1 — The human being as a source of inspiration, energy and exchange
1.1 — The human being as a linguistic entity [A]
1.2 — The human being as a body-centred entity [B]
1.3 — The human being as a complex psychic entity [C]
1.4 — The human being as an entity belonging to complex social systems [D]
2 — The use of amplification
2.1 — Extending the dynamic range and the idiospheres [B]
2.1.1 — The possibility of counterpoint between bodily spaces: private space, social space and public space [D]
2.1.1.1 — The intimacy of the sound source, opening up greater expressive possibilities [B]
2.1.2 — Playing with “intimacy”, whispers and liminal gestures [B]
2.2 — Reference to body-centred models no. 5 [destructiveness] and no. 6 [excitability] [B]
3 — The use of the voice without vibrato
3.1 — “Natural” singing [B]
3.1.1 — An openness to the vocal heritage of jazz, Baroque music and certain forms of mainstream music [C] [D]
3.1.2 — An aversion to a specific repertoire within the history of notated music [D]
4 — The use of prosody as a formal model
4.1 — The natural behaviour of language [A] [C]
4.1.1 — Reference to body-centred model no. 3 [corruptibility] [B]
5 — The use of explicit formal functions
5.1 — The search for new formal functions and their interpretation [A] [C]
5.1.1 — The possibility of changing perceived time [D]
5.2 — Reference to body-centred models no. 4 [constructiveness] and no. 5 [destructiveness] [C]
5.3 — The use of the notion of the internal energy of information [D]
6 — Calligraphy and writing on the body: identigraphy
6.1 — Resisting the reduction of idiospheres [A] [B] [D]
6.1.1 — Increasing the level of concentration [B]
6.1.1.1 — Reference to body-centred model no. 7 [trance] [B]
6.2 — The uniqueness of the trace through the uniqueness of its support [B] [D]
6.3 — Seeking the possibility of fertile accidents [D]
6.4 — Transforming the act of writing into a performance [D]
7 — The use of the computer as a hyper-system
7.1 — The use of interactivity and generativity [D]
7.1.1 — Reintroducing lived systems [C]
7.2 — Controlling complex structures [C]
7.3 — The possibility of concentrating on the result rather than the process [A]
8 — The use of sensors to increase expressiveness
8.1 — Expanding idiospheres [B] [D]
8.2 — Giving the audience access to interactivity [D]
9 — The use of metalepsis in writing the Opus
9.1 — Writing cycles of cycles [A]
9.1.1 — Reference to body-centred models no. 1 [attractiveness] and no. 2 [cyclicality] [B]
9.2 — Defining the Opus and the causality of works [D]
10 — The multiple modes of presenting music
10.1 — Music for the stage [D]
10.1.1 — Music for concerts [D]
10.1.2 — Music for dance [D]
10.1.3 — Music for theatre [D]
10.2 — Music for installations [D]
10.3 — Music for images [D]
10.3.1 — Music for films [D]
10.4 — Music for exhibitions [D]
10.5 — Music for the Internet [D]
Understanding this manifesto
A first premise: what “metaleptic” means
Metalepsis is a crossing between distinct narrative levels: it occurs, for example, when a narrator enters the story they are telling, or when a character addresses the author and asks them to change their fate. In my manifesto, I extend this notion to the relationship between artistic thought and practice. The four dimensions of the human being defined in point 1 — linguistic [A], bodily [B], psychic [C] and social [D] — pass through the other points and take on new functions: they become compositional procedures, forms and ways of relating to the audience.
The letters in square brackets make these passages visible. They do more than indicate similarities between topics: they allow the reader to follow how a principle concerning the human being is transformed into an artistic choice.
A second premise: the body and technology, a coexistence
The schematic manifesto set out above brings together the principles of my vision and my aesthetics. Here I develop their meaning and their consequences in practice. I call this aesthetics “Consubstantial Music” and the vision that encompasses it “Consubstantialism”. Its working instrument is the hyper-system: the computer, with its ability to connect different systems and enable them to interact.
Consubstantialism brings the human body into a relationship with technology. Both have a material reality, but each has its own substance: I use this word here to mean what constitutes each of them and characterises its way of existing.
The body is organic, living, vulnerable and subject to time. It senses, tires, and experiences pleasure and pain. Technology has a different constitution: it can process data from the body and respond to its presence, but it does not possess its physiology or experience emotions as a living organism does.
The relationship I seek arises from this difference. Body and technology coexist, act upon one another and participate in the same artistic experience, each retaining its own substance.
It is within this “with”, this co-presence of different substances, that my con-substantial art takes shape.
1 — Concrete people, living bodies
Some artists find inspiration in nature, travel, science or religion. I find it in human beings and in exchanges between people [point 1 of my manifesto].
