Perspectives on Sylvano Bussotti

A score can be a stage, a drawing, a body – and sometimes all three at once.

Sylvano Bussotti (1931–2021) was a composer, painter, director, costume designer and poet. From the Darmstadt Summer Courses of 1958 onward, his calligraphic scores – among them the Five Piano Pieces for David Tudor – unsettled serial modernism. Just as unsettling was his openly lived homosexuality, at a time when the avant-garde preferred asceticism and structure.

Julia Freund, Federica Marsico and Matteo Nanni gather ten contributions on this body of work. The essays trace Bussotti’s self-staging in La Passion selon Sade (1965) and Lorenzaccio (1972); they read the early letters to Arrigo Benvenuti, in which „Silvano“ becomes „Sylvano“; they examine queer desire in Nottetempo (1976) and in the unperformed Izumi Shikibu ; they reconstruct the friction with the Partito Comunista Italiano around I semi di Gramsci and the friendship with Alain Daniélou. Further chapters concern Julio organum Julii , the performance practices of David Tudor and the Kontarsky brothers, and the freehand line that dissolves the staff into scenery.

The volume draws on newly accessible holdings in Milan, Florence, Berlin and Los Angeles. Arising from a conference at the University of Gießen, it closes with Paul Attinello’s outlook on open archives and unfinished questions.

A scholarly anthology in English that keeps analysis, archival work and artistic practice in conversation.