Music without Musicians ... but with
Scientists, Technicians and Computer
Companies
GIUDITTA PAROLINI
Technische Universität Berlin, Institut für Philosophie, Literatur-, Wissenschafts- und Technikgeschichte, Sekretariat H23,
Straße des 17. Juni, 135, 10623 Berlin, Germany
Email: [email protected]
In the early days of music technologies the collaboration
between musicians, scientists, technicians and equipment
producers was very close. How did this collaboration develop?
Why did scientific, business, and musical agendas converge
towards a common goal? Was there a mutual exchange of
skills and expertise? To answer these questions this article will
consider a case study in early computer music. It will examine
the career of the Italian cellist and composer Pietro Grossi
(1917–2002), who explored computer music with the support
of mainframe manufacturers, industrial R&D, and scientific
institutions. During the 1970s, Grossi became an eager
programmer and achieved a first-hand experience of computer
music, writing several software packages. Grossi was
interested in avant-garde music as an opportunity to make
‘music without musicians’. He aimed at a music composed and
performed by machines, and eventually, he achieved this result
with his music software. However, to accomplish it, Grossi
could not be a lonely pioneer; he had to become a member,
albeit an atypical one, of the Italian computing community of
the time. Grossi’s story, thus, can tell us much about the
collaborative efforts stimulated by the use of early computer
technologies in sound research, and how these efforts
developed at the intersection of science, art and industry.
1. ELECTROACOUSTIC MUSIC AS
A COLLABORATIVE ENDEAVOUR
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, technology
has become increasingly important in the arts. It has
radically changed how artists perform their work
and how they relate to their public. Walter Benjamin’s
essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility’is an early record of this transformation
(Benjamin 1936). Written and rewritten during the 1930s,
the essay examined photography and film as prominent
examples of the transformations brought by technology
in twentieth-century art. With the privilege of hindsight,
we can argue that during the past century technology
has produced in music changes as significant as the ones
examined by Benjamin for the visual arts. Electronic
and digital tools have deeply reshaped the key practices
of sound production, reproduction and reception in the
second half of the twentieth century. Furthermore, they
have contributed ‘to bring the arts much closer together’,
so that ‘poetry, painting and sculpture’deserved at
least an appendix in the International Electronic Music
Catalog compiled by Hugh Davies in the 1960s
(Davies 1968: v).
The use of electronic and computer technologies has
transformed what counts as a musical instrument, the
skills and requisites to compose and perform music,
how music is experienced by the public, and how it is
distributed. There is therefore scope for an investigation
of musical developments grounded ‘not only in history,
society, and culture, but also in science and technology
and its machines and ways of knowing and interacting’
(Pinch and Bijsterveld 2004: 636). The use of electronic
and computer equipment in sound research has forced
musicians to build bridges with other communities, and
they have begun to work with scientists, technicians
and equipment producers to explore new soundscapes.
The musical curriculum has also changed over time
to include teaching in mathematics, acoustics and
informatics. Musicians have embraced new skills, such
as programming, and live coding is now a recognised
practice in music (Nilson 2007).
Alternative histories can emerge by approaching
electroacoustic music as a collaborative effort of several
actors: musicians, scientists, technicians and producers
of electronic and computer technologies. These histories
will consider the moral and material economies that
governed access to technologies, and the part that
equipment manufactures played in these economies; they
will explore how musicians, physicists, engineers and
computer scientists pooled their knowledge to achieve
innovative results in sound research; they will consider
how these interactions shaped and re-shaped scientific
and musical careers; they will examine the role that
technicians had in assisting musicians. In turn, these
histories of electroacoustic music can benefit science
and technology studies, because they improve our
understanding of the mutual interactions between
technology and society. Notable is the case of the Moog
synthesiser (Pinch and Trocco 2002). This instrument
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emerged from the collaboration of engineers, musicians
and salespeople; in its design and development, users’
requests shaped engineers’choices, and the synthesiser
became a boundary object that moved across musical
communities and acquired different meanings. Only by
examining the collaborative effort behind the Moog, and
the flexibility that the instrument derived from it, can we
account for the ubiquitous presence of the synthesiser in
very different music cultures and its ambiguous status as
both instrument and machine.
The story of the Moog synthesiser belongs to the
‘analog days’of electronic music. In contrast, this article
will address the close collaboration between musicians,
scientists and equipment producers in the early ‘digital
days’of music technologies. Back in the 1950s, 1960s and
1970s, computers were not yet personal, off-the-shelf
music software did not exist, and the majority of tradi-
tional music institutions could not afford a mainframe.
Musicians therefore had to forge new alliances to explore
the world of digital sound. How did these collaborations
develop? Why did scientific, business and musical agen-
das converge towards a common goal? Was there a
mutual exchange of skills and expertise? To answer these
questions this article will consider a case study in early
computer music. It will discuss the career in avant-garde
music of the Italian cellist and composer Pietro Grossi
(1917–2002). Grossi struggled to gain access to compu-
ters, because in Italy the mainframe industry had only
marginally developed and music schools were not interes-
ted in a systematic investigation of digital technologies.
