Electroacoustic Maderna

Unlike the German and French schools, the policy of the RAI Phonology Studio in Milan, founded in 1955, has always been marked by empiricism and by leaving composers free to explore in any direction rather than conforming to declarations of principle. Maderna and Berio, the first to work there, assisted by technician Marino Zuccheri, approached these new techniques without determinisms or preconceived ideas about their organization, engaging with the material. Later, in 1960, they were joined by Nono.

Maderna's musical sensitivity immediately achieved results with Notturno (1956), an almost whispered work, best heard in pianissimo, and Continuo (1958). Maderna's few notes of this last piece exist, and he describes it as a piece based on a single sound that passes through 22 stages of slow and gradual transformation, without interruption. According to Marino Zuccheri, however, that single sound was not synthetic, but rather a note from Gazzelloni's flute.
The result, for its time, is fascinating in any case, because here the material is allowed to evolve and dictate its own rules. The approximate sonogram you can see is by Giordano Montecchi, who conducted a careful analysis of this piece, published in Quaderni della Civica Scuola di Musica, nos. 21-22, 1992, Milan (click image to enlarge).

Listen to Continuo.

A final consideration concerns the RAI Phonology Studio in Milan, which closed due to obsolescence in 1983. The Italian State founded it and left it as it was, without ever updating it. No one had worked there for many years.
A facility that played a crucial role in the sound experimentation of the 1950s, where musicians such as Bruno Maderna, Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, John Cage, Henri Pousseur, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Franco Donatoni, and many others worked, and which had consequently built a reputation in the international music scene, was abandoned only due to a lack of will, certainly not due to cost. All of this sheds an even more sinister light on the total absence demonstrated in recent times by Italian institutions with regard to sound experimentation.

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