TheDizionario Biografico degli Italiani of the Italian Enciclopedia Treccani (originally published: 1929), is dedicated to notable Italian people (composers, artists, politicians, historians, etc.) past and present. It has been an honour for me to contribute with an entry on Teresa Rampazzi.
The article contains a biography of Teresa Rampazzi, updated with the latest developments of my research; a list of works and writings by Rampazzi; a brief description of the Rampazzi archives’; the lists of references.
She was not a feminist and she did not recriminate sexual differences in the artistic world. She once said: “just as there are many women who have a demanding profession, the same is true in music […]. Unwittingly I risked compromising my musical interests when I got married. But they were much too important for me” [Teresa Rampazzi in interview with Luisa Galanti: L. Galanti, L’altra metà del rigo. La donna e la composizione femminile oggi in Italia, Imola,Grafiche Galeati, 1983, p.66].
If someone asked her if there is a feminine way to make music, she answered: “absolutely not. There is neither male nor female music. There are pieces composed by men which seem to be composed by a woman and viceversa, if by ‘feminine’ you think of something sweet, elegant, delicate. But a woman can be as vigorous as a man, or even more!” (Ivi, p. 72).
In was wonderful last Friday Ferbuary 3rd, to be interviewd by Reinhold Friedl. With me, the lovable Francesca Rampazzi, daughter of Teresa. Reinhold Friedl is doing a radio show dedicated to Teresa Rampazzi for the Radio WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk) in Cologne, that will be broadcast in the next months.
Francesca told us an astonishing series of anecdotes about her mother, and her connections with Maderna, Cage, Stockhausen, Metzger, Bussotti, Chiggio, and many others.
I contributed with many writings to this emerging literature, since my Master thesis in 2000, and I’m proud of this. The first articles dedicated to her dates back to 1979, with an interview Teresa Rampazzi gave to M. Mollia.
Many of these items are available online. Enjoy the reading!
Last tuesday on Late Junction, BBC Radio 3, Fiona Tarkington played one track from Teresa Rampazzi’ Diana Baylon.
Listen again here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07z7cys – BBC Radio 3 – Late Junction, Fiona Talkington with Sam Lee.
The programme stays up on listen again for one week. Enjoy!
Fiona Tarkington gives a beautiful introduction to the piece which starts at 1’18’ and the piece begins at 1’22’20”.
Louise Gray gave Teresa Rampazzi’s album IMMAGINI PER DIANA BAYLON (1972) a terrific review in the September Issue of The Wire: Adventures in Modern Music.
Teresa Rampazzi – IMMAGINI PER DIANA BAYLON (1972): new Die Schachtel album. Project by: Laura Zattra / Produced by: Fabio Carboni, Bruno Stucchi / Digitization and Digital Archiving: Sergio Canazza / Mastering: Giuseppe Ielasi / Design: dinamomilano.com
Heath sine and square wave generator from WDR radio
In 1952, 1954 and 1956 Teresa Rampazzi attends the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music. During the 1952 edition she has the chance to hear Herbert Eimert’s speech, where he presents the equipment from the Studio for Electronic Music of the West German Radio in Cologne. Teresa is 37 years old, she still is an avant-garde pianist, but it is a small electronic instrument (a frequency generator) that strikes her. She understands that sound synthesis is the only way to go beyond the rigidity of tonal music. In her own words:
…I arrived at electronic music exactly at its birth, listening to its cries in the large Marienhöhe concert hall, in Darmstadt. (Actually the term ‘arrived’ is not correct because we never actually arrive anywhere, we are always on our way). […] So in that [Marienhöhe] Concert Hall, for the first time Eimert showed the public a small frequency generator. Musicians looked at it suspiciously and did not attach too much importance to it. For me, that little, insidious object would certainly grow, multiply and change [1].
1952 Ferienkurse edition is also one of the most famous editions: Boulez declares the “death” of Arnold Schoenberg’s aesthetics, the new generation of composers –Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, Karel Goeyvaerts, Bruno Maderna, Luigi Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Bernd Alois Zimmermann – starts to claim the musical world’s attention. (and Teresa is for the occasion a member of the chorus of España en el corazón by Luigi Nono) [2].
The Electronic Music Studio at Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne was founded by the composers Werner Meyer-Eppler, Robert Beyer, and Herbert Eimert. EImert was also the studios first director. To read more on Herbert Eimert and the WDR Electronic Music Studio visit 120years.net
[1] Teresa Rampazzi, “Piccolo discorso con Michela”, Autobiografia della musica contemporanea (Michela Mollia ed.), Cosenza, Lerici, 1979, pp. 122-126.
[2] Antonio Trudu, La “scuola” di Darmstadt. I Ferienkurse dal 1946 a oggi, Milano, Ricordi-Unicopli, 1992, pp. 73-82.
As with the spellbinding Musica Endoscopica, this issue of Immagini Per Diana Baylon – one of her three known soundtracks for art installations – helps to place Teresa as Italy’s answer to Daphne Oram; that is, a pioneering female experimenter operating in a male dominated field since the ’50s, and an artist/musician/technician who was magnetically drawn to the emerging possibilities of analogue electronics (although she would also expand into computer composition as soon as the opportunity arose).
Here is what bookmat.com says about this new issue I curated in collaboration with Die Schachtel [boomkat.com/products/immagini-per-diana-baylon]. Remastered from the original tapes, foil-blocked metallic print jacket with fold-out insert of liner notes and photographs.
Teresa Rampazzi’s third vinyl record with Die Schachtel (2016) contains just one music work. IMAGES FOR/IMMAGINI PER DIANA BAYLON is a stereophonic piece of 31’50”, to be played in loop during Diana Baylon’s exhibition. The music is a soundscape for the exhibition Diana Baylon, 23 November – 14 December 1972 (catalog by Lara-Vinca Masini) held at the Modern Art Gallery Il Fiore in Florence in 1972 (http://www.dianabaylon.it/mostre/). Diana Baylon (1920-2013), a friend of Rampazzi’s, was a cross-disciplinary artist from Florence who transformed various materials into figurative and, later in the ‘60s, abstract and programmatic art objects (ceramics, glass, metal, paper, paintings, graphics, jewellery).
IMMAGINI PER DIANA BAYLON was the third time that Teresa Rampazzi realized music for an exhibition. The first was also the very first experimental composition that Rampazzi and Ennio Chiggio realized in 1965, a sound collage for the opening of an exhibition of the Gruppo Enne at the International Biennale d’Arte in Venice. The second soundscape
piece, Environ (1970), was realized by Rampazzi for the presentation of a 360° round modular couch in foamed resin designed by Chiggio, presented at a furniture shop in Padova in 1970.
Vinyl Project by: Laura Zattra / Produced by: Fabio Carboni, Bruno Stucchi / Digitization and Digital Archiving: Sergio Canazza / Mastering: #GiuseppeIelasi / Design: dinamomilano.com
