Giuseppe Chiari (Florence, 1926 – 2007).
He studied engineering and mathematics at the University of Florence, in parallel with music and composition. In 1947, he established the first Jazz Club organizing jam sessions inside the University.
Attracted by John Cage’s experiments in avant-garde music, in 1961, he founded the Vita Musicale Contemporanea an association for musical research, alongside Pietro Grossi. Strongly influential for the development of his inquiry was Silvano Busotti and the fruitful contacts with Gruppo 70 movement, and the strong relationships built with the Fluxus movement based in New York to which he formally adhered by participating in 1962 in the Fluxus Internationale Festspiele in Wiesbaden, where Frederic Rzewski executed publicly his ‘Gestures on the piano’ performance. He was also invited to Documenta V, Kassel (1972), and to Venice Biennale (1972, 1976, 1978), and Sidney Biennale (1990).
In his inquiry fundamental is the relationship between music and art, which for Chiari, is expressed in a “total” way because the total is the artist’s vision of the world. He was an advocate of the need for interaction between music, language, gesture, and image, devising an expressive-musical system consisting of short pieces, which, flowing together from time to time without a predetermined order, gave shape to complex musical pièces. He thus composed “action music,” based on a complex method of performance; in fact, alongside traditional instruments, he made use of random sound elements, assumed as essential components of his musical language: Casualty and improvisation, the constants of his research. He composed “action music” based on the mixture of traditional music components with casual and indeterminate elements such as water, leaves, and stones, that become founding elements of actions based on improvisation and casual encounters, enhancing the power of freedom and indetermination within the artistic practice (Gesti sul piano, 1962; La Strada, 1965; Suonare la Città, 1965).
