Pietro Grossi: OSTN
Gruenrekorder

Drawing for inspiration from Alberto Tacchinardi's 1912-published Musical Acoustics, Milano-based vibraphonist Sergio Armaroli applies its ideas about the relationship between music and science to an hour-long meditation on Pietro Grossi (1917-2002). It's hardly Armaroli's first release: music by the self-described “painter, concrete percussionist, fragmentary poet, and sound artist” has appeared on Leo Records, Hat Hut, Da Vinci Classics, and others, and he's also played with figures such as Alvin Curran, Fritz Hauser, and Elliott Sharp. It's not uncommon for Armaroli to augment his music presentations with video and painting, and the polymath has clearly found a kindred spirit in Grossi, an Italian composer, cellist, visual artist, electroacoustic researcher, computer music pioneer, and founder of the Studio of Phonology of Florence.

In a lengthy five-part essay packaged with the release (issued in a 300-copy CD run), Armaroli cites the fertile foundation Goethe, Pythagoras, John Cage, and others created for Grossi's own thoughts on harmony, balance, and the music-science relationship in general. Known for questioning accepted beliefs about musical authorship and personal artistic expression, Grossi, like the Pythagoreans, pondered whether music could be subjected to mathematical rules, whatever its long-standing resistance. The composer isn't so much interested in answering the question, however, as encouraging the development of new perspectives. A Cage-like sensibility is exemplified in Grossi's position (as articulated by Armaroli) that music made without musicians “is not a paradox but a real utopia of a music liberated from labour where listening becomes central.”

Such provocative musings provide context for the vibraphone-and-tape material on OSTN, which presents six Grossi ostinati as moving soundscapes. The sonic character of each part differs from the others; further to that, Armaroli adjusted the speed of the vibraphone motor to better complement the material within each movement and amplify the vibrancy and luminosity of its sound. Figure-ground relationships between the instrument and the backdrop are critical to the sound design of each part too.

In the first ostinato, vibraphone patterns ascend and descend against a warbling tremolo that imparts a somewhat sci-fi-like atmosphere to the movement. While contrast between the components is evident, Armaroli does much to merge the gleaming timbres of his instrument with the pulsations gently convulsing alongside it. The vibraphone seems to more fluidly swim within the still-convulsing sound field in the second ostinato, the instrument's notes seeming at times to dissolve into the liquidy base. The rather ominous third movement startles by opening with a loud stream of white noise and blustery storm sounds that the vibraphone attempts to get progressively under control with a series of intricate and overlapping patterns. Though they're likened to voices of the dead, the warbling textures drifting alongside the shimmering vibraphone in the fourth ostinato register more like the strange vocal quality associated with whistling wind. Siren-like glissandos behind the vibraphone textures immediately distance the fifth from the others, as does the sixth when animal-like scurrying and scrabbly noisemaking undergird Armaroli's wildly free-flowing extemporizations.

Embodying Grossi's ideas, Armaroli attempts to treat the vibraphone as “an instrument of distance” whereby the performer tries to absent himself and bring the sound product to its greatest degree of purity—to realize, in other words, as best as possible Grossi's concept of a “music liberated from labour” where the focus shifts from performer to musical result. There is a sense in which the goal's achieved; at the same time, it's impossible to not hear him as the soloist within each part when the timbres of the vibraphone establish a distinct separation between it and the backdrops.

July 2025