Pietro Grossi was an Italian composer who saw the future of music before it happened. His work in computer programming, digital music production, and generative algorithms paved a new dawn for music, even if his work still seems centuries ahead. A classically trained cellist, Grossi did not simply utilize computers as tools for transcription or recording, but for generating music. For example, his 1961 piece “Progretto 2-3” consists entirely of high-pitched tone loops, directed solely by a computer algorithm. Such a process sparks a debate that humans could only even conceive within the past 50 years: what makes music human? Scholars and Romantics the world over praise music as a genuinely human innovation. The manipulation of sound for the sake of human expression couldn’t be tailored to the cold-hearted stoicism of a machine… could it?
Grossi proved that machines could not only dream, but also expand upon what the music world had already seen. His 1969 work “Collage” created music that would be regenerated and rearranged each time it was performed. In 1980, his “Computer Music” transcription project transcribed and performed improvised elaborations upon the work of Bach, Chopin, Satie and more. The genius of the masters was boiled down to nothing more and nothing less than cold, hard computation, an array of numbers and symbols that could be analyzed and reinterpreted by something as “dull” and “lifeless” as a computer. It’s certainly odd to realize that a construct so valuable to so many can be boiled down to one big math problem. But then again, isn’t it a bit comforting to know that one of humanity’s most valuable and mysterious achievements is to a certain degree simultaneously completely rational and brilliantly magical?