The Italian musician was able to move into the field only
with the support of computer companies and scientific
institutions that granted him access to mainframes
and had available programming expertise. Eventually,
he turned himself into an eager programmer to achieve
afirst-hand experience of computer music.
By approaching sound research through mainframes,
Grossi envisioned the opportunity to make music
without musicians. He aimed at a music composed
and performed by machines, and shared through digital
technologies. To achieve this result, Grossi became
a participant, albeit an atypical one, of the Italian com-
puting community of the time. Computer companies –
such as Olivetti-General Electric (OGE) and the Italian
branch of IBM –and scientific institutions devoted
to computing –in particular the Centro Nazionale
Universitario di Calcolo Elettronico (CNUCE) and the
Istituto per l’Elaborazione dell’Informazione (IEI), both
based in Pisa –looked at Grossi’sworkwithcuriosity
and interest. Although they did not share Grossi’s
musical agenda, these companies and institutions
valued his research in computer music for the challenges
it presented to hardware and software development.
Even decades later, the Italian IT community has
not forgotten Grossi’s experiments in sound research.
In 2008, the Italian association of IT professionals
(AICA) distributed a DVD copy of the GE-115
Computer Concerto recorded by Grossi to the partici-
pants of the IFIP World Computer Congress held in
Milan. In 1967, the manufacturer of the GE-115 main-
frame had done the same, using Grossi’s computer
music as a Christmas gift for its customers. Grossi’s
story, thus, can tell us much about the collaborative
efforts stimulated by the use of early computer techno-
logies in sound research and how these efforts developed
at the intersection of science, art and industry. To
explore this story, I will briefly introduce Pietro Grossi
and describe how his venture into electronic music
quickly turned towards computers. I will then discuss
his experience with mainframes in collaboration with
OGE and his long-term involvement with CNUCE
for making computer music. I will focus on how
Grossi acquired programming skills and how his work in
software development fulfilled both his musical agenda
and the expectations of his scientific partners.
2. FROM TAPE RECORDERS TO MAINFRAMES
During the 1960s, Pietro Grossi turned his career as a
classical musician upside-down.
1
Grossi was trained in
cello and composition in Bologna during the 1920s and
1930s and began to play with the orchestra of the Teatro
Comunale in Florence in 1936. As a middle-aged man,
after three decades spent with the Florentine orchestra,
he came to set aside his cello, which was eventually sold,
and devoted more and more time to making music
with electronic technologies and, later, with digital
computers. His first hands-on experience with music
technologies took place in 1961, when he spent two
weeks in the electronic music studio set up in Milan by
RAI, the Italian public broadcasting corporation.
Founded in the mid-1950s, the Milan studio was an
important centre for electroacoustic music composition
for almost two decades (Donati and Pacetti 2002;
Manning 2004: 68–72; Novati and Dack 2012). Its
facilities were extensive for the time and Grossi used
them to create his first electronic music composition,
Progetto 2/3, based on combinatorics (Giomi and
Ligabue 1999: 34–5).
In Milan the studio equipment had been custom-
made by Alfredo Lietti, who began to work for RAI as a
radio operator in 1938 (Rodà 2012). While Lietti was
working for RAI, he graduated in physics and was
promoted to higher technical roles within the company.
Lietti followed the evolution of the electronic music
1
There is no book-length biography of Grossi, but there is a long life
story (in Italian) published a few years before his death (Giomi and
Ligabue 1999). There are also contributions on Grossi written by
musicians and composers, who were Grossi’s co-workers or former
students (Giomi 1995, 1996; Mayr 2011). In writing this article,
I mainly relied on primary sources: scientific reports published by the
CNUCE musicology division; two oral histories (with Ferruccio
Zulian and Leonello Tarabella); and correspondence between Grossi
and Jon Phetteplace (a cellist and avant-garde musician who studied
with Grossi in Florence).
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studio from its inception until 1961, when he resigned
and went to work in a Swiss scientific laboratory. In
designing the studio equipment, Lietti was inspired by
the principle that electronic technologies could serve
their purpose in a music studio only when there was ‘an
effort at mutual understanding’between the musician,
concerned with aesthetic problems, and the engineer,
interested in the technological issues posed by sound
generation (Lietti quoted in Manning 2004: 70). Lietti’s
machines proved his point. They were created to
respond to the requests made by the musicians who used
the facilities in Milan, in particular Luciano Berio, who
was the studio co-director alongside Bruno Maderna.
Lietti’s machines remained in use for several years, either
in their original form or renovated using transistors,
which in the 1960s became the mainstream devices for
electronics.
In the Milan studio Grossi did not work alone. He
had the assistance of a technician, Marino Zuccheri,
who was the only permanent staff member of the
studio.
2
Zuccheri had previously been employed by
RAI as a sound technician and helped the composers
who visited the studio with their recordings. He taught
them how to generate and modify sounds with the
equipment available, how to mix them, how to cut
and reassemble the magnetic tape. He also helped
them when they could not autonomously control
all the equipment. Lietti and Zuccheri were both non-
musicians, but they contributed substantially to the
electronic music experience in Milan. Although they
pursued scientific and technical rather than artistic
careers, their skills and expertise were essential to
designing the equipment and promoting its use among
musicians. When Grossi decided to set up his own
electronic music studio in Florence after his experience
in Milan, he was faced with the necessity of finding
similar scientific and technical co-workers.
