A.: In your artistic biography you come across as being a ‘composer’, you made your first appearances in public in 1962, not in a concert hall but in some of the main contemporary art galleries of the time: at the Galleria Blu in Milan with ‘Gesto e segno’, at the Galleria La Salita in Rome with ‘Gesti sul piano’ and again in Rome, at the Galleria Numero, with ‘Musica e Segno’.

C.: During the fifties I led a private artistic life. I was writing and drawing but I also composed and many of my compositions were not written on music sheets but on any old paper and often with geometric lines.
I enjoyed being in the company of poet friends such as Lamberto Pignotti and Sergio Salvi, who used to take me to Paszkowski, where I was accepted at the table of Bigongiari and Luzi. That’s where I met Giorgio Bonsanti, editor of the magazine Letteratura, which later published my article, Il suono non è suono (Rome, 91/92, 1968), and when I read it now I’m surprised at how clear my ideas were even then – they weren’t so different from now. During those years I basically led an artist’s life in cafés: I was part of the poets’ café circle – because you could do anything at Paszkowski – you could arrive with a drawing, a composition, recite some poetry…
During one of these evenings, at the Palazzo di Parte Guelfa in Florence, I took part in a debate between Russian composers, who were going around bad-mouthing Schönberg and the twelve-note system. It was there that I met Pietro Grossi, who taught cello at the Conservatorio Cherubini, and later on in the evening he invited me to his house. That invitation changed my life as an artist. Grossi gave me a structure that was more scholastic, more bureaucratic I would say. He wasn’t remotely interested in my music. He didn’t want to give his opinion about how good it was, he was interested in principles. When I told him I wrote music according to my own principles, of maths, arithmetic, combinations, a bit like the twelve-note system, albeit an extremely free one, in a serial way, he realized I was that kind of composer and that was enough for him. He’d been very timidly trying to explain for ages at the Conservatory that one can write music with a combinatorial technique.
In 1961 he got me involved in the foundation of a musical association ‘Vita musicale contemporanea’. This wasn’t just a theoretical association – it really existed, and we organized concerts, conferences and debates. It was through my coordinating work that I came into contact with many artists, including Sylvano Bussotti, with whom I began to work closely; but it was mostly from his friend Heinz Klaus Metzger, an expert of philosophy and contemporary music, that I got an enormous amount of information. I took as much as I could from him because I was greedy for knowledge, I wanted to understand the music of others. At a distance, it was this knowledge that enabled me to get into Fluxus. Because in Fluxus we don’t ask a lot but we do ask people who know what’s going on in the world, people who are very well informed.

From a conversation with Giuseppe Chiari, Andrea Alibrandi: interview of 25 January 2006 in the catalog