Italian composer and pianist Ludovico Einaudi is one of classical music’s most streamed artists. His music draws from rock, jazz, American minimalism and from his teachers, avant-garde European composers Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) and Luciano Berio (1925-2003). While all of these influences are valid and present, what kept returning to my mind's eye after my conversation with Einaudi is how overwhelmingly present the influence of Stockhausen and Berio are in Einaudi’s conceptual process and how this connection was so clearly missed by this reviewer in The Guardian. Based on my conversation with Einaudi and in reaction to The Guardian article, I feel compelled to show the clear lineage from Stockhausen and Berio to Einaudi. In our conversation, Einaudi discusses his studies with Berio and Stockhausen, his new album 12 Songs From Home, how attending a Philip Glass Ensemble concert in New York in the 70’s opened his ears, and breaking down the barriers between popular and classical music.

Einaudi doesn’t need me proving how clearly he is applying some of the same concepts as his teachers Berio and Stockhausen using a different musical language. I don’t point out these connections to glorify Stockhausen, as he said some terrible things in addition to some beautiful things. I point these conceptual correlations out to show how some of the same philosophical concepts and overlapping approaches to composition can underlie works of music that use vastly different languages and appeal to different audiences. Diversity in musical language is not only interesting but imperative as different sonic landscapes resonate with different people.

Studying Nature In New Ways

“Music is more and more related to the most recent knowledge of Astronomy, in the state of Mathematics, of Biology, of Chemistry, Physics, where Nature is studied in a completely new way.” - Stockhausen (Source)

When speaking with Einaudi a couple weeks ago, he was looking out at the Alps. “Sometimes I think the natural forms are interesting to explore as abstract forms. I’m now looking out from my window and I see a mountain,” says Einaudi. “I would try and experiment to shape a piece of music with the shape of the mountain and see what kind of melody you could arrive to build following the shape of a natural element.” Einaudi commonly names pieces after nature and science to make the correlation between his process and his work clear. One of the more obvious examples of this is his album Elements, which includes titles including Whirling Winds, Mountain, and Four Dimensions. His album Seven Days Walking takes inspiration from fossils, butterflies, symmetrical patterns, birdsong, and the moon. 

A propensity towards studying nature comes from Einaudi’s studies with Berio as well as being clearly linked to the ideas of Stockhausen. Einaudi recalls being in the countryside with Berio and suddenly noticing a storm of birds that started to create a beautiful complex shape in the sky. “Berio was saying to me ‘It would be very interesting to make a transcription of this group of birds for a group of strings.’ This was one of the ideas that I keep with me as I explore different forms coming from nature, scientific processes, geometric processes, ideas connected to philosophy and literature,” says Einaudi. “This is one of the most important lessons that I kept from my years from Berio.”

In addition to being inspired by the natural world around him, part of Einaudi’s compositional process is a research period. “The research period is always very interesting because while you’re thinking about music you’re reading books that you haven’t read before. It’s always a chance to study and explore a new world that takes you to a beautiful journey,” says Einaudi. “You always end up more rich than when you start.”

Thinking Big

“The goal is to realize what we imagine.” - Stockhausen (Source)

One of Stockhausen’s most well known works is his Helikopter-Streichquartett: for string quartet, four helicopters with pilots, audio, and video. The sonic elements of the helicopter are combined with tremolo from the strings in the experimental and out of the box work. Creating and participating in these larger-than-life works is part of Einaudi’s practice as well. Einaudi famously wrote and performed his Elegy for the Arctic on a floating platform in front of a glacier. In the video, the sounds of the environment are just as important as the piano piece itself. 

Elegy for the Arctic was not a one-off way of thinking about performance for Einaudi. In his new album 12 Songs from Home, Einaudi recorded works written during the lockdown in Italy on his iPhone. He performed on his upright piano, which is normally used as a writing piano. This instrument hadn’t been tuned in a long time, had a key that stopped working, and audibly creaks. “I started to enjoy this piano very much and now it has become my favorite piano in the last weeks,” says Einaudi. “I don’t know why; I enjoy the softness and the fact that it has a sort of texture that’s almost like fabric. It feels sometimes that you’re not playing on strings but are playing on heavy cotton.”

