Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

[AHF <>]

Mario Bertoncini died early yesterday, January 19, in Siena, Italy. 

Mario was hugely influential to my music, introducing me and my classmates at 
McGill in 1975 to the idea of music design — essentially, if you really want 
to make new music, why start with existing instruments? — make them. But 
then, even the idea of “instrument” falls short, for once you have devised 
and built something entirely new to make music with, where does the discovery 
end and the composition start? Should they even be different things? We 
eventually substituted for “instrument” the words “sound source”, which sat 
better with “music design” —  idea, design, construction, discovery (through 
a kind of pure improvisation), and performance all being the same 
composition, having one name. (These sound sources were not a “tool” for 
sounding something else.)

Mario’s sound sources are beautiful to look at. He could quote Dante in the 
original endlessly. His performances of Chopin and of Terry Riley’s Keyboard 
Studies amazed.

If you know of him, it might be through his being in Gruppo di 
Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza.

There is another thing to tell you about Mario: he developed a method for 
teaching improvisation, to which I was exposed, also in 1975. Since at the 
beginning of that semester we students had not yet built anything, and we 
were scheduled to meet regularly anyway, and Mario had to do something with 
us, he taught us how to improvise. It was a skill we would need once we had 
something ready to play. First, he would rant on, passionately and effusively 
poetically, about all that was wrong with “the official avant-garde” — the 
predictable gestures, the annoying conceits of dynamics and form, the 
pitch-centricity, the yearning for newness battered by the desire to impress, 
the hierarchy of leaders (divided by nationalities and sorted by fame), etc. 
etc. Then, once we were terrified, he would demand that we start playing. No 
further instructions (no father instructions). Each time we did, he would 
stand by until someone in the room did something, anything, that offended his 
sensibilities. “STOP THAT SHIT.” “You crush my soul.” “Must we hear that 
again? Hasn’t the official avant-garde already done that enough that even my 
dead grandmother would recognizes it” (These are not exact quotes, but you 
get the idea.) The first try we lasted maybe 3 seconds before Mario saved us 
from ourselves. Little by little, we would survive longer and longer. Because 
of his unswerving vigilance, we never played a bad note (other the the last 
one, the one that caused him to immediately capture and snuff out the 
horror). By term's end, we might even pull off an acceptable 14 minutes of 
improvisation without intervention. I do recall at least once reaching our 
own ending. Not bad, considering there were about 15 classically trained 
young hotheads in the room who initially barely knew one another.

Mario was a huge soul, a huge artist, a mentor, a friend.

Andrew Culver