Grossi’s studio, called Studio di Fonologia Musicale di
Firenze (S2FM), opened in 1963. The musician invested
his own money in the studio. He purchased some
commercial equipment and commissioned the design of a
few sine-wave generators from two technicians, who
also helped him to set up the whole studio. The S2FM
equipment eventually consisted of ‘sixteen sine-wave
generators, some filters, a frequency meter, a white noise
generator and a set of very good tape recorders’(Giomi
and Ligabue 1999: 36, my translation). In 1965 the studio
moved from the musician’s house, where it was originally
based, to the Conservatorio Cherubini, the music school
in Florence where Grossi had been teaching cello since
the 1940s, and where he also began teaching a course in
electronic music in 1965. At the music school, the S2FM
facilities were extended with more custom-made pieces
designed by two technicians, Paolo del Canto and Luigi
Pelosini. Grossi also commissioned the RAI technicians
in Milan to build an instrument for regulating the speed
of tape recorders (Giomi and Ligabue 1999: 36–7). The
students of Grossi’s electronic music course had access to
these facilities. They learnt how to use the equipment
and received instruction in acoustics, mathematics and
composition. The course also included seminars given by
artists, philosophers and scientists (Giomi and Ligabue
1999: 44 (image)). Grossi’s electronic music teaching was
open to both musicians and non-musicians, because
Grossi believed that anyone should take part in the
experience if interested in sound phenomena and be able
to use the tools available in the studio. Engineers and
visual artists joined Grossi’s course as students and
worked alongside musicians, contributing to the activity
of S2FM. Even though not every student completed the
course or produced an original composition, the plurality
of the students’backgrounds facilitated dialogue between
musicandtheseotherdisciplines interested in sound
production through electronic equipment (Mayr 2007:
94–5). A few of Grossi’s students continued their venture
in electronic music, while others turned to visual arts.
It is more difficult to follow the path of the people who
embarked on a scientific career after attending Grossi’s
electronic music course. In his life story, Grossi mentions
explicitly only Riccardo Andreoni, who ended up work-
ing for the computing centre of the Arcetri Astrophysical
Observatory in Florence. Andreoni learnt how to pro-
gram attending some classes organised by Grossi in
1969/1970. The classes were taught by a mathematician
and sponsored by the IBM R&D division in Pisa
(Giomi and Ligabue 1999: 23).
Davies’sInternational Electronic Music Catalog,
published in 1968, provides a comprehensive list
of the compositions produced by S2FM (Davies 1968:
100–1). By the time the catalogue appeared in print,
Grossi’s experience in electronic music was drawing to
a close. Grossi had been attracted to electronic music
at the beginning of the 1960s because it offered the
opportunity to extend sound research beyond the
12-tone equal temperament scale, and at the same time
liberated the musician from the time-consuming and
tiring manual training required to perform classical
pieces. However, by the mid-1960s, Grossi did not feel
that electronic music could accomplish his project
to make music without musicians. He began to
regard electronic music only as a moment of transition
towards the automation of musical performance
and composition realised with digital computers
(Camilleri, Carrera and Mayr 1987: 38–9).
When Grossi approached computer music in the late
1960s, the discipline had already begun to develop. The
first experiences in computer music took place in the
1950s. In 1957 the composers Lejaren Hiller and Leonard
2
Technicians were often key figures in electronic music studios,
where they taught musicians how to use the equipment and helped
them to turn knobs and switches. They have also remained key
figures in computer music, as discussed by Zattra and Donin (2016),
but the case study examined in this article does not deal with them
explicitly.
288 Giuditta Parolini
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Isaacson produced the Illiac Suite for String Quartet with
the assistance of the ILLIAC mainframe available
at the University of Illinois (Hiller and Isaacson
1957; Chadabe 1997: 273–4). In the same year Max
Mathews, a researcher who worked at the Bell
Telephone Laboratories, completed the development
of MUSIC-I with the assistance of his co-workers.
This was the first software for digital sound synthesis
and the first member of the MUSIC-N family of
computer programs, which were very influential in
the international developments of computer music
(Mathews 1963, 1969; Doornbusch 2012: 47–9).
Grossi occasionally used computers in the early
1960s, when he was already actively involved in
electronic music. The algorithmic pieces he presented
at the Biennale in Venice in 1964 were realised with
analog equipment, but sound, pitch and duration
were computed on a mainframe at the University of
Florence. Grossi had begun to calculate these values
by hand using logarithmic tables, but by using the
computer was able to speed up the computations
(Giomi 1996: 180 (Fig. 1c); Giomi and Ligabue 1999:
40–1). Gaining access to digital technologies, however,
was much more difficult than setting up an electronic
music studio. The basic components of an electronic
music studio, in fact, were not inexpensive, but
they remained affordable even for an individual
musician as proved by Grossi’s ability to create S2FM.
The expertise necessary to use this equipment was
also easy to acquire with some hands-on work. For
instance, Grossi was able to work alone and teach his
students in Florence after only two weeks spent in
the Milan studio. Even the University of Indiana in
Bloomington found Grossi’s expertise satisfactory
and invited him to teach the first formal courses in
electronic music when the university opened a studio
in 1966.
