determination and indetermination,  what should be composed and what left to the initiative of the performer, therefore considered a co-creator: the point which focuses the magic word IMPROVISATION.

R.G.:	Magic? …

M.B.:	Yes, magic and misleading too; as much as the concepts people grasp so eagerly these days: Electronic Music, Graphic Music and others, which correspond all to the “idols”, “eidola theatri” in our case, denunciated by Bacon a few centuries ago.

R.G.:	Would you like to find other definitions for them?

M.B.:	Not at all: “music” is clear enough! And graphic music does not exists, only notation, musical notation does: neumatic, alphabetic, proportional …, you know that better than I; in some periods composers were more interested in pitches, in others they just notated the gesture of a musical phrase. More recently, as a score you might also have the description of a succession of actions to be performed, or even some times a score/instrument which had already built-in some of the gestures necessary to set it in vibration.

R.G.:	Could you perhaps give me an example of the last one?

M.B.:	EPITAFFIO in memoria d’un concerto, a piece I composed in 1968, which is based upon the correspondence between the action of writing a text, to be performed with the same nuances (intensity, pauses etc.) an actor would employ reciting it, and its sonorous result.
About electronic music, it is nothing else but music obtained through electronic devices and processes and it requires, on composer’s part, quite a few technical notions, a bit more elaborate than the action of just turning knobs and switches, plus the inevitable knowledge of the laws of composition. We don’t speak of violin music as a religion, not submitted to the common laws …; when someone did so, he produced also horrible violin music. The account is balanced again. The problem with those laws is that they should be related, intimately connected to the musical material, the organization of which they are supposed to regulate. What I said before about the contemporary theatrical production in a summary way, is applicable to music as well.
With the morphological elements we have at our disposal today, after the evolution – or better: the systematic destruction – of the musical language especially following the second world war, I don’t believe that we can construct a musical form, at least in the sense we are used to give to this term; nor that we need it. We did everything but the last step, the inevitable consequence implicit in that evolution: to stop having the skeletons of the past supporting our uncommunicative vocabulary. It is like filling variegated empty shells produced by archaeological excavations, with neon tubes.
Musical form is not only just a section of “something” which could vaguely belong to “something else” or be opposed to “anything else”. The dialectic of old languages was based on a precise system, stratified slowly through the ages, which created extremely clear references, so that one was entitled to speak of a form. Clear, understandable, undiscussed. The amount of violation imposed on it by the most imaginative composers just reinforced its validity as a vehicle of comprehension.
After Schönberg, who cancelled the worn-out tonal relationships between pitches  but kept intact other syntactical elements and Webern, whose interpretation of twelve-tone system generated a reduction of thematicism up to a prophetic organization of structural motivic cells (a single interval, sometimes a note) concentrated in extremely significant aphorism, total serialism was an attempt to substitute a drastically new organization to the old form. As a reaction against that hyperrational movement, the most irrational, arbitrary and chaotic anarchism occurred; the growth of language reached such a high degree of saturation, that the need for a reconsideration of the assumption of making music, of the basic act of composing, is today an absolute necessity.

R.G.:	What do you think of minimal music in this context?

M.B.:	All the best. That it is a radical way of considering the acts of composing, performing and listening to music in a direct, fresh approach. Only certain commercial aspects of it, unfortunately the most popular ones, leave me totally cold. I think that our musical language does need both a reconsideration and a simplification, but not an extra-injection of bad taste and brain-softening: we have enough TV programs, musack  and discothèques for that!
Because it is clear, isn’t it?, that simplification is by no means synonymous  with impoverishment: the other way around! If you consider the increasing disorder as a progression towards degradation of language, a reduction of entropy, on the contrary, would only mean articulation, choice, after all: composition.

R.G.:	Would you say that the contemporary poor art shares such a voluntary reduction of means or would you rather think that it is a product of a reconsidered naiveté?

M.B.:	I am rather suspicious about the possibility of finding naiveté around, today. At least not in this form: whom would you consider more naïve, Ivan Illich, who disregards our supermarket-like society from his voluntary exile in Cuernavaca, or the guy who, after having bought a synthesizer thinks that he can create the “music of future”?
Poor  Art is not naïve; no more, in any case, than the homonymous pieces of furniture produced by the Venitian “Marangoni” of XVIII° century were – and it will soon share their destiny of being sold at Christie’s for thousands and thousands of pounds!

