Interview with Alessio Nanni
Photo of Alessio Nanni by Cosimo Filippini – © Cosimo Filippini.
All rights reserved.
This exclusive interview with Alessio Nanni was conducted by Nicola
Linza and Cristoffer Neljesjö in Rome, Italy during February 2013
What inspired you to become a pianist and composer?
I think people simply don't choose to become a musician. One is born that way. Music is a sort of a state of mind that is completely different from any other arts. Musicians have to deal with the fact that what they do is not represented in reality by real elements, and that's exactly the opposite, for instance, of what happens to painters, sculptors, actors etc. Music is an immaterial language ruled by techniques that are completely unnatural, even though we all have the ability to get involved in rhythm and harmonies. We are born with the ability to move, to speak, even to sing, but not to play an instrument, and that's why it's so difficult to learn and why it requires years of practice, most of which is done during an early age.
In my case, I was always fascinated with sound and the different representations of sound through a musical instrument. In other words, I wasn't only interested in listening to music, but I was even more interested in the process of making music, whatever it was, and that's was my primary instinct from the very first day of my early music experiences. Music and his processes were to me like the most exciting peak to climb, because I knew that once I could get to the top, something magnificent was going to materialize in front of my mind. And I've always been a super curious person, so music was the perfect challenge.
I don't come from a musical family, so I'm not that case of a young boy that grows up into a musical environment from the very beginning. But even though I was not so close to any music tradition I remember I was completely attracted by musical instruments every time I had the occasion to see one, and keyboard instruments were my favorite.
Once I could get my hands on a keyboard I instantly felt that piano actually was my voice, my life, like something that you recognize from a past life.
I have always been connected with piano in a very natural and intimate way, and one of the most interesting parts of that game was that I didn't need anyone other than myself to play it. And that's one of the most important point in my production, the autonomy, element that mirrors in many ways the same autonomy that a pianist has every time he can sit in front of the piano. You can go from A to Z just counting on yourself, without the help of anybody. Of course it is also risky because all the pressure is on you, and somehow you have to learn how to handle it.
I started studying piano seriously in 1991 when I was in Rome, than I moved many times to follow my teachers in Florence, Imola and in Salzburg, where I got my master degree at Mozarteum. I built my student experience, like it should be in my opinion, in a very traditional way. But after that period, that we could say was quite an "academic" period, something was going to change, I knew that.
Composition is a totally another topic, being a composer is something that is a more mature choice than becoming a pianist. When you just play music actually you drop some of the responsibilities you have because you are playing the music of another person. This process is a completely subconscious process, but it's very common. I don’t say performing it's easier, for sure, but composing is a totally different game to play. Once you decide to start composing you really have to ask to you 'what I want to say and why', which is a sort of new challenge that is not so common in just performing music. When you compose you have to ask "why" doing things, performing is almost all about "how" I do things.
For me music is a process. Composing is one of the most complex and exciting process that a musician can experiment. I remember I started my first composing experiments when I was very young, I think one or two years after my very first piano lesson.
I remember I was sitting in front of the piano and between one exercise and another I used to start improvising. What was pretty interesting was that I was not actually improvising because when you improvise you instantly lose the notes you play right one moment after you have played them. Instead, I was able to remember each note I was playing during my improvisations and that was quite surprising. Somehow, I was composing by memory, which is a very rare process.
The interesting thing is that years after I started study the piano I was so sick of that academic world that I decided to devote my life, or a big part of it, to composing music and to the research on new musical languages. I started study composition very seriously when I was in Florence in 2004, and since I had to decide what kind of composition I wanted me to devote to, I went with the most experimental, the electroacoustic music.
That was one of those moments in life where really everything is going to change forever, a moment where new landscapes are opening in front of you in a way that you could never imagine before. In one moment I was literally pushed in the rest of my life.
I had the opportunity to study the literature of contemporary composers that are completely ignored in the standard classic piano courses. I had the opportunity to listen to the contemporary music that actually revolutionized the human perception of what is music and what is sound. This sort of distance that I was putting between myself and the classical music establishment, especially with the classical piano world, looked to me like the coolest thing I could do in my whole life. I always knew I was an outsider, or a sort of outsider, and in that period I actually declared to the world that I was actually crossing the border, for real, I was risking everything. I was absolutely, indiscriminately, irreversibly, unquestionably redesigning my personal rules to be a musician in the real world of today using the potentials of new technologies. I was thousands of miles away from the piano academy behavior that I was forced to tolerate for years. Finally!
In that moment I understood the most important rule in being an artist, and a musician: being predictable is bad and useless.
And that's why I think, at one point, people started following me, because what I do is highly unpredictable.
In the last three years I found my way to merge together my skills as a performer to my ability as a composer, being an author, being the producer of my ideas, creating new processes, avoiding following rules that somebody else had to impose to me.
