9 April 1984. Tom Johnson Festival. Padua, Auditorium Pollini.
Right from the start, the idea of the new and the desire to astonish by breaking the mould as it were, have guided our choices. Plenty of space was given to gesture, drama, free improvisation and generally to everything that other musicians of classical training were not involved in. We even dedicated a festival to extreme minimalism, the kind of music for which Tom Johnson had already coined the name in his articles in the Village Voice, New York.
As for Johnson, in 1984 we performed, with Maurizio Berti’s scenography, his exhilarating theatrical work, The Four Note Opera, an hour and a half of music rigorously composed on four notes (A, B, D and E), and then we more or less performed his entire works. We were in Padua, not London or Milan, yet the festival was a great success and the numerous audience realized that some contemporary music was in fact enjoyable. Here’s another keyword of our experience: enjoyment. One really enjoyed searching for and experimenting with new music.
22 June 1983. Padua, Palazzo Moroni courtyard.
Above all, in those early years there coexisted in more or less all of us, together with the desire to enjoy ourselves, the excitement of experimentation. We tried to create genuine musical ventures, with many ideas and few means, challenging audiences who attended our concerts. We explored new ways of proposing musical experiences, leaving behind the canons of the classical concert, mixing the cards of the various experiences and abilities that each of us brought to the group. Improvisation, imagery, acting, movement, electronics and the interaction with audiences were the characteristics of our performances in this first period. Experiences that settled and matured made possible the creation of many of our productions in the following couple of decades.
23 and 24 July 1986. Padua, Palazzo Moroni courtyard.
It was precisely in 1984, the same year of the Tom Johnson Festival, that we created a festival of music and new technologies. At the beginning it was called Computer Music Festival. Subsequently, we changed the name to Computer Art Festival, as together with computer music, increasingly more space was given to computer video, poetry and dance events. And the experience of the Computer Art Festival would have been a lengthy common thread of the entire organizational history of Interensemble.
B. Beggio. From Interensemble 3.0 – About its thirty years