R.G.:	About your piece CHANSON, to which extent is it composed, or else which are the elements pre-determined  by your choice and which are those left to the performer’s choice?

M.B.:	Nothing is left to the player; I mean nothing essential to the relevant characteristics of the piece: timbre, mode of attack, intensity, rhythm (almost inaudible periodic patterns have the sole function of changing the formant spectrum in real-time), density, polarities of pitches, indicated by a tablature notation. The actual display of those elements in time is left, to a certain extent, to the spontaneous reaction of the player, in as much as each page of tablature contains an abbreviated description of the relative symbols. Only two particular groups of events, extremely different from each other as far as both intensity and tone-colour are concerned, have a fixed place in the general strategy of the piece.

R.G.:	Strategy, you said? … Why not just form?

M.B:	Because that arrangement, although very evident and therefore active on the listener with a psychological effect, is not relevant as a formal element. In other terms I advise the player to place that particular combination of events at a certain moment, not as an absolute order issuing from a compositional requirement (the reasons for which I could not possibly explain), but  as just one  of the multiple possible locations of it, which could all be as good and would not affect the form, or else the meaning of the piece, if placed at a different moment.
The one who decided “when”, in this case, was not the composer Mario B., but Mario the player: since they happen to be the same person, the solution is printed.
Let me put it this way  and, please, don’t consider me absurdly dogmatic or professorial: I don’t speak for posterity, I just enunciate what is for me the only possible way of both making and understanding composition today. I think that composing does not mean to take a number of quantities, arbitrarily measured and chosen, and put them together: it means TO  DISCOVER THE MATERIAL AS WELL AS THE LAWS WHICH ARE CONTAINED IN THAT MATERIAL. The metaphor I use to explain this concept is an analogy with a mechanism or an organism, a body, a human body, for instance: it is defined (and how!), limited in length, weight, power & so on, but the development of such elements in time (=actions), although strictly connected to those elements, is not fixed and therefore unpredictable. To define the limitations of the body is the role of the composer; to display the action in time, is that of the performer. And the amount of freedom left to the latter should never be confused with the role of the new magician, the Improviser, “deus ex machina” of many obscure spots in the composer’s consciousness.
If you leave the definition of few details of your composition to the player, that should not be because  you abdicate, but because that is the best way to trigger his imagination and therefore to obtain the result you have in mind.
As a corollary, I am tempted to give you another apparent paradox: the more the sound-sculpture is defined (through its limitations) the greater the freedom of the player can be …

R.G.:	A concrete example? …

M.B.:	Well, take  Chanson; if you think that the piece is acceptable, so is the definition …

R.G.:	O.K. Another thing; do you call “material” just a phonic material?

M.B.:	Oh no; there is also a degree of homogeneity implicit in the selection of a material; a previous selection before the real compositional process takes place.

R.G.:	Homogeneity seems to be one of your main preoccupations, I realized; your instrumental scores also show such a tendency. Don’t you fear that to renounce the dialectic of contrast would drastically deprive you of one of the essential elements of language?

M.B.:	May be. But there is a strong possibility for me to be less interested in language than in the both logical and unpredictable activity of the mechanism, the body I was referring to; and activity means simply life.
I used the word “logic” as opposed to arbitrary statement; only the basic assumption should be arbitrary: -“I want to make a piece with such and such characteristics” (material). That’s arbitrary enough. The next steps must all be logically connected.

R.G.:	And when you don’t find such a rapport between the chosen material and its realization, what do you do?

M.B.:	I don’t write a piece. Or else, I write a bad piece.

R.G.:	Forgive me, but this way don’t you risk being dogmatic too?

M.B.:	Not at all, so far as I don’t try to impose my private requirements on anyone!

R.G.:	You could not deny though, that you tend to judge other pieces and other composers according to such requirements.

M.B.:	I don’t judge: I listen to a piece and either I like it or not. In both cases I try afterwards to justify my preferences with an objective meditation, if I can.

R.G.:	In principle I wanted to ask you a few questions concerning your participation in the improvisation group NUOVA CONSONANZA, one of the very first groups to experiment with collective improvisation as group composition, but unfortunately we don’t have much time left so that I think that as a conclusion of our conversation, you would rather speak about the project you proposed to McGill University last year, the experimental composition course you called MUSICAL DESIGN.
Before that, may I ask you again for which public did you write pieces like CHANSON?