Of course I was rejected by many academic ambients, but this is all another story.
What is your view on new electronic music?
I think electronic music has much more to say today than ever before. Technology has deeply changed in the last ten years. Computers and every other electronic devices built to record/process digital documents are today more powerful and affordable than ever.
This is a huge point for artistic productions and could be really liberating for artists from all over the world to express new ideas and techniques. If we think about the early age of electroacoustic music when composers like Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Boulez, Karl Heinz Stockhausen, Bruno Maderna, Luciano Berio and many more started to study the interaction between sound and electronics, it's very clear that music and new technologies are strictly connected. Many of the solutions that have been studied in experimental and electronic music are gradually included in the music of today, even in commercial music.
Today, more than in the past ages, music is almost completely digitalized, either if we talk about composing music or producing/reproducing music through an electronic device. And here comes the paradox: classical musicians seem to me like they are blocked in a sort of golden age, or an idea of golden age, when music was aesthetically considered like a pure energy where nothing else than a piano played by a guy in a tuxedo was allowed to be considered acceptable.
Of course this is a total lie and it's as dated idea as women have no right to vote. Today more than 90% of the music we hear is passed or it is passing by an electronic device. Most of the recordings, even from the past, are today completely re-mastered, which means the original document has been reprocessed using the most advanced digital technology we have today.
Now if we think about composing, and composing for
movies or other similar scenarios for instance, most of the time the sounds we
hear are completely computer generated, electronically sampled and reproduced
through a virtual instruments, and a virtual recordings. This happens all the
time. Even contemporary music, which is often protected by a sort of academic
patina, is electronic devices assisted, for composing, recording, producing,
and performing.
If we think about electronic music just like it was a little sort of music style or a commercial phenomenon we are totally wrong.
What I try to say every time about electronic music is that computer music is today important like it was the piano in 19th century, because it's due to the technical development of that type of instruments that composers and the audience could discover new landscapes in music. Today, together with piano and violin and oboe, and all that kind of traditional acoustic instruments, we have computers that deeply contribute to the research on sound producing, forging new shapes of acoustic treatments, and creating a new opportunity for people that years ago could never be able to have access to that kind of creative potential.
For me the involvement of electronic music in my creative process is terribly liberating. Years ago I was asked in which direction music would possibly go in few years, and I instantly replied that music has always been connected with its historical period and with its technological potential.
In the same way, I was fascinated with the strong individualistic identity of the piano that pushed me to follow a complete process from A to Z, in the same way I consider electronic music liberating form all the typical issues we have in traditional styles.
When you compose an electronic piece of music, what you do is exactly what you get at the end of the process, without any other intermediate steps or filters. In other words, once you decided which note has to be played, you have to choose what sound should play that note and how, and once you get to that point the piece is actually done, you won't need a player, a recording studio, an engineer, a publisher, and today you don't need even a discographic label I would say, since everybody is able to get published through the web. In this way, from the idea to the final step of presenting the product to the audience, you only have two steps: you and your devices, with zero degree of dispersion. And this is simply amazing, and new.
If this is true for composing electronic music, it's even more valuable for classical music. Electronic processing in audio and video are today so accessible and affordable that a single musician can put a very low budget on the table and start creating his own recording studio. Then he can produce something that is good enough to be published and see how the world will be reacting to that idea.
If we think about this potential, this is the very first time in the human
history when artists have this kind of freedom. In the past 40 years if you had
not any support form a label or a management or any sort of organization you
could never be able to get to the public just with the power of your ideas. And
that subjection to the idea of 'asking to somebody to do something' generated
the power that the academy has today, feeding itself, generating the behavior
that musicians have today, behavior that is no longer interesting and valuable
in my opinion.
Today, thanks to the new technologies, anybody can say something to somebody, and the message, whatever the message is, can pass through the web in a very fast and powerful way generating new freedom and opportunities for musicians all around the world.
Of course, not every examples of the application of this freedom are interesting, for sure, but we have to be open and smart enough to understand that in all ages musicians had to handle problems and enjoy potentials. Today we just have our problems and potential, but in the real world, nothing has changed for what concerns the process. We just need to be open and intuitive enough to avoid limits and take the best we have today to express our identity.
Are there any similarities in classical- and electronic music?
There are some similarities between the two worlds for what concerns the researching process that is at the base of composing/performing music. Classical music is the music from the past that already has a place in the history. Even more important is that the so called 'classical' music is defined by composition forms that were invented in that specific period, like the fugue, sonata, concerto, rapsodia, prelude, aria etc. Every period has his own composing form, and that identify the music style and taste of a specific geographic area and historical period. Today we can write a fugue, for instance, or a romanza, using new technologies to generate the voice, sounds or even simulating the ambient reverberation of a particular concert hall. This can be done completely with the help of modern computers that has more computational power than ever before. But more important, we can create new composing forms due to the new technology potential. In my view, this is just a story that continues its own course.
