Digital Transfer of Media

This paper documents and summarizes the (still ongoing) work concerning the digital recovery of the collection of composer Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988). This recovery has a number of peculiarities which are mostly related to conditions in which the tapes were recorded originally and to the functions these recordings covered in Scelsi's compositional work. The specific archival process and model used are then described and future work is outlined at the end.

In the context of the Scelsi Revisited project, french composer Fabien L ́evy was assigned a fragment extracted from the tape NMGS0030-117 belonging to the legacy archive of the late Giacinto Scelsi. L ́evy’s work produced in turn a piece for 9 wind instruments, a tue–tete, which was premiered in Darmstadt on the 9th of august 2014.

This paper is an analysis of the piece and it is completed with a conversation between the author and the composer, held on  august 10 2015 during the Darmstadter Ferienkursen.

Computer Music is over fifty years old and a meditation over the relationship between music and technology is order, possibly extending it to the social and cultural context in which this discipline was born. The planetary political system where computer music was born was characterized by a strong antagonism between two ideological blocks in which culture had a tremendous impact in occidental countries to demonstrate the advantages and the richness of democratic, progressive and innovative societies. The end of this antagonism has generated a steep decrease of interest in cultural investments by the occidental countries, and computer music has evolved in the present sound and music computing: a much wider interdisciplinary field which encompasses many areas where the combination of sound, music and information technologies still produces brilliant results. This paper will also develop some of the current issues at stake in the sound and music computing area:

Il ciclo musica -ricerca scientifica -tecnologia ha le sue radici in due diverse fonti: quella antichissima della matematica e delle scienze naturali, e quella più recente dell'ingegneria dell'informazione. Per la portata dei cambiamenti determinati -a partire dalla seconda metà del secolo scorso -dallo sviluppo delle tecnologie dell'informazione e dei sistemi di comunicazioneè particolarmente interessante prendere in considerazione questo periodo storico.

"This paper documents and summarizes the (still ongoing)
work concerning the digital recovery of the collection of
composer Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988). This recovery has
a number of peculiarities which are mostly related to con-
ditions in which the tapes were recorded originally and
to the functions these recordings covered in Scelsi’s com-
positional work. The specific archival process and model
used are then described and future work is outlined at the
end.
"