Bruno Maderna
Musica Elettronica

Born in the studios of European national radios in the mid-1950s, electronic music finds in Bruno Maderna (1920–1973) one of its first protagonists. This CD, released by the Stradivarius label, collects much of his electronic production: seven pieces created between 1956 and 1962, totaling 75 minutes of music.

The first three pieces are classics of their genre in their own way: "Notturno" is a short piece (three and a half minutes) very homogeneous in texture, with an almost constant dynamic, and whose only sound material is white noise (i.e., the sum of all possible frequencies, produced simultaneously) filtered in different amplitudes; jokingly, Maderna titled it this way to allude to the many nights it took to create it.

Nights spent in the RAI Studio di fonologia musicale in Milan, one of the most important centers of the time, cutting and pasting strips of magnetic tape: once, before the advent of samplers and computers, this was how it was done. "Syntaxis", the next piece, is more varied in sound palette, with sinusoidal sounds (i.e., pure sounds, without harmonics) extremely high or particularly low, short and taut, and with a gradual accumulation that becomes frenzied in the finale. "Continuo", the third classic, starts with barely perceptible sounds and develops according to a progressive intensification of sound density until it collapses, two-thirds into the piece, returning to the initial stillness with some additional nervous twitching.

In the subsequent pieces, there is a juxtaposition between electronically produced sounds and traditional sounds: the flute (in "Musica su due dimensioni"), the voice (that of the great Cathy Berberian in "Dimensioni II - invenzione su una voce"), the marimba (in "Serenata III"). The last track on the CD is "Le rire", a veritable patchwork made of voices, footsteps, the splashing of water, timpani sounds at the end, etc.; in French, the title means "laughter", and it is owed to the definition that philosopher Henri Bergson gave of laughter: "something mechanical applied to something alive". When someone pointed out to Maderna that the piece seemed to embody that definition, he said: "Well, we will title it Le rire".

Thus, for those interested in the early, significant moments of nascent electronic music, this CD is obviously recommended.