Giuseppe Chiari is, to any Italian interested in contemporary art, a household name… he is known throughout the world, too, in circles engaging in contemporary art.

Born in Florence in 1926, Chiari today is considered the most important Italian Fluxus artist (a member of the interdisciplinary Fluxus art group since 1962), by virtue of his manifold activities, including visual arts as well as sound art. He also engages in sound poetry, and has been a member of the Gruppo 70. He has published books, like “Musica senza contrappunto” (“Music Without Counterpoint”) (1969) and “Senza titolo” (“Without a Title”) (1971). Naturally, the CD is primarily digging into the sound art of Chiari. This release is historical, being the first CD issued with the sound art of Giuseppe Chiari.

When I slipped this CD out of it’s hard-cover slip-case it turned out to be smeared with glue on both sides… The glue probably came from the glued slipcase, and it was dry and sticking firmly to the surface, making the CD completely unplayable. Since I couldn’t play it anyway, I decided to try something that I’d never done before, partly because I never had had any reason to… I put the CD under running, lukewarm water, and applied some dishing detergent to it, letting the detergent loosen up the glue for a few minutes. Then I put more lukewarm water on it, and starting rubbing the glue off with a soft cloth, from center on out. However, this just made the glue smear out even more, so I had to rub really hard for a long time, at least ten minutes, until the surface looked reasonably clean. I then dried the CD and put it into the player, and… it worked! Fantastic! Silenzio must make really sturdy CDs to stand that treatment! This sort of fits in perfectly with the whole idea of this CD too, I find, to my amazement!

The first piece is “Gesti sul piano” [1962]. Chiari plays the piano at the Royal College of Art, London, in April of 1974. This is the longest piece on the CD with its 23 minutes.
The performance instructions for “Gesti sul piano” are awkward, to say the least, even with a Stockhausenesque aspect: the player is asked to sit in front of the piano in a position of unawareness, with no technical knowledge of playing… Where does this lead? Well, it is interesting, and it turns out musical, however much the involved party is trying to avoid that… Hm… It’s like John Cage trying to avoid sound by using it, or something like that… It’s also reminiscent of some of Stockhausen’s intuitive music, where you meditate on something to clear your mind of waste products before you’re attuned to the Universe and can start playing. Each time someone extends the possibilities of sound, at the moment far beyond anything hitherto “accepted” as art or, for instance, music, our conception of art and music changes too, following the one who does the extending action, so as to catch up with the avant-garde of it – and that is what has happened here too. I experience this piece musically, with rhythm, pitch, duration and all. Maybe this is some kind of intuitive chance operation? It could be the free flow of spiritual energies, too, right on down into the keyboard, out into the strings of the piano, dispersing the vibrations in a receiving space, where we catch them with ears and brains!
The music – the sound! – is enjoyable, sharp, filtered through a bleak curtain of analog hiss and hum, in no way interfering with the music in the overall impression, but rather adding to the charm of this document.

The piano investigations move from frantic, hysterical, Nancarrow-fast hammerings to sparse, transparent Feldmanesque tones, one by one. Long pauses are inserted, in which other sounds than regular piano sounds emerge, sounding like bangings on the wooden parts of the piano frame, soon to be ornamented with small twirls of piano notes. There is an array of events going on here, and you should probably see the performance too, to fully appreciate the theatrical effects. At times you can here that Chiari plays directly on the strings too. It gets completely hilarious when he starts hitting the keys from the highest to the lowest in a determined succession, only to begin upwards again, all the way to the highest note, after which he starts hitting the lid, sounding like a carpenter at work!
The beginning of the 1970s was tough for some art forms, in the harsh political nearsightedness of correct communist thinking, and this too has to be taken into consideration when estimating the value of this recording. I’m sure many communist purists had very adverse feelings towards freethinkers like Giuseppe Chiari in those days.

Track 2 is another version of “Gesti sul piano”, but shorter, just about 7 minutes. It was recorded in Firenze in 1990, but the sound is much more blurred than the earlier version from 1974, probably recorded on a cheap cassette tape recorder. This makes the sound very interesting though, vibrating as if the sound reached you through water, or as if you used ring modulators like Stockhausen did in “Mantra”. These tapes really seem to be documents that have been preserved by pure chance, collected by Silenzio and then released here. I love those kinds of records!

Track 3 – “Il tamburo, per pianoforte” (“The Drum”) [1950] with the sub-title “120 disposizioni di durata di un solo suono” is the oldest composition here. It explores duration and interval. The two versions here (track 3 and 4) are transposed for the computer, which plainly demonstrates the free and open nature of the work. The first version was realized by Tommazo Tozzi in the 1970s, and the second one recorded by Letizia Bolognesi as late as 1989.
Tozzi’s version gives me the impression of a ribbon of some kind, in which rectangular holes have been cut, through which the sound can be heard as the ribbon moves, a little like the way a player piano works. The sharp, hard, solid sounds hit you irregularly, producing intricate rhythms or completely rhythmless rhythms. The second version, by Bolognesi, feels pretty much the same, but sounds more like percussion, though equally beautifully unrhythmically rhythmic, and the track hosts a few different sub-versions of the piece! There is something very compelling and tempting about this, like the sight of a Japanese rock garden.

Track 5, the last piece, is “Il Silenzio. Musica Verità” (“Silence. Reality Music”) [1965]. This is a pure tape collage of street sounds, very concrete indeed. There is no blending or anything, but shorter pieces of recorded sound are simply lined up, one after the other, and this reality music really forces my thoughts in the direction of Pierre Schaffer and his earliest experiments from the late 1940s. This love of sound is beautiful, illogical and mad, and I love it!