An Index of Metals was commissioned by the Fondation Royaumont and received its first performance on 3 October 2003 in the Festival Voix Nouvelles in Cercy-Pontoise (France). Both the full score (Ricordi, Milano 2003) and an audio/video recording (Cypres, 2005, CYP5622) have been published. The work is written for a soprano soloist, an instrumental ensem­ble – with electric guitar, bass guitar and keyboard, but also the voice and acoustic instruments are all amplified – and electronic devices. The video component involves the projection of images on three separate screens (measuring 3 x 4 metres) placed alongside one another. Fausto Romitelli (Gorizia, 1963 – Milano, 2004) was responsible for the music and the overall conception, Paolo Pachini (Roma, 1964) made the video (in collaboration with Leonardo Romoli – Firenze, 1972), and Kenka Lèkovich (Fiume, 1962) wrote the text.

The composer and the two video makers were interdependent in the work’s composition but they nonetheless maintained a degree of autonomy. Following the initial joint planning, in which the poetic motivations and main technical orientations were established, Pachini – who maintained daily telephone contact with Romitelli – made most of the video. Thus the composer already had this to refer to when he came to write the music, while the video itself was subsequently modified to conform to the music (Pachini 2011). For example, one fundamental datum was the duration of the musical macrosections, which imposed major cuts on the video. However, aside from the restrictions of this macro-level, the creation and elaboration of the im­ages and the rhythm adopted in the editing were entirely decided by Pachini (and this did in fact involve some slight décalages with respect to the macro­sections). Nonetheless, across the various planes of communication the work undoubtedly presents a single and coherent overall intent, and this is borne out by several features. In the first place the authors deliberately avoided any pedantic inter-media correspondence.[2] The overall coherence perceptible to the spectator has to be identified at the deep level – thus tending to elude analysis and require the exercise of interpretation – where the structure takes on sense, and the formal data are connotated by extra-formal mean­ings.[3] In the second place it should be borne in mind that, of all the video types, abstract video is aesthetically closest to music, while the radically dis­tinct nature of the individual media proves all the more critical, not to say blatant, whenever the tendency is toward assimilation.

The sections that constitute An Index of Metals – which in the recording (Romitelli – Pachini 2005) have an overall duration of about 50 minutes – are clearly separated, even though they follow on one from one another without a break. The succession is as follows (reading from left to right: track number on the DVD; title in the dvd; title in the score; duration on the CD – practically equivalent to the DVD; whether or not the voice features; bars in the score):

The macroform of An Index of Metals is clearly apparent both to the eye and to the ear. It involves an initial and a concluding part, Introduzione and Finale with Cadenza, which frame the work in a very traditional manner. Within this frame the sections that make up the body of the work alternate strictly be­tween pieces on a significant scale (in terms of duration, structural density, use of the solo voice), involving not surprisingly the enunciation of the poetic text, and less substantial pieces (exclusively instrumental, simpler and briefer) pro­viding a respite between the phases of greater intensity (we shall deal below with the only exception to this strict alternation, the Adagio).

At this level of macrosections there is a clear inter-media correspon­dence, with each new musical piece being associated with video parts that are also recognisable and practically self-contained. However, at the inter­mediate and lower levels of formal duration the audiovisual synchronizations constitute an exception with respect to the prevalent asynchrony (nonetheless synchronizations occur, for example, in the following cases: numerous and regular in Introduzione; barely perceptibly in the final part of Drowningirl II, from about 7' 30'', where the reiterated convergence of the instrumental polyphony on the unison corresponds with a minimum of décalage to the brief freeze of the image on the three screens; and in Hellu­cination 2/3, although here the perception of any regularity is even more distorted).

In fact a concordance between music and video emerges not so much in the parameters of vertical temporality as in the construction of horizontal temporality, and this aspect is so pervasive as to constitute the hallmark of the work’s inter-media constitution. In both media we find a prevalently pro­cessual organization of form, i.e. one that:

1. contemplates some sort of morphological mutation over time (this might seem obvious, but it cannot be taken for granted either in music or in contemporary videoart);
2. ensures that such a mutation comes about in a linear, gradual and substantially continuous fashion;
3. often exhibits such a mutation, making it the formal focus of interest;
4. often matches the perceptible process to an underlying constructive principle which will also be processual, so that it is actually the lat­ter that is exhibited;
5. often gives the process an automatic, mechanical character, mean­ing that its execution is apparently not guided by a compositional will extraneous to the generative rule.

In the field of music this organization, which can be called ‘writing by processes’, is a technical and stylistic approach which in recent decades has been adopted across a whole range of quite disparate movements such as minimalism (Reich 1968), spectralism (Baillet 2001) and the post-serial Italian school, notably among the successors of Donatoni and Berio (Lom­bardi Vallauri 2007, pp. 148-150). The derivation of its underlying principle, which consists in basing the generation and development of material on au­tomatic combinatory devices, can probably be traced back to serialism (in the broad sense of the term), and also to the operative paradigm of electronic music and in general to the propensity of contemporary composition to adopt a scientific and technological approach, meaning that the artist feels comfortable using categories such as automatism, permutation, continuum, entropy, and so on. Romitelli in particular made an explicit acknowledgment of his critical adhesion to the technological vocation of his times (Romitelli 2001).

In the video component of An Index of Metals the adoption of the pro­cessual form is expressly derived from music: in fact, as we have seen, this was Romitelli’s technical and poetic intention. With Index he aimed on one hand, for the first time in his career, to expand his poetic of 'violence' to a global dimension, composing a 'mass of the senses', a multisensorial im­mersion (also by means of such technical devices as surround sound and video projection on multiple screens) analogous to the 'light shows' in vogue in the 1960s and 70s (Romitelli 2003). On the other hand he was also intere­sted in producing a work featuring all the attributes of complexity and structural coherence typical of the academic tradition: featuring, in this case, not only intra- but also inter-media coherence. One expedient which contri­buted to this goal was the digital codification of both sound and image, since, thanks to their computing power, electronic devices are uniquely efficient in generating processual perceptive objects (which the human author is able to control and manage). It was also undoubtedly a help that, prior to branching out as video-maker, Pachini was himself a composer, proficient in the latest musical techniques, enabling him to honour Romitelli’s aspirations to the full.

Thus in several sections of An Index of Metals we find processes which are gradual (2), formal (3), generative (4) and in differing degrees automatic (5) in both the musical and the video strands. Their presence takes on diffe­rent significances in the categorically distinct planes of the audiovisual experience across the whole spectrum ranging from the objective datum to the spiritual content. In structural terms the first type of process to emerge concerns the quantity and complexity of the material used within the tempo­ral unit, and thus which takes the form – whether increasing or decreasing – of densification or, less often, of rarefaction. On the semiotically interme­diate plane, if the structural forms of the music and the video become associated with other structural forms such as those of the physical reality, the same process can be interpreted as the tendency to order/entropy, ascent/fall, aggregation/disgregation. But lastly, on the plane of freer con­notations (and giving recognition to the importance of the verbal text in the inter-media sum of the parts) what comes ideally to predominate in the work is the process of corruption, in the broadest sense, which includes chemical and organic alteration and degeneration, contamination, both physical and mental illness, death and decomposition.

[2] What Cook calls “conformance” (Cook 1998, pp. 98-102).

[3] What Adorno called the ‘spiritual content’ of art, differing both from its explicit content and from its sensible aspect (Adorno [1970] 1975, pp. 147-150, 218-219).