Bodyscore

IDENTIGRAPHIES
THE MOMENT OF WRITING, THE WRITING OF THE MOMENT

A few months ago I tore up a page of music. For my friend’s birthday I had copied out by hand a piece of mine he loved, written years earlier on a computer: sending him a PDF, or a printout, seemed meaningless. He died before I could give it to him, and I tore up the page. The PDF still exists. Tearing up something you have written by hand for hours is a violent, almost theatrical gesture. Deleting a file is nothing: one click, and “undo” brings it back.

I belong to the generation of composers ironically called “pencil/mouse”. I write for orchestra, string quartet and voice, but for concerts in which computers are everywhere: performers read their parts on paper and interact live with electronics. From the age of six until 2001, when I turned thirty, I wrote everything by hand. My publisher simply photocopied my manuscripts for the musicians, so they had to be perfectly legible. At fifteen my teacher made me rewrite my first public piece four times, not for its music but for its handwriting. “Clarity of writing is clarity of mind,” he used to say.

Handwriting thickens with age and experience. As in any calligraphy, each stroke carries the writer’s state of mind, and leaves a memory in the body: I still remember where I wrote every score until 2001. Writing by hand demands a concentration close to trance, to self-hypnosis, in which time is not stopped but intensely lived. A score is also far more than notes. For performers, each sign is a position of the hands, the lips, the breath: when to breathe, how to move, how to stay still. A sensual bond ties the score to the body.

When the computer entered music publishing, something fundamental changed. Calligraphy was banished; the stroke and the handwritten sign were replaced by fonts. By hand every gesture is unique; every click is like every other.

In writing there are three things that call for correction: inattention, error and accident. The first two must always be corrected. The accident is different. Deep in concentration, you sometimes leave the plan you had made. An accident need not be corrected; the history of music and art is full of accidents that artists kept and signed. On paper, even what is corrected leaves a legible trace, so a handwritten score holds the history of a composer’s choices. The “undo” function erases that history. It cheapens the present moment and takes away from writing its power to sign – firmare, in Italian – one’s own present. Typed scores are perfectly clear, but anonymous. Handwriting joins clarity of thought to the identity of the person who writes. This is why I call what I do identigraphy.

After 2001 I wrote everywhere – on trains, on planes, between meetings – and I no longer remember where many pieces were written, or why. So I asked myself how to recover that concentration, resist undo and give the present more room, without renouncing the generative and interactive music I believe in.

The answer was the living body. A living body is an extension of lived time: it breathes, changes, ages, keeps the marks of its life. Since 2007 I have written my music directly on the skin of men and women who come to my studio. I write by hand, in ink, and nothing can be undone. Correction is banished; every accident has to be taken in and integrated. A session lasts six to twelve hours without interruption, with no room for distraction. The model breathes with me, at my tempo. A body is not a page: there are fragile zones and powerful ones, and its shape invites the accident. Changing model is much more than turning a page.

I choose the model and the pose according to the music I want to write. I want to see the music inhabit a body that expresses its power, fragility, torsion, effort, grace or animality. Writing needs a place and a time set apart from the noise of everyday life, so I follow a few rituals. I clean the skin myself, centimetre by centimetre, and learn its shape. When I write on a face, my left hand supports the back of the neck: I feel the pulse, the breath, the warmth of the skin, the trust of the model in each of my gestures. In Asia one might say that I write on qi. I would say that I write on people’s souls.

Since I began writing on bodies, I remember every composition: when I wrote it, where, and on whom. No paper and no pixel can give me that.

The ink disappears within hours, so photography is the only way to keep it. But neither the concert nor the photograph was enough. I combined two printing techniques that are usually kept apart: platinum-palladium and charcoal. I brush the paper myself, leaving the strokes visible, and before printing I make a final incision by hand in the negative – one more signature.

This is identigraphy: giving my music a second skin. It joins the uniqueness of the handwritten gesture, of the body, of the music, of the photographic moment, of the brushed paper and of the incised sign. My gesture is no longer only that of writing music; it is in every one of these choices, and on stage, when I perform my music live.

If someone asked me today for a copy of my music, I would know what to give, with pride. Identigraphies let the public enter the moments in which I compose, and feel the tension of a work before it exists. If I write on people’s souls, identigraphies are the soul of my art.

Jacopo Baboni Schilingi, from “Identigraphies – moment de l’écriture, écriture du moment” (2017), abridged.