3
As someone who was venturing into computer
music, instead, Grossi met greater challenges because
he could not purchase his own computer nor did he
have the programming skills to develop software
tools. He needed partners to do so, but he could not
find them within the Italian musical community, who
were uninterested in computers. He had to look for
collaborators among the few Italian scientific institu-
tions and business organisations which had access to
mainframes and in-house competences to work with
them. How could Grossi approach these companies
and institutions? How could he find a space for his
musical research within their agendas? To answer these
questions I will examine how Grossi’s computer music
was produced with the support of computer companies
and in association with several research centres.
3. MAKING MUSIC WITH THE
GE-115 MAINFRAME
The Olivetti company was founded at the beginning of
the twentieth century in Ivrea, a small town near Turin.
In just a few decades, Olivetti became an international
business company known worldwide for its typewriters
and calculating machines (Caizzi 1962; Ochetto 1985).
Olivetti’s products were praised for their design
and technical features, and Olivetti was a solid and
enterprising business in the aftermath of the Second
World War. Its general manager, Adriano Olivetti,
was a visionary entrepreneur and decided to invest in
computers, almost unknown in Italy at the time.
4
In the mid-1950s Olivetti opened its R&D division
with the aim of designing a commercial mainframe.
The mission was successfully accomplished, and by the
early 1960s Olivetti was the only Italian company
producing mainframes and doing research in hardware
and software development (Parolini 2015). Olivetti’s
experience as a mainframe manufacturer, however,
was short-lived. In 1964 Olivetti sold a large part
of its computer business to the US company General
Electric (GE) and created the joint company OGE.
Four years later, it left the mainframe sector for good
and sold the remaining share in the joint company to
the US partner.
Although short-lived, Olivetti’s involvement in the
mainframe business was crucial for Pietro Grossi’sfirst
approach to computer music. The industrial facilities
created by Olivetti –in particular, the R&D centre in
Pregnana Milanese –did not close after the merger,
and OGE offered Grossi the support of its R&D staff
and the GE-115 mainframe to do musical research.
The collaboration between Grossi and the computer
company started in 1967, while the musician was
engaged in the preparation of a radio programme called
Musica ex machina. The programme, co-authored by
Grossi and the composer Domenico Guaccero, was
broadcast by RAI between March 1967 and May 1968.
The episodes gave an overview of international and
Italian experiences in electronic and computer music,
and Grossi asked OGE to collaborate in the preparation
of some pieces for the episode on computer music
(Giomi and Ligabue 1999: 50–1).
The company did not have any specificinterestin
computer music, but accepted Grossi’s request because
it was an opportunity to advertise its mainframes.
During the 1960s, computers were still uncommon in
Italy and the company was trying to create a market for
them. Thus, it had to convince potential customers that
computers were powerful machines, able to perform
complex tasks such as playing music, and significantly
superior to the punched-card office equipment that
was still widespread in business companies and
3
On Grossi’s work at Indiana University see Indiana University
Archives, Accn. 2001/031, Box. 3. Grossi had already served in the
faculty of the Indiana Music School in 1957, when he taught a cello
summer course.
4
In Italy the first mainframes (manufactured abroad) were set up in
1954/55 (Bonfanti 2004).
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public institutions. Grossi’s radio programme could
reach a large audience and support the company’s
marketing strategy. As such, it was an opportunity not
to be missed.
Although computer music did not have a place in
OGE’sscientific agenda, the collaboration with Grossi
was successful due to a chance event and a distinctive
feature of early mainframes. In the early days of
computing, mainframes did not have a screen to allow
the operator to check whether computing processes
were running smoothly. Computer technicians needed
alternative means to monitor the functioning of the
machines. At the time, computing speed was still
low and the mainframe central processing unit emitted
frequencies in the audible range. Therefore, loud-
speakers were placed on the mainframe, in key positions
where instructions were executed, and used to check
whether the flow of information was regular or whether
an instruction had gone into a loop and jammed the
system.
5
Ferruccio Zulian, a staff member of the OGE
R&D division in Pregnana Milanese, decided to play
music with these loudspeakers. Zulian was a young
physicist employed as systems designer. He did not have
any musical training –‘I just knew that the notes in the
twelve-tone equal temperament had a constant ratio
and after twelve notes the frequency doubled.’To play
his first piece of computer music, someone had to give
him a score and teach him how to read it. Despite his
lack of musical training, Zulian was keen to experiment
with sounds:
My first idea was to employ the ‘move’instruction, which
was used to transfer characters. When I changed the number
of characters to be transferred, the sound frequency changed.
In this way, however, I produced an asymmetric square wave
[which could not be used to play music]. Then I decided to
use a signal already available in the mainframe, a signal
I could command with an instruction. It worked this way:
I started the signal, then the computer executed a loop
during which there was a countdown (beginning from n/2)
and then the system jumped to level zero, the signal was
switched off and the loop was repeated generating a sym-
metric square wave. The period of the square wave depended
from the number nand it was repeated mtimes, with mbeing
the ratio between sound duration and period. Every sound
was identified by these two parameters, mand n,andIcould
produce 1300 audible frequencies using this procedure.
