It may seem unusual to review a book in Italian in an international journal such as Organised Sound, but Circuiti del Tempo (Circuits of Time) offers a perspective and a point of view on the history of international electroacoustic music that in our opinion cannot be overlooked. It is not merely a book about the history of electroacoustic music or music technologies. Rather, it is an inquiry into the mutations in the relationships between sound artists, composers, performers and institutions, and into the technological means of their time, as well as into the development of compositional thinking and technology-dependent musical creativity in relation to the evolution of society. The text also deals with the changing ways in which art and its technologies – over the course of more than a century – have had a major impact on society itself and its forms of communicating and organising knowledge. This approach allows Di Scipio to intersect sociology, philosophy, historiography, musicology and technical insights, employing an extremely well-documented critical methodology – predominantly regarding the first 90 years of the twentieth century, although the text also covers the period from the 1990s to the present day, for which we will make separate assessments.
The purpose of the book is not purely didactic: it would probably be too complex as an introduction to the subject. It is rather a very useful university-level text for delving into many historical, technical, sociological and aesthetic aspects – including a myriad of valuable notions that can be consulted for both educational and purely informative purposes.
The text is divided into four parts. The first part deals with sound technologies in the context of a ‘prehistoric’ phase, ranging from the last decades of the nineteenth century until the late 1940s, during which time the transmission, reproduction and analysis of sound exerted a strong influence on compositional practices. This section also focuses thoroughly on the ‘electronic lutherie’.
The second part, which Di Scipio calls ‘pioneering’, describes the birth of electronic and concrete music, tape music and the first intermedia and multimedia projects from c.1948 to 1960. Di Scipio insists on a key aspect concerning the development of the techniques of sound recording and manipulation: the employment of these techniques not just as means of reproduction but also of production. He outlines in detail the decisive role of radios, institutions and electroacoustic music studios where musicians, musicologists, researchers and technicians worked together to develop an organic conception of the production of new technological means.
The period from the beginning of the 1960s to the end of the 1970s is the subject of the third part. On the one hand, this section reports the innovations of industrial record production and the diffusion of new electronic musical instruments; on the other, it recounts the ‘electronic bricolage’ characteristic of American experimentalism, which coincided with the emergence of live performance practices. The birth of computer music, the development of digital synthesis, the automation of production means and the progress of algorithmic composition procedures are also discussed in this part. Reflections on the theme of space lead Di Scipio to sketch out diverse practices such as acoustic ecology, soundscape composition, site-specific sound installations and the beginnings of ambient music.
The fourth part covers the period from the early 1980s to the present day. In this section, Di Scipio describes the phenomena linked to the transition from analog to digital, such as the computerisation of production forms and the democratisation of access to technical sources; the emergence of a great plurality of studio practices related to sound, and what Di Scipio calls the ‘overproduction’ of acousmatic music (p. 450); the hybridisation of electroacoustic music with different musical languages; the spreading of the practice of re-mediation (the representation of one medium in another); and the diffusion of real-time processing procedures, including new performative practices such as live coding. The description of these phenomena converges in the concept of the ‘dissolution of the criteria of aesthetic autonomy of “music” in favour of the emergence of the relational criteria of sound art practices’ (p. 435), as exemplified by sound installations that imply a relationship between the audience and the sonic space. In its relationship with specific spaces and contextual conditions, sound art would allow going beyond the reproducibility of the work, ‘rendering audible relationships, not objects’ (p. 562).
In Circuiti del Tempo, Di Scipio highlights the importance of ‘recognising the cultural and therefore historical-dynamic dimension of music, moving its foundations from an ontological to an anthropological and cognitive level’ (p. 88). The coexistence of a multidisciplinary critical framework and such a wide field of investigation – both in terms of time and of the quantity of meticulously collected information – constitutes a rare compresence, whose depth, in our opinion, has no precedent in the literature.
Although Circuiti del Tempo is an essential text for its ability to recount with clarity and depth almost a century and a half of the development of electroacoustic technologies, it is necessary to recognise that it presents some ideological and methodological limits regarding the last 30 years of electroacoustic music. In light of a rather legitimately apocalyptic interpretation of the by-now almost complete ubiquity of musical mass consumption mechanisms, Di Scipio faces with great diffidence the processes of democratisation of electroacoustic technologies and the diffusion of re-mediation practices that have taken place in recent decades. In this way, other types of electroacoustic music made with conventional or already stratified technical methods are excluded from the discussion, although many of them may spark artistic interest. Similarly, works arising from creative use of complex commercial software – including programming software – are often judged irrelevant for his critical-historical path. Even the ease of accessing software such as GRM Tools, Audiosculpt, Max/MSP, or Open Music is understood as trivialising.
This perspective lacks the pluralism that would be needed to discuss the paradigm shift brought by the low-cost accessibility of digital means. Furthermore, Di Scipio defines hybridised music with the derogatory term ‘electronic cross-breed’ (p. 503, ‘meticciato elettronico’) and completely overlooks the historical and sociological impact of the emergence of geographical, counter-cultural and gender identities that had until then remained at the margins of the literature on electroacoustic music. In some passages in the fourth part, objective critical analysis is replaced by moralistic and reductionist judgements; see, for example, his personal opinions about Steve Reich and Pierre Henry (footnote 83, p. 507), or his generic and poorly documented statements on live coding, glitch music and Intelligent Dance Music. About the latter, Di Scipio states, without any documentation, that the production of IDM music is ‘carried out by means of complete software automation, probably without any digital signal ever being converted into sound vibration and perceived as such before reaching the consumer!’ (p. 514).
These idiosyncrasies suggest that the adopted criteria for the analysis of contemporary electroacoustic music are inadequate to grasp its complexity and the substantial impossibility of tracing a univocal historical trajectory. It is not by chance that the concepts of technology-based music (Rudi Reference Rudi2015) and sound-based music (Landy Reference Landy2007) seem to open the door to wider perspectives. Circuiti del Tempo adopts appropriate criteria up to the early 1990s, but the changes that have taken place with the advent of globalisation and the internet, we believe, no longer allow us to use a single scheme to interpret the present. In this sense, the history of electroacoustic music is breaking up, even more than before, into a plurality of stories. To trace these stories one will need not just a map, but a ‘map made of the crossings of other maps, that we must try to read transparently’ (Gaiarin Reference Gaiarin2000).
In conclusion, given the originality of the approach of this text, we believe a revised English translation of the book would be desirable. An area of improvement of the whole book could be to give a less approximate indication of sources by adding in footnotes the origin of the information. We also believe that, in order to discuss the productions of the last 30 years, a greater critical distance and more documented and in-depth research are necessary and unavoidable. Aside from these considerations, the monumentality of the project makes it a text of inescapable usefulness for understanding the developments of electroacoustic music and for untangling the threads of historical continuity between the diverse aesthetic currents of the first 90 years of the twentieth century.
