
When Boston Universityâs Center for New Music was founded in 2012, one of its aims was to provide a cooperative focal point for the cityâs abundant but disparate new-music happenings. Another goal, though, was to offer a venue for trends that are happening elsewhere â especially Europe â that would otherwise go unnoticed here.
Thatâs the thinking behind the Italian-born composer Pierluigi Billoneâs upcoming residency. Billone, who lives in Vienna, is a student of Salvatore Sciarrino, who was in residence at BU during the centerâs inaugural season. Like Sciarrino, as well as the German composer Helmut Lachenmann, Billone emphasizes unusual timbres and textures, and focuses on how instruments can be played in unusual ways â advancing what Joshua Fineberg, the Centerâs director, called âthe sound toolkit of music.â
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Billone, though, brings this process to an extreme. His music is born from a complete immersion into the instruments for which he composes, and from a fierce imaginative freedom at what they can produce. The results are wildly strange, an extension even of what are called âextended techniquesâ into a new, and very personal, realm of sound creation.
âHe essentially learns the instrument to be able to reinvent the instrumental technique and make this entirely personal version of a bassoon, or a viola,â Fineberg explained. âAnd he writes this music that, honestly, when you hear it, you canât quite believe it.â
Everything about Billoneâs compositions is personal, especially his scores, which are written in a gorgeous notation that can seem like an obscure hieroglyph to the uninitiated. To get a sense of how sound and script go together, check out the recording of âLegno.Edre II.Edreâ by the bassoonist Chris Watford (who will do master classes and forums during the BU residency) and look at the opening of the score on Billoneâs website (www.pierluigibillone.com). The union of the eerily beautiful sounds and the ornate calligraphy makes the piece seem like a message from an alien world. The music seems not so much composed as dragged from deep in the composerâs subconscious.
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And thatâs what makes it so extraordinary, Fineberg explained. It isnât just the riotously new sounds, but also the emotional charge they can produce.
âI think the reason Billoneâs music is special is that he has this really wonderful sense of ritual and pacing and timing,â he said. âHis pieces tend to be fairly long, and very dramatic, laid out in a way that creates a sort of intense dramatic situation. And so for me thereâs really something of an exotic religious ritual to it â this crazy religion thatâs never existed with these slowly changing drones, and these unfamiliar sounds and strange locations of things.â
Fineberg credits New York-based Talea Ensemble with sparking his interest in Billoneâs music. âHis music is really part of his body,â said percussionist Alex Lipowski, Taleaâs executive director. âItâs so central to his being. His whole life revolves around creating this heavy experimental music.â

After hearing Billoneâs âMani.De Leonardisâ for automobile springs and glass at Darmstadt in 2008, Lipowski wrote to the composer, asking to play it. He didnât hear back for about two weeks, and wondered if heâd done something wrong.
âHeâs so careful about who receives his music,â Lipowski said. âHe doesnât just send scores out because if heâs not there to work with people, if he doesnât have his hands in how the music is created, it just doesnât work.â Once a musician knows what Billone wants, viewing his scores is like âlooking at sound under a microscope.â
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Talea has since brought Billone to the United States and played a number of his works, including some American premieres. At first, Lipowski said, the experience was intimidating. âHe stands over you with this sort of stiff, cold face,â he said. âHeâs very serious. Once he opens up, heâs actually a really beautiful person â warm and generous and emotional. But he has this hard soul, because his music doesnât survive when itâs played not necessarily badly, but just incorrectly.â
That kind of intensive commitment on both sides of the performer-composer relationship has so far restricted the spread of Billoneâs works to a small group of initiates. Lipowski mentioned the Viennese new-music group Klangforum Wien as his biggest champions. âWe really admire what theyâve done.â
Thatâs why the BU residency is both necessary for the spread of his work and a slightly risky experiment. âBasically, his whole career, heâs worked with this handful of players who have invested in his music and believe in it and spend months and years,â said Fineberg, who also noted that when he discussed the residency with Billone, the composer asked him to âbring in this player and this player.â
âAnd I said that for me, the whole point of this is, we take people who donât play your music, and we help them get started. And by the end, maybe they still wonât be doing it great, but 10 years from now theyâll have this experience and if they want to dive into it, they wonât be starting at zero.â
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David Weininger can be reached at globeclassicalnotes@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @davidgweininger.