6
Zulian’s hobby became known within the company
and the OGE headquarters in Florence put Grossi in
contact with the R&D division. Grossi needed the
approval of the OGE’s external relations manager
and the R&D management before he could begin his
collaboration with Zulian. From time to time Grossi
travelledtoPregnanaMilanesetoworkwiththe
researcher on the computer music software. At this stage
Grossi had no familiarity with software and the GE-115
was still programmed in machine code, harder to use
than any high-level programming language. Therefore,
it was Zulian who realised Grossi’s musical ideas. The
researcher wrote several computer programs to play
pieces of classical music or to generate original com-
positions suggested by Grossi. Even though he was
unable to program the machine, Grossi had direct
involvement in the transcription of the classical pieces
and in the preparation of the punched-cards (Figure 1)
used to feed these data into the computer (Giomi and
Ligabue 1999: 52). The musician also published a
detailed description of the programs developed by
Zulian to record their collaboration (Camilleri et al.
1987: 33–6).
When the GE-115 eventually played music, the
sound quality was poor. The square-wave timbre was
rough and largely unsatisfactory, but Grossi did not
mind. Despite the evident technological limitations,
he saw enormous potential in computer music. The
GE-115 could play Paganini’sCaprice No. 5 –one of
the first pieces transcribed for the mainframe –at
speeds forbidden to any violinist, and it could explore
sound permutations without the constraints of the 12-
tone equal temperament. Grossi believed that techno-
logical progress would have improved sound quality
and ‘once the monodic limits and the invariability of
the timbre have been overcome the computer will
become an extremely faithful performer (performer,
and not instrument, acting on the basis of a program-
score and not manual commands) of any music –even
if completely removed from the limits attached to the
manual playing of traditional instruments’.
7
Not on
aesthetic, but on technological grounds, OGE shared
Grossi’s positive thinking about computer music and
produced, with the pieces played by the mainframe,
a 45 rpm vinyl entitled GE-115 Computer Concerto
(Olivetti–General Electric and S2FM 1967). The
company sent it to its customers for Christmas 1967
and presented it as the outcome of the collaboration
between OGE and S2FM. Side 1 contained a few
classical pieces (Bach, Paganini), while Side 2 included
three pieces: one obtained by the superposition of
several performances of Paganini’sCaprice No. 5
played at different speeds, one a cyclic permutation of
five sounds, and the last a special interpolation of
ascending and descending scales.
5
Grossi had already heard sounds produced by the central processing
unit of a mainframe in 1962, during a visit to the computing centre of
the Monte dei Paschi in Siena. The bank had an ELEA 9003, a
mainframe manufactured by Olivetti (Giomi and Ligabue 1999: 55).
Grossi described this experience in the leaflet that accompanied the
recording of the GE-115 Computer Concerto:‘Many people will
recall those [sounds] emitted by the Elea 9003’s central processor and
the way these sounds varied and described typical sequences
according to the different jobs performed.’
6
This quotation and the one above are excerpts from a written
interview with Zulian (March 2016). The English translation is mine.
7
The quotation is taken from the presentation of the GE-115
Computer Concerto (printed in English, Italian and French). Grossi
wrote the presentation, but he did not sign it, nor did he add his name
to the cover of the record.
290 Giuditta Parolini
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The record gratified Grossi’s ambitions and increased
his interest in computer music.Atthesametimeitoffered
OGE several opportunities to advertise its mainframes.
In January 1968, RAI broadcast the episode of the
programme Musica ex machina about computer music,
and later in the year the broadcasting corporation
interviewed Grossi and Zulian about their collaboration.
In 1968 the ability to produce music with the GE-115 was
publicly demonstrated in Florence and Como during
musical festivals. In both cases the computer company
offered all the technical support required for the public
display and enjoyed a celebrity that it would not have
accomplished if it had provided the public with a technical
explanation of the mainframe’s potentialities.
4. THE MUSICIAN AS PROGRAMMER
In 1968 the collaboration between Grossi and Zulian
ended because ‘the computer music work in Pregnana
was slowed down by technical and organisational issues’
Figure 1. The image summarises the transcription process required to play music with the GE-115. On top there is the musical
score, a canon from Bach’sMusical Offering; in the middle is the transcription in machine language (hexadecimal notation) of the
first 21 notes in Bach’s score; at the bottom there is the punched-card used to input the data. The numbers mand nwere inputted
in the GE-115 in binary code (e.g. FB360082). Each number required two bytes (e.g. FB-36 identified the frequency, while 00-82
determined the sound duration). A 80-column punched-card, as the one in the picture, could be used to input up to 20 notes.
The image was originally published in the Italian magazine Comma –Prospettive di Cultura (February/March 1968).
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(Giomi and Ligabue 1999: 55, my translation).
Indirectly, however, this first experience in computer
music facilitated Grossi’s access to scientific institu-
tions based in Pisa. The Olivetti R&D division had
been located near Pisa during the 1950s and had
pooled resources with the local university for the
computing project of the Calcolatrice Elettronica
Pisana (De Marco, Mainetto, Pisani and Savino 1999:
32–3). The University of Pisa fully exploited this early
start in mainframe research and was the first Italian
institution to create a degree in computer science in
1969. Leonello Tarabella, one of Grossi’s youngest
co-workers at CNUCE, benefited from this training.