I am interested in the forms of language we have created, living bodies and their expressive possibilities. I am inspired by the psychic and psychoanalytic complexity of the people I meet and spend time with. These people belong to real social systems: associations, collectives, businesses, and also networks we call “virtual”, such as social networks.
My starting point is therefore not an ideal or abstract human being. It is concrete, tangible, corruptible people. I use “corruptibility” here to describe the condition of a body that changes, tires, deteriorates and can die.
It is an arbitrary choice, but it is mine: it interests me, moves me and drives me to create. My axiomatics — the set of principles from which I develop my artistic choices — arises from this concrete presence of the human being, in physical manifestations and relationships, including those mediated by digital technology.
2 — Amplifying to make perceptible
I see myself within a history of musical systems that moves from monodic modality through polyphonic modality to tonality. Within this continuity, I seek ways of organising music that respond to my present.
I compose both for instruments of the European musical tradition — what I call European ethnic instruments, including orchestral instruments — and for new instruments: synthesisers, touch interfaces, sensors and purpose-built prototypes. When I write for instruments of the European tradition, I want them amplified [point 2 of my manifesto].
Amplification allows me to extend the dynamic range: I bring sounds at the threshold of audibility within reach of the listener and attain fortissimos that can “blow your hair back”, even if you have none. It makes micro-gestures and pre-gestures perceptible: tiny actions and muscular tensions that prepare a gesture and that, without amplification, would not reach the audience.
In this sense, I expand the musicians’ idiospheres. I use this term here to describe each person’s sphere of expressive and perceptual possibilities: what someone can make felt of themselves and bring into a relationship with others.
Sound diffusion also allows me to compose a counterpoint between distances and spaces of relationship. This is the domain of proxemics: the way distance between people contributes to communication. I seek the co-presence of the performers’ intimate sounds, the social sounds of the hall and the public sounds of the spectators. I do more than move sound through space: I compose an acoustic depth of field.
Two of my body-centred models come into play here — conditions or behaviours of the body that I take as references for composition: destructiveness, through sound that invades and overflows, and excitability, through resonances capable of producing enchantment.
3 — A voice without vibrato
I do not want vocal vibrato in my music [point 3 of my manifesto]. This is an aesthetic choice: I do not want my writing to be associated with operatic singing.
Amplifying the voice allows me to avoid the vocal modifications needed for a singer to be heard above a powerful orchestra. From my perspective, bel canto responds to historical and acoustic conditions different from my own. It also evokes a nineteenth-century world of halls, costumes and narratives to which I do not wish to belong.
I seek a vocality that makes the sung text more intelligible and relates to the musical practices of the present. Since I come from notated music and work with singers who can read a score, I make this requirement explicit in my writing: the voice must be without vibrato.
4 — Prosody as a model for form
Over a long history, the human voice has developed into song and speech. When we speak, we do more than produce meanings: we distribute accents, durations, intensities and timbres. This sonic organisation of speech is prosody [point 4 of my manifesto].
The same sentence can take on different values according to how it is pronounced. I therefore distinguish the expressive energy of the meaning of words from that of their utterance: the former brings concepts into play, the latter the emotional dimension of speaking.
Considered as the distribution of spectral energy over time, prosody becomes for me a metaphor for musical form. In this sense, I recognise a continuity with spectral aesthetics, which takes the characteristics of sound as materials for composition.
Speech also needs the body: a breath before the sentence, the exhalation that sustains it, and another breath that allows it to continue. I distinguish the breath that supplies the lungs from the breath that articulates phrasing, although the two are connected.
Speech knows inertia, impetus, pauses and fatigue. The need to segment it, with its durations and proportions, becomes a model for articulating my compositions. In this necessity, I also recognise the body-centred models of attractiveness and corruptibility.
5 — Making formal functions recognisable
Point 5 of my manifesto develops this relationship. Formal models connected with prosody and the body refer to human experiences that can be recognised through empathy.
I extend this possibility to formal functions: introductions, expositions, developments, recapitulations, bridges, interpolations, endings, false endings and codas. I want these functions to be explicit, that is, perceptible in the way they operate. I also work to redefine them and discover new ones.
6 — Writing on the body
I use the computer to generate musical materials, but in the act of creation I also choose to write by hand and practise calligraphy on the body [point 6 of my manifesto].
I call this practice “identigraphy”. It is also known as “bodyscore”: musical scores written on the human body. The support is a singular, living body; this gives the act of writing a performative dimension, and each trace its own uniqueness.
This practice expresses my resistance to idiotisation, understood as the reduction of idiospheres, of the singular possibilities of feeling and expressing oneself. It also seeks to intensify the tension of the relationship with the audience: a tension of anticipation and openness to encounter that I evoke through the term “pre-tensio”.
7 — The computer as a hyper-system
Point 7 of my manifesto concerns the computer and its hyper-systemic properties. It allows me to calculate and control complex structures and concentrate on the result without having to relinquish their complexity.
