From the liner notes
…I encountered the 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; no one ever joins any place; we are always walking).
Teresa Rampazzi describes in this way her encounter with the electronic synthesis. It was the year 1952, when she first participated to the Ferienkurse für Neue Musik at Darmstadt (she went several other times later). At that time Teresa Rossi (this was her maiden name) was 37. She was a pianist, performer of avant-garde music and chorus singer; she was married with 2 children.
The 1952 edition was one of the most famous edition of the Ferienkurse: Boulez declares Schoenberg’s death, there were the first concerts der jungen Generation (Teresa was in the chorus of España en el corazón by Luigi Nono). Nevertheless, a small electronic instrument (a frequency generator) struck her instead. She had understood that that was the only way to completely reject tonal music.
...so in that [Marienhöhe] Concert Hall, for the first time Eimert showed to the public a small frequency generator. Musicians looked at it suspiciously and did not attach too much importance to it. For me, that little, tricky object could certainly grow, multiply, shock the world, that is the musical world.
Teresa comes back in Padova changed. But she takes a few years to finally abandon her instrumental activity. Meanwhile, in her lounge she meets composers, musicians and theoreticians (Niccolò Castiglioni, Franco Donatoni, Severino Gazzelloni, René Leibowitz, Heinz-Klaus Metzger). In Padova, she plays in 1959 during a concert with John Cage, Metzger and S. Bussotti. In 1963 she organizes an electroacoustic music concert.
But she completely carries our her plan only in 1964, when she meets Ennio Chiggio, a visual artist member of the Gruppo Enne. “From Darmstadt she took every time with her just moods, perturbation, never detailed reports; and we tried together to elaborate them”. Chiggio worked at that time with a company that produces electronic materials: he obtained a low-frequency generator, a semiprofessional Philips recorder, and a mixer. Teresa contacted him to borrow a mixer and a tape player for an audition]. In 1978 – in a interview with Michela Mollia from which we propose here several long quotations, Teresa describes her first experiments as follows:
…you cannot ask a newborn baby to make a long speech. I started to babble when I enthusiastically decided to use the [Eimert’s generator]. I mixed just short signals for some few minutes. They were not phrases nor words. I shut down and sold the piano, though I’ve almost destroyed it during my performances with John Cage. And I bought the same little frequency generator I’ve seen at Darmstadt. With it and a mono tape recorder, I tried to make my first electron experiment.
Their first experimental work was a sound collage made together with Ennio Chiggio, which functioned as musical background for the vernissage of an exposition by the Gruppo Enne at the Biennale in Venice. On 22nd May 1965 – together with the arrive of Serenella Marega and a young engineer, Memo Alfonsi – the N.P.S. (Nuove Proposte Sonore) group presented itself in a concert with a programmatic manifesto.
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