Pietro Elia Barcellona
This artistic research investigates Luigi Nono’s suono mobile practice applied to contrabass. The project originates from a historical possibility that remained unrealized: a solo piece that Nono had conceived for Stefano Scodanibbio, never composed and lacking documentary sources. The impossibility of a philological reconstruction opens an investigative space in which artistic research becomes a tool for production of knowledge.
Suono mobile, understood as both a compositional idea and a particular approach to sound conceived as an object never fully describable by notation, challenges the principle of musical fixation. The progressive negation of the score as a completed work shifts the focus of the practice toward the bodily dimension of musical making and toward listening as the very object of composition.
Through the reconstruction of practice based on the testimonies of musicians who collaborated with Nono where the bodily knowledge of this experience is preserved, together with instrumental experimentation, creative microphone use, the study of listening practices, and the active construction of sound space, the research aims to reactivate the principles of suono mobile as a contemporary practice.
The contrabass becomes a ground for exploring new relationships between performance techniques, technology, and perception, generating original performative devices. Moreover, the project intends to develop renewed modes of audiovisual transmission of the practice, with particular attention to the testimonies of the musicians involved.