Percussion-Art
Within the European scene, Italy, too, can claim a representation of percussionist-artists that, while not vast, is certainly distinguished. Andrea Centazzo, born in Udine in 1948 and residing in California since 1992, is a complete musician: composer, improviser, bandleader, and multimedia artist. In 1976, he founded the prolific Ictus Records and shortly thereafter the Mitteleuropa Orchestra. Over the decades, his body of work has spanned a wide range—from pure improvisation to the composition of theatrical works and film scores, from creating percussion instruments to writing theoretical texts. Like the other leading European figures discussed previously, Centazzo’s discography is extensive, boasting collaborations with musicians such as Giorgio Gaslini, Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, John Zorn, Giancarlo Schiaffini, Fred Frith, and countless others. In my previously cited essay included in Quaderno del Jazz 24, I briefly addressed his multimedia performance work; here, however, I will focus more specifically on his graphic and pictorial output.
In the 1980s, Centazzo began moving from traditional scores to graphic elaborations that, while still offering cues and directions for performance, also take on an autonomous visual value, using only black and white to create sinuous paths of imaginative elegance. In some cases, the notation appears on lines of undulating staves, populated by geometric symbols, tangles of lines, spots, and scattered notes, all laid out with a sparse design that produces an effect of restrained, intimate lightness, almost intellectual in character. In other works, a sharper geometric structure emerges, suggesting a more clearly defined generative idea at its core. A series of such works, titled Immaginografie, was exhibited in 1984 at the Galleria Bonomo in Bari—and, I presume, elsewhere as well.
In the same period, Centazzo also created colorful graphic scores using mixed media, often cutting and pasting sections according to compositional balances that can at times appear somewhat rigid. Before and after the development of the Immaginografie, one may also come across, though more rarely, pencil or pastel drawings and tempera paintings on white card stock, entirely unrelated to musical notation or performance. Here we encounter pictorial works that differ in compositional structure and chromatic-timbral value—almost attempts at swift, colorful gestural expression that at times stand in contrast to a heavier, more problematic informal intent.
However, it was between 1983 and 1987 that Centazzo developed his most cohesive series of paintings: sometimes small or large rectangular works, sometimes torn into fragments freely arranged on the wall to form a kind of colorful constellation. The support used is always manuscript paper, which is crumpled and then flattened before being sprayed with light, grazing strokes of paint. The result—though achieved with an entirely different technique—is similar to what Corrado Cagli produced in his cycle of oil-on-paper works in the late 1950s and early 1960s, which, with an almost hyperrealistic skill, mimic the look of a crumpled page.
This graphic and pictorial material is now preserved at the Biblioteca delle Arti – Sezione di Musica e Spettacolo of the University of Bologna, to which Centazzo donated his personal archive. This includes, in addition to his artworks, posters, scores, recordings, reviews, books, and more. The documentation, covering his entire career from the 1960s to the present, has been cataloged and archived. In 2012, the library inaugurated the “Andrea Centazzo Collection,” the catalog of which is available online.
“I battartisti,” Libero Farnè, Quaderno del Jazz 25, June 2025
Phenomenology of Sound and Sign
Brief Digressions on Composing in Five Short Panels and a Coda
by Sergio Armaroli
First Panel | PENTA-GRAMMAR
Andrea Centazzo’s graphic sign arises from an imagined soundscape, born from the five lines of an infinite staff—structured compositionally and conceived as a grammar of sound-sign: an open work, a penta-grammar. The score is thus rediscovered in the gesture and, through the gesture, released into a pictorial sign.
Second Panel | FROM POINT TO SOUND
The point as a generative nucleus of movement: beyond the note as mere indication of pitch—a checkmate to convention and an invention in act, a genesis of forms: “beyond the visible”…
…where Andrea Centazzo’s penta-grammar reclaims certain formal principles of the twentieth century, liberating them, with irony, into the celebration of improvisation as presence and embodiment. Free forms for possible sounds.
Third Panel | PERCUSSION AS TOTALITY
The sign is the pictorial counterpart of the gesture that strikes, hits, caresses, brushes the sonic material in its shaping movement: creating totality. We can observe a process unfolding through the sign, which becomes the symbolic substitute of the gesture: thus, the art of a percussionist is, by definition, “gestural.” Gesture is sublimated into image as a possible whole, laid out before our eyes to continually suggest infinite possibilities of execution.
Fourth Panel | OF SHADOW
The graphic sign that takes shape in painting as the shadow of the video. Echoes of sound, at last. From the mechanical eye of the camera to the hand that traces and erases: from the score to the sonic space, a “cartography of the imaginary” in search of a two-dimensionality of crisis. In Andrea Centazzo’s work, painting is grafted into shadow and emerges from shadow as a possible beyond. From this possibility, the pictorial gesture takes shape in Imaginographies of restrained lightness, leaving a trace.
Fifth Panel | INTERVAL IN THE SILENCE OF FORM
At the edge of the interval, in the silence of form, the rigid compositional structure of the page dissolves into the gesture, from the grid to the fluid space of sound. Drawing, hidden within melodic invention, lives synchronously with the color of sound: a vivid, almost metallic pictorial timbre of multiple possible imaginary gamelans and forms named close to the body, from the hand that traces rhythms plastically suggested by the raised textures of the paper, dialectically renouncing the two-dimensionality of notation which becomes the pretext for a song (Cjant): evoking maps.
CODA
…where sound signifies nothing beyond its presence in act, the image suggests a further passage. Likewise, Andrea Centazzo’s visual work unfolds in a spiral movement of inward, generative growth, opening up new possibilities of matter as a Phenomenology of Sound and Sign.