This upright piano has its own distinct sonic qualities. I pointed out that performing this music on a different piano would result in different music and asked if he planned on pulling a Glenn Gould and taking not just a bench, but an entire piano with him when he is able to tour this album. He said yes. “I’ve been thinking about taking this piano on tour in the future. Of course it will be different,” says Einaudi. “The cracking for example - I could place the piano on a wooden structure that cracks if I want to keep that.”

Intuition and Instinct: Non-Thinking

“For Stockhausen, using intuition means opening one’s mind in order to receive more vibrations from the universe than one normally does. The use of intuition is extensively explained and explored by Stockhausen in many interviews from the early seventies; some of his pieces are dedicated to this technique.” - Stockhausen’s Paradigm

Stockhausen and Einaudi’s music are both inspired by studying the natural world and moving beyond the thinking mind. “I need the conceptual side and I enjoy this in my work. At the same time I need to be emotionally involved in what I do,” says Einaudi. “There’s an intellectual side that needs to be inspired by readings and ideas and a more instinctive side that is very important. I need both of the situations to be satisfied.”

Popular Music

“Whenever a pop composer tries to expand these durations from the customary two-to-three minutes, he is very unsuccessful, because he has no experience whatsoever in building large art forms. They add sequences of short events of different characteristics, and they cannot build a process because that requires a totally different skill and point of departure.” - Stockhausen (Source)

This is the point of departure. But even so, the influence is clear. One also has to wonder if Stockhausen would say this listening to the pop music of today. 

The connection here is that Stockhausen taught Einaudi how to manipulate form. Looking at Einaudi’s most recent album 12 Songs from Home, there’s a range in track length from 2:34 to 11:06. “I remember during my studies that I was very fascinated with all of Stockhausen’s ideas about microcosmos and how from a formula you can create a piece of music that lasts for hours because you expand all of the proportions into a bigger field,” says Einaudi. “But sincerely, most of his music I found at a certain point in terms of sonic fascination boring and couldn’t really enjoy it for more than 15 minutes. At the same time, I come from classical training.”

Hearing the Philip Glass Ensemble perform in New York in the late 70’s was a shifting moment for Einaudi. He found out about the performance by calling Glass’ home; Glass had changed his answering machine to the time and location of the performance in case callers wanted to attend. So Einaudi went. “Philip Glass was performing in an industrial building. The group was performing in a circle with a group of organs. I remember the performance very well; I was intrigued by this music because I started to feel a connection with popular music, electronic music, and the pop/rock world,” says Einaudi. “In a way, I felt there was a thread between the classical world and what was going on in the pop/rock scenes around the world. This started to attract me. At the same time, I was coming from a very traditional academic training in Italy so it took me some years to understand how exactly I could add pop/rock into my music.”

Performing in this in-between space has become Einaudi’s life work. “I quite like the approach of popular music. Everything is very intimate. Popular music is talking to everybody. I like great ideas but the ideas come to me without barriers. I don’t like cultural frontiers or divisions,” says Einaudi. “This is the point I started to see coming from an avant-garde world of music. I started to understand if I could change something in my world and create something that could bring those different worlds into one. In a way I made it possible with my musical language, I think other composers did the same. I wanted to see if it was possible to have the great forms of music together with an approach that is very simple and talks to everybody through music.”

Perspectives on New Music

From Perspectives on New Music: 

“It is clear that the ‘big shift’ in the early seventies in Stockhausen’s writings is nothing more than a shift of attention in his paradigm from the technical side to the more philosophical side; but it still is the same paradigm.

The paradigm approach has not only made it possible to detect this consistency, but also points to a basically new approach in musicology, especially in cognitive musicology. Instead of analyzing a composer’s work in terms of style, in which the pieces themselves are the indisputable sources, the paradigm approach takes the values, principles, and images as main sources. This gives rise to creating “possible” or “virtual” music, based on such a paradigm, independent of the existing works of the analyzed composer. It not only aims at understanding or explaining a composer’s work, but goes beyond that by opening up new paths in music.”

Ludovico Einaudi

(Bio courtesy of artist’s website)

Luminous, emotive, effortlessly lyrical and always supremely refined the music and performance of Ludovico Einaudi have attracted an ever growing audience over the last two decades whose diversity and devotion are without parallel. He has released a series of chart-topping albums with sales of over a million copies, sells out the most prestigious concert halls worldwide, composed a string of award-winning film scores and routinely tops audience polls becoming an internet phenomenon. 

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