8
The very existence of CNUCE, a major computing
centre, was indebted to the know-how available at
the University of Pisa and to the funding provided
by the computer company IBM. IBM established its
Italian R&D activities on the second floor of the
CNUCE building and collaborated closely with the
centre’s staff.
Grossi approached CNUCE’s scientificmanagement
through mutual acquaintances. He was then invited
to present a formal request for collaboration to the
director, Alessandro Faedo, a mathematician who had
a key role in establishing Pisa as a research centre for
computer science. According to Grossi’s reminiscences,
IBM was a major player in accepting his proposal for
collaboration because the company, the only business
competitor of OGE/GE in Italy, had resented Grossi’s
computer music research with the GE-115 mainframe
and the visibility that this collaboration had brought to
OGE (Giomi and Ligabue 1999: 56). Grossi welcomed
the opportunity to continue his work on computer
music in Pisa. The musician had personal and profes-
sional commitments in Florence and travelling to Milan
to work with Zulian had been inconvenient. Pisa,
instead, was ideally located. Grossi could remain in
Florence with his family, keep his teaching appointment
at the Conservatorio Cherubini, and commute regularly
to Pisa. Grossi’s collaboration with CNUCE began in
1969, and in the next few years a small musicology
division was constituted and worked under the musi-
cian’s direction. This research in computer music did
not encounter obstacles even when CNUCE became an
institute of the Italian research council (CNR) in 1974.
Although Grossi’s division was hosted by CNUCE,
his work in computer music benefited from the
cooperation of other scientific partners located in Pisa.
First of all, Grossi had the support of the computer
company IBM. IBM was in charge of the maintenance
of the CNUCE computer systems and constantly
updated the hardware available in the centre. The first
music software created in Pisa in 1969/70, the Digital
Computer Music Program (DCMP) (Table 1), was
originally developed for the IBM 7090 mainframe,
a machine for which there was not yet software
portability. However, in the early 1970s, IBM provided
CNUCE with several versions of the System/360
(Campbell-Kelly, Aspray, Ensmenger and Yoost 2014:
ch. 6) the first compatible series sold by the company (i.e.
the same software could run, with only minimal adjust-
ments, on different computers of the series). By 1975 the
DCMP could run on three different System/360 –360/30,
360/44 and 360/67 –(Grossi and Sommi 1974), a feature
that facilitated public demonstrations of the software.
IBM also made available to the centre an IBM 1800 data
acquisition and control system which had some digital-
to-analog converters. The converters were especially
valuable for computer music research because they per-
mitted finer control of sound variables. To maximise the
performance of this IBM system, Grossi and co-workers
began to develop the music software PLAY 1800 in 1970/
71 (Table 1) (Baruzzi, Grossi and Milani 1975: 15–20).
Both DCMP and PLAY 1800 were designed to play
music in real-time. This was a considerable technical
challenge in the 1970s because music software is
computing-intensive, and only state-of-the-art hardware
could generate sound soon after its elaboration without
major disruptions. Grossi was aware of his debt to IBM
and commented in 1973: ‘The research team in Pisa is
now very active, because we have available powerful and
flexible computers and so it is possible to think and make
the unthinkable’(Grossi 1973, my translation).
Apart from IBM, IEI was the other main partner in
Grossi’s computer music research in Pisa. IEI was a twin
centre of CNUCE, but had a broader mission in the study
of information processes and also did some hardware
development. Its researchers designed, assembled and
maintained the synthesiser TAU2 (Bertini, Chimenti and
Denoth 1977) used by Grossi and co-workers from 1975
onwards. The TAU2 offered a significant improvement in
sound quality, even compared to the digital-to-analog
converters of the IBM 1800. The synthesiser was also a
more economic and effective solution for playing music
in real-time: it limited the computing time required to run
the music software because sound was produced by the
analog system rather than converting digital inputs
(Camilleri et al. 1987: 69–71). This was not irrelevant in
the 1970s, when computing time was still very expensive.
In the following years the main effort of Grossi’s division
was the development of the software TAUMUS (Table 1)
used to control the TAU2 synthesiser (Bolognesi and
Grossi 1979). In the mid-1980s, the users, who had access
to early data networks and had received permission from
the musicology division, could connect remotely to the
computer music programs available at CNUCE using the
software TELETAU (Table 1) (Nencini 1986).
All the software packages developed in Pisa by
Grossi and his co-workers had three main technical
features: performance in real-time, automation and
interactivity (Baruzzi et al. 1975: 1–2). These three
technical requirements responded to Grossi’s aesthetic
8
Oral history with L. Tarabella, July 2016.
292 Giuditta Parolini
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ideas about computer music. According to Grossi,
computer music had to be played in real time to mark a
discontinuity with traditional musical practices. The
computer user had the right to immediately hear the
piece of music selected from an archive or generated
with an algorithm. Music software also had to auto-
matise the processes of execution and composition to
achieve the aim of making music without musicians.