Interactivity allows the system to respond to what happens; generativity allows it to produce materials and behaviours from rules. Through these possibilities, a composed entity can become a generated entity: the musical system is enabled to evolve and, in the sense of my metaphor, to “live”.
8 — Sensors and the relationship with the audience
I study and use sensors that build bridges of gestural communication between people and computer systems [point 8 of my manifesto]. The audience can thus participate in the interaction: from a group of spectators, it also becomes a presence capable of acting upon the system, an “inter-actor”.
An infrared camera can detect movements; sonar, a distance; a pressure sensor, a weight or the touch of a finger. Other sensors detect muscular tensions that precede a gesture, or physiological parameters such as heartbeat, breathing and temperature.
I use these data to increase expressive possibilities, expand idiospheres and open a dialogue between the audience and the work.
Body and machine: why I oppose transhumanism
For me, using sensors does not imply an endorsement of transhumanism. A sensor transmits data from a body to a computer. It is not that body and does not contain its lived experience.
Technology expands the body’s possibilities of action, perception and relationship without requiring it to become a machine. The keyboard communicates with my fingers, the mouse with the gestures of my hand and arm, the screen with my gaze. Writing a poem on a computer does not make a poet “transhuman”. The same reasoning applies to the use of sensors in my music.
My opposition to transhumanism is ethical and political. I challenge the perspective that makes overcoming biological limits — memory, learning speed, physical endurance, longevity — the horizon of a higher existence. The promise to eliminate suffering seems to me to leave unresolved what it means to live in a body and in relationship with other bodies. Eliminating suffering is a first step towards suppressing empathy, love and emotional sharing: a step I do not want to take.
In my aesthetics, I distinguish psychic suffering from sensory saturation [pain], which concerns the body and its limits. Suffering is psychic. Pain is physical. How can we envisage abolishing the suffering caused by the loss of someone we love? Or the suffering one human being inflicts on another? How can we understand pleasure without also considering the intensity, limits and saturation of sensations?
The distinction between “orgaste” and “orgasm” helps me clarify this issue. In the vocabulary of the Sexocorporel approach, the French term “orgaste” — rendered as “orgasto” in Italian — denotes the physiological discharge of sexual excitation, with its involuntary muscular responses. Within this distinction, orgasm also includes the emotional dimension and the lived experience of pleasure. I am interested in the distance between a physiological response and the subjective experience that may accompany it: describing the former is not enough to account fully for the latter.
In today’s world, marked by wars, violence, abuse and injustice, I consider the transhumanist project a form of oppressive capitalism. I challenge its claim to liberate human beings while feeding on inequalities and tending to erase cultural differences. In this sense, I also consider it neocolonialist. It is against this perspective that I take a stand.
Embracing limits and difference
The consubstantial interpretation responds to my needs as someone living in the present. The model of corruptibility allows me to recognise death, abandonment and loss as conditions of existence: not because we should give up caring or acting, but because this awareness gives value to the present.
The model of destructiveness allows me to embrace sensory saturation and pain within creation as well. I can “vibrate” with the world, knowing that sometimes this vibration exceeds what I can bear. I wonder what part intensity and saturation played in the works of Beethoven, Liszt, Van Gogh or the poètes maudits.
The body-centred models allow me to think of solitude and belonging to the world together, without erasing singularities. Awareness of an ending, of separation and of mutual dependence is, for me, a foundation of society and humanity.
9 — Metalepsis between works: a cycle of cycles
Metalepsis, explained at the beginning of this section, also concerns the way my compositions interweave [point 9 of my manifesto].
Since 1997, I have written works that echo and transform one another. A closing theme may reappear in a developed form in another composition, become the opening of a third, or an ostinato elsewhere. Sounds and formal structures can also pass from one work to another: the form of an entire composition can become that of a section of another.
A material thus changes level and function. The works retain their autonomy, but belong to cycles within which they acquire further meaning. Since the cycles are also connected to one another, I consider my Opus — the entirety of my compositions — a “cycle of cycles”, a meta-composition made of compositions.
Here, attractiveness and cyclicality acquire formal value. Attractiveness manifests itself in the relationships of mutual dependence between works; cyclicality, in their belonging to organised wholes. Each composition follows its own logic and, at the same time, that of the cycle to which it belongs.
10 — Multiplying the places and forms of listening
I express myself through concerts, performances, installations and exhibitions [point 10 of my manifesto]. I work in concert halls, theatres, galleries, museums, cinemas and shopping centres; indoors and outdoors; in a forest or beside a river, in a garden or a park; in private homes, shops and hospitals. I also express myself through the Internet.
For me, multiplying the forms in which music is presented means remaining in relationship with the society of the present. I seek to integrate into my creations the greatest possible variety of places, modes of listening and ways of experiencing the work. I seek to musicalise the world.