If we think about the music technology we should consider that even the piano, as an instrument, is a quite young mechanical device compared to the story of humanity, because it just turned around 150 years since it was born in its modern form. When the first model of fortepiano (the ran parent of modern piano) was released it was so advanced that composers like Beethoven and Schubert, and many more after them, could literally reinvent the idea of composition due to the new technical potential thanks to the new instruments they had. This is exactly what happens today when you can get your hands on a new music devices or software that will open new doors on your creativity.
The new piano models in early 19th century were able to play piano and forte, a feature which sounds almost ridiculous today, but that little difference was actually a huge leap ahead compared to the harpsichord that could only play the single note with any degree of dynamics. Plus the piano gradually gained the ability to sustain the sound more than ever before, providing a larger amount of volume. With the implementation of pedals, that helped to create resonances and echoes, composers like Franz Liszt were able to create colors that were never even considered to be possible to get from acoustic instruments. In addition we have to consider that the significant improve of power, the performance volume, gave to the musicians the opportunity to fill with sound even bigger concert halls with just one single instruments, turning the concert ritual from a very limited and exclusive communication gesture to a sort of massive and sharable public event. That 'classical' music, that today seems to be so elegant and exclusive, was actually considered as the pop music of our days.
In other words, the instrumental development technology was pushing music to be able to reach more people than ever. I don't see, in that process, any difference in using microphone and video camera to reach, like in my case, more than two million views in two years with my video recordings. The technology we use today is just what we have, it's just a change of time, there's no bad or good technology. There's only a bad usage of a technology.
The technology changes, but the process and the urgency to say something is exactly the same. The more the instruments are developed on the technical side, the more the composition can get to another level of complexity and expressive power. If we exchange the word 'instrument' with 'device', we see the situation is pretty similar, because the modern musical instruments are computers, or even computers that interact with acoustic instruments.
I'm pretty sure that if Liszt would have composed something today, in 2013, he would have loved to compose some electronic music due to the huge potential of this technology, in the same way he composed visionary pages where he investigated every single potential element of the instrument he had in front of him at that time.
Music, each performing and/or composing, is a process. The tool you use makes the difference? I don't think so. The process makes the difference. This is the truth in every art, and music is not an exception.
If a piano were in front of you right now what would you play first?
The Intermezzo op. 118 nr.2 by Brahms.
How did you come to play Nocturne in c sharp minor by Fryderyk Chopin at Palazzo Pitti, Sala del Fiorino, Florence?
In 2010 we all celebrated the 200 years of Chopin's birth. As well as many other pianists in the world I was asked to dedicate some recitals to Chopin, and since I love Chopin I was very happy to do that.
I was scheduled to perform a Chopin recital in New
York City in may 2010, and before that I had one concert in Florence, in a
mysterious place called "Sala del Fiorino". The concert society that
planned the concert series asked me to play in that place, and I decided to
check the piano in the hall a couple of days before the concert. Now, you have
to consider I've visited Palazzo Pitti many times in the last few years, due to
the incomparable 'Galleria Palatina' which is one of my favorite collections
ever. So it was an incredible surprise for me when the guy at the palace opened
the door of the Sala del Fiorino to let me get in. I was like in shock.
Literally. The Sala del Fiorino is the original ballroom of the family, and you
can actually see many musicians represented in the decoration to the top of the
hall. On the walls there are four giant mirrors that reflect the light from the
beautiful chandelier from the ceiling that looks to me like a waterfall of
light.
I was like in a dream. I remember I felt in love with that place instantly, and forever.
In that period I already was starting publishing my video recordings and I thought it would have been amazing to record a video there. Then the day of the concert came, and I started the program with the Nocturne in c sharp minor.
After that nocturne I remember I received an unusual
warm applause, like something that you would aspect form a final part. At that
point, I decided to video record the Nocturne. One day after the concert, I had
a meeting with the director of the museum trying to convince her to let me
shoot a performance in the hall. I was sure it would have been terrific, and I
knew there were no videos filmed in that place, so it was like a unique
occasion. They agreed.
Two days after that concert I could be able to get in the hall, the guys from security locked me inside, and after a couple of hours I came out of the room. One week later the video was online, and I knew it was going to be the only video filmed in that hall, so I was like super excited.
I was so in love with the place and with my Chopin that I hoped everybody would be touched by that sincerity, making one of my dreams come true, and bringing the beauty of that unknown place to people all over the world via internet.
And so it was. At the moment more than half million people watched the video through Vimeo and Youtube, making that video one of the most successful ever in my collection.
If you had to choose only one classical piece to play for the rest of your life which one would it be?
The Goldberg Variations by Bach.
The above
interview with Alessio Nanni 2013 © Manner of Man Magazine. All rights
reserved. Reproduction is strictly prohibited without written permission from
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