Grossi already had these goals in mind when he wrote
the presentation of the GE-115 Computer Concerto:
‘A future slogan might well be “Compose your music
by yourself and have it performed by your computer
(or by the terminal connecting you to it)”.’Last but not
least, computer music had to enhance the participation
of the listener and provide facilities to modify pieces or
play them with a different tempo.
In Pisa, Grossi’s role quickly shifted from that of
the musician, who merely suggests ideas, to that of
the programmer. Apart from the first version of the
DCMP, completed by early 1970, Grossi directly
contributed to all the other main software projects
developed by the musicology division. Unlike the
GE-115, the IBM mainframes available at CNUCE
could be programmed using high-level languages,
a considerable facilitation for Grossi who also received
the support of IBM staff, in particular Giorgio Sommi
and Cesare Chignoli. Upon Grossi’s request, Chignoli
also taught a few classes on Fortran programming
at the Conservatorio Cherubini. Despite his age,
Grossi learnt quickly, alongside the students. By
October 1969, he had written to his former pupil, Jon
Phetteplace: ‘[In Pisa] We carry on our work with
computers. We are making progress in software
development and we are doing interesting things.
I learnt to program and I believe that it is not possible
to go back’(Grossi 1969, my translation). In the
following months and years, Grossi kept Phetteplace
informed about the work done in Pisa and encouraged
him to take up programming because ‘there is no doubt
that the computer will soon be of the highest importance
in music’(Grossi 1970, my translation). Grossi
always tried to bring his experience in computer music
back into the musicians’community. His students at the
Conservatorio Cherubini were already receiving some
informal teaching in computer music during the 1970s,
althoughanofficial course in musical informatics was
opened only in the 1980s. There were also public
presentations of Grossi’s software packages during
festivals of contemporary music and in collaboration
with music institutions in Italy and abroad.
The Italian musical community, however, was not
very welcoming to Grossi. His computer music projects
were better received among scientific circles (Giomi and
Ligabue 1999: 53). Indeed, computer scientists began to
consider Grossi a member of their own community
because by the early 1970s Pietro Grossi had become
a keen programmer or, as Grossi defined himself in
Table 1. Software developed by the CNUCE Musicology Division.
Software
name Suitable for Developers Main features
DCMP IBM/7090; IBM
360/30, 360/44,
360/67
Cesare Chignoli (IBM); Giorgio Sommi (IBM); Pietro Grossi
(CNUCE); Carlo Paoli (IBM)
The software elaborated and played monodic music in real time (the music was
inputted by the user or auto-generated by the DCMP). The software could also
manage an archive of musical pieces and perform these pieces with
modifications (slower or faster, in random arrangement, with changed
frequencies, adding pauses etc.). Frequency and duration were the only sound
parameters controlled by the program.
PLAY 1800 IBM 1800 Pietro Grossi (CNUCE); Silvio Farese (CNUCE) The software had features similar to the DCMP, but controlled timbre and pitch
in addition to sound frequency and duration.
TAUMUS IBM 370/168 Pietro Grossi; Tommaso Bolognesi; Mario Milani; Carlo Paoli;
Raffaello Porinelli; Leonardo Tarabella; Leonello Tarabella.
All CNUCE staff.
The software was developed for the synthesiser TAU2. The TAU2/TAUMUS
system performed the same tasks of DCMP and PLAY, but the sound was
much more refined, because the system was polyphonic and polytimbric. It
offered a more accurate control of sound frequency, duration, timbre and
pitch. In addition, the TAUMUS software auto-generated music (using
random numbers) more efficiently than DCMP and PLAY software packages.
TELETAU EARN-BITNET-
NORTHNET
Network
Giovanni Nencini (CNUCE)
(Pietro Grossi also contributed ideas)
The software enabled remote users to access the TAU2/TAUMUS system
available at CNUCE via data networks.
Music Without Musicians ... but with Scientists, Technicians and Computer Companies 293
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later years, ‘un artigiano informatico-musicale [an artisan
of both informatics and music]’(Giomi and Ligabue
1999: 71). Grossi did not refrain from declaring his
fascination for software and some of his colleagues in
computer science hinted that he liked programming better
than making music (Giomi and Ligabue 1999: 54). Yet
Grossi was not an engineer, a physicist, a mathematician,
or a computer scientist, as were his scientificco-workers
at CNUCE. What did he find in software development?
To answer this question, it is necessary to consider
how the programmer’s role has changed over time.
In 1969, when Grossi learnt to program in Fortran, IBM
was still selecting programmers without setting rigid
qualifications in terms of degree or work experience.
It rather appealed to curious minds: ‘Do you enjoy
algebra, geometry or other logical operations? Can you
do musical composition or arrangement? Do you have
an orderly mind that enjoys such games as chess, bridge
or anagrams …finally do you have a lively imagination?’
(Ensmenger 2010: 52, fig. 3.1). The programmer as a
white collar corporate employee did not yet exist, and
computer companies still valued creative individuals,
such as Pietro Grossi, who conceived of programming as
a form of craft. In the 1950s and 1960s programming
itself was considered akin to ‘art’,and‘even today […]
the notion that computer programming still retains
an essentially artistic character is widely accepted’
(Ensmenger 2010: 48). As a programmer, Grossi
contributed to the institution’sscientific output, like any
other CNUCE researcher. The publications of the
musicology division (journal articles, instruction manuals,
music records) and the software packages developed
there all counted as ‘research results’. The drawback was
that, as research products, Grossi’s music records and
software packages had a very limited circulation beyond
scientificcircles.