M.B.:	You are a wicked man! On  one hand you bring in a crucial question substantially connected with at least language, communication, engagement, art & society and God knows what else overwhelmingly related to my poor 13 minutes piece and, on the other, you just inform me (but I don’t blame you!) that I have to shut up!
Very rapidly I could only say that I did not compose it for the “happy few”. Not because I wanted them to be more numerous, but because they seem to be less and less happy.
What to listen for in that piece? It depends on what sort of exposure the eventual listener has had to various disciplines. One attitude is welcome: the renunciation of preconceptions of any kind. Then, if the listener is a physicist, he will probably enjoy the acoustical side of Fourier’s theorem; if he is a musician, he may find the piece not articulated enough; a critic may talk  of a “new impressionism”   and finally a simple man will eventually be grateful to me because I did not restrict his imagination by telling him explicitly “what”, “how” and “where”.
After having spent energy, time and money in trying to put myself in really direct contact with the sound material with an attitude similar to that of a sculptor, in other terms not accepting the pre-cooked dishes that current technology provides, I started thinking of the incredible value of an eventual research institute which would function in the following way. A team of experts in various fields: a mechanic technician, an electronic engineer, a musician, a visual operator etc., all at the same level of importance, would work together with their respective apprentices and therefore create an ideal situation for experimentation on the interaction between various disciplines. The pedagogical value of such an enterprise is evident.  The principal idea consists in mixing three different forms of experience with a simultaneous action: assimilation (theory), experiment (praxis), final result (object).  The analogy with the synergetical structure of the Italian “Botteghe d’Arte” of the Renaissance is clear.
In 1973 I was invited to be composer-in-residence of the Art Program of the Berliner Senate (D.A.A.D.) and I started experimenting with various kinds of projects together with kinetic painter Peter Sedgley, also deeply involved in audio-visual activities, and with the sculptor Rudolf Valenta.
As soon as I return to Berlin, next fall finally, I’ll probably be able to realize what I have in mind.

R.G.:	What did keep you here, then?

M.B.:	Well, just chance. Last year, during my visit to Canada, I happened to find the way of realizing my utopian project right off, although in a limited, scholastic version, at McGill University, with the collaboration of the I.C.C. (Instructional Communications Center) and especially the Mechanical Laboratory of the Engineering Faculty, the director of which, Mr. Jack Kelly, extremely knowledgeable and cooperative person, had a primary role in that experiment. The Faculty of Music sponsored the project, we got a grant – limited but welcome – and as a result of a year of work, public concerts were held and both individual and collective projects successfully demonstrated.
The most rewarding factor for me was that a selected number of students, the most interesting personalities in Musical Design (one of them is a Philosophy teacher), formed a group, called MUD, with the intention of continuing the research already initiated. Their names are: Andrew Culver, Charles de Mestral, Pierre Dostie, Chris Howard, William Miller; two other people joined the group recently: Linda Pavelka and Benoit Sarrazin.

R.G.:	Do you think that they will be able to give valid contributions to the unstable balance of contemporary music?

M.B.:	The ancient Latins were used to say that the future lies on Jupiter’s knees; but after      having worked with those people rather a long time and watched their first achievements, I think I can answer positively your question.

R.G.:	It’s a pity that after a brilliant start you have to leave …

M.B.:	In a way, yes, you are right; but what I have in mind is not just a music course – another one! – My proposal is an alternative project, the aim of which is a radical change, a totally different approach to the problems of making music today as well as those related to the interaction between music and other disciplines.
But I know that anything like that, in spite of everybody’s good will, is not to be realized in a scholastic situation. A school is an organism with its own rules …

R.G.:	Try to find a sponsor then …

M.B.:	A sponsor? The time of the far-seeing patrons of art is over: Maecenas has died long ago …
No; a real solution is to go back to Berlin. I confess that I am really eager to go back to my atelier and, finally, to my work again!

R.G.:	Thank you, Mario Bertoncini; I hope you did not mind if I sometimes took the part of “l’avocat du diable”.

M.B.:	I didn’t mind that at all: I always agreed with what Lesage wrote in LE DIABLE BOITEUX, do you remember? –“Un demon spirituel vaut mieux, beaucoup mieux qu’un vertueux catholique très ennuyeux”…