"So the ideology was that: use sounds as instruments, as sounds on tape, without the causality. It was no longer a clarinet or a spring or a piano, but a sound with a form, a development, a life of its own"
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Ferrari is describing a clean break from the old musical morality play where every sound has to “belong” to something you can point at onstage. His phrasing is almost polemical: “without the causality” is the key provocation. It’s not just that tape lets you record anything; it lets you sever the listener’s reflex to ask, What made that? and instead ask, What is it doing? In that shift, a clarinet stops being a clarinet (a bundle of history, technique, genre, class) and becomes a shaped event in time.
The subtext is liberation with a sting. Traditional instruments come pre-loaded with social meaning and inherited hierarchies: the piano implies concert hall seriousness; the clarinet can signal orchestral polish; even “a spring” evokes the found-object theatrics of early experimental music. Ferrari wants to strip those associations away, not to be abstract for abstraction’s sake, but to let sound behave like a character rather than a label. “A form, a development, a life of its own” borrows the language of organisms and narratives, arguing that sound can carry its own dramaturgy without needing the alibi of a performer’s gesture.
Context matters: postwar European musique concrete and tape studios were rewriting composition as editing, montage, and listening-as-making. Ferrari is staking a position inside that revolution: not merely expanding the palette, but rerouting attention from source to morphology. It’s a manifesto for treating recorded reality as raw musical matter, and for trusting the ear over the instrument’s résumé.
The subtext is liberation with a sting. Traditional instruments come pre-loaded with social meaning and inherited hierarchies: the piano implies concert hall seriousness; the clarinet can signal orchestral polish; even “a spring” evokes the found-object theatrics of early experimental music. Ferrari wants to strip those associations away, not to be abstract for abstraction’s sake, but to let sound behave like a character rather than a label. “A form, a development, a life of its own” borrows the language of organisms and narratives, arguing that sound can carry its own dramaturgy without needing the alibi of a performer’s gesture.
Context matters: postwar European musique concrete and tape studios were rewriting composition as editing, montage, and listening-as-making. Ferrari is staking a position inside that revolution: not merely expanding the palette, but rerouting attention from source to morphology. It’s a manifesto for treating recorded reality as raw musical matter, and for trusting the ear over the instrument’s résumé.
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| Topic | Music |
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