Grossi remained associated with the CNUCE
musicology division until the mid-1980s, when he
retired, but by the early 1980s the Conservatorio
Cherubini in Florence had become his main workplace.
From the music school, he could reach the computing
facilities in Pisa via a computer terminal and in Florence
he could use a synthesiser system, IRMUS, which had
been built by a new scientific partner, the Istituto di
Ricerca sulle Onde Elettromagnetiche (IROE). During
the 1980s, Grossi’a main activities not only took place
away from Pisa, but also his interests shifted from
computer music to computer art, a practice that Grossi
called Homeart (Giomi and Ligabue 1999: 75–8).
5. CONCLUSION: MEN, MACHINES
AND MUSIC
Opening the black box of technology (Latour 1987;
Pinch and Bijker 1987) is a recurrent theme in science
and technology studies. Pinch and Trocco did so for the
Moog synthesiser. Inside the machine they found a
fascinating conundrum that could not be explained
either in engineering, or in music, or in popular culture
alone, but only by considering a wider set of social
factors and dynamics of conflict, consensus and
persistence (Pinch and Trocco 2002). Likewise, the case
study examined in this article highlights the complex
interactions between men and machines when music is
at stake. On the one hand, we have a musician, Pietro
Grossi, with his ideas and artistic aspirations; on the
other hand, there is a machine, the general-purpose
digital computer. The computer was not to be made
ex novo as the Moog synthesiser, but was reshaped
and transformed from a general-purpose machine into
a music-making technology. This was not easy: the
computer was not very user-friendly in the 1960s
and 1970s, music software had to be written from
scratch, and hardware for sound generation improved
or created.
One way to describe Grossi’s encounter with compu-
ter music is the one followed by a large part of the
literature available on the musician (Giomi 1995, 1996;
Mayr 2011). For this literature, Grossi is the lonely
pioneer who conquers the machine and accomplishes his
artistic ideals, despite the hostility of traditional music
institutions. The existence of Grossi’s allies (experts,
technicians, scientific institutions, computer companies)
is acknowledged, but who they are, what they do, why
they do it, does not really matter. Only the musician
Grossi receives attention. This article has told an
alternative history of Pietro Grossi’s involvement in
avant-garde music. In this story, Grossi is not a lonely
pioneer, but an enterprising member of scientificand
musical circles. On the one hand, he enrols helpers in
business and academia, and reshapes himself as a
programmer and scientific researcher. On the other,
he advertises his work at music festivals and teaches
electronic and computer music at the Conservatorio
Cherubini. In my story there are several human and
non-human actors alongside Grossi. They are computer
companies (OGE/GE and IBM); scientific institutions
(CNUCE, IEI, IROE); researchers (Ferruccio Zulian,
the IBM R&D staff in Pisa, CNUCE, IEI and IROE
researchers); technicians, if we go back to Grossi’s
involvement in electronic music; mainframes (GE-115,
IBM 7090, several System/360, IBM 1800, etc.); devices
for sound generation (digital-to-analog converters,
synthesisers, humble loudspeakers); software languages
(machine code, Fortran); data networks, etc.
And the musicians? Where are the musicians? There
are very few of them in my account because they were
not crucial in Grossi’s venture into computer music.
They could learn from him, and many of Grossi’s
students have made their name in electronic and com-
puter music. They could also offer him the opportunity
to present his research in public events: the Maggio
Musicale in Florence, the Autunno Musicale in Como,
the Biennale in Venice, etc. But they could not grant
294 Giuditta Parolini
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him access to mainframes or provide the expertise
necessary to use them. They were, rather, beneficiaries
of Grossi’s ability to build networks within the Italian
computer science community. That is the reason why
they remain in the background of my story. In the
foreground there are instead researchers, scientific
institutions and computer companies that tangibly
helped Grossi. Whenever possible, I have tried to name
them because they were not abstract categories –the
scientist, the technician, the manager, the research
centre –but real people and real institutions. In my
account, Grossi the musician turns into Grossi the
programmer or, better and according to his own
definition, the artisan of both informatics and music,
a person who can trade the cello fingerboard for
the computer keyboard without regrets. Eventually,
Grossi achieved his dream of making music without
musicians, as all the software packages developed in
Pisa included commands that enabled the computer to
play and compose music automatically. However,
this happened only because Grossi had been ready to
jump ship, acquire new skills, and craft alliances with
scientific and technological partners.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A preliminary draft of this article was presented at the
conference Alternative Histories of Electronic Music
(London, April 2016). I would like to thank the
conference participants for helpful comments received
there. The suggestions of two anonymous referees and
the English copyediting by Erika Szymanski further
improved the manuscript. I am grateful to Ferruccio
Zulian and Leonello Tarabella, who shared their
memories of working with Pietro Grossi with me, and
to the archivists at the University of California San
Diego and Indiana University, who made available to
me several documents related to Grossi.
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