I found out about Sergio Maltagliati’s work while researching into Pietro Grossi, the legendary father of Italian music informatics. We had decided to dedicate an exhibition to him at Ivrea, in conjunction with the “Musiche Possibili” association.
My overview of Sergio Maltagliati’s work would have to start from that particular visual angle – the ties and associations with the works of the great Florentine ‘master’.
Sergio Maltagliati is compared with Pietro Grossi mainly due to the central role of the “BIT” to his work. Digital technology is not only the source of his tools, but also a way of setting essential new boundaries and making bold changes that make the forms and musical invention of the past seem dated and dangerously conservative, like worlds of sound that have lost all relation to life and reason for being. His work is undoubtedly “experimental”, although not in the academic sense of the term. He wished to offer new “experiences” of reality; he was aware that the world is now, more inevitably, perceived through the medium of digital technology.
Since 1997 Sergio Maltagliati has dealt principally in music on the Internet and one of his first compositions intended for the network, netOper@, was based in fact on an idea of Pietro Grossi. Like much of his work, it is clear that the emphasis is not on the traditional introspective search for musical language. The sense of the work is not to be found in its pure acoustic result. This might seem paradoxical, but the acoustic result is not the key or, perhaps, the most important feature of this work. Such an approach inevitably connects the work of Sergio Maltagliati with that of Pietro Grossi. Our attention is drawn to the artistic potential of the technology – the Internet.
Another essential aspect to Sergio Maltagliati’s approach is the idea that art is not just the fruit of the composer all alone in his ivory tower. In truth, this concept of the tower has always come across as more of a convenient and, at times, lucrative simplification, than the actual reality. The creation is always the fruit of collaboration. It is a shared effort. The author is not the ingenious creator; he is a modest inventor of limited powers. The work arises out of collaboration and cooperation. Two of his works are strongly based on this concept: neXtOper@_1.03 (a work for mobile phones) and midi_Visu@lMusiC (music and images on I-Mode mobile phone).
The work is open to collaboration not only in the way it is organized but also in terms of its evolution. Sergio Maltagliati’s work is therefore about randomness, which is exploited and given an aesthetic value. Randomness is attributable to music automatically generated by algorithms and self-designed programs, as well as to the fact that the work permits the autonomous decisions of collaborators, musicians and Internet surfers.
Luca Cartolari