Fabio Machiavelli (Pisa, 1993) is a composer whose activity spans composition, performance, and instrument building.
He studied Percussion Instruments with Jonathan Faralli (MA in Percussion Instruments, 2018), and Composition with Giovanni Verrando (MA in Composition, 2022), Claudio Vaira, Fabio De Sanctis De Benedictis (BA in Composition, 2020), and others. He continued his education at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena with Salvatore Sciarrino, receiving the Diploma di Merito in 2024. He is currently a PhD student at the Conservatory of Mantua. In his artistic research, he addresses issues related to new lutherie, DIY practices as compositional processes, the construction of new instruments, and the implications these practices have in educational and academic contexts.
His practice takes shape through a growing family of self-built and augmented instruments in which acoustic bodies, sensors, transducers, and real-time processing are treated as inseparable from the act of composing, moving between notated music, performance, and installation.
Some of his works involve building autonomous electromechanical apparatuses capable of interacting with the performers, and with one another. Among these are Machines Inside Me (La ,Biennale di Venezia, 2023) and, more recently, Micro-Breath of a Blue Lung, for self-built ,electromechanical instruments, voice, and electronics, developed and premiered with Ictus in Brussels.
His music has been performed by Ictus, Input Duo, Neko3, Mdi Ensemble, Divertimento Ensemble, SpóĆdzielnia Muzyczna contemporary ensemble, Quartetto Prometeo, Ensemble Chromoson, Ensemble Multilatérale, Endkadenz Ensemble, Livorno Music Festival Chamber Ensemble, and others, and presented in festivals and seasons such as: La Biennale di Venezia, Inner Spaces,Klangspuren Schwaz, Warsaw Autumn, Transart Festival, Sacroprofanum Festival, Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt, Suoni Inauditi, Ma/In Festival, and others.
His music is published by SZ Sugar, Milan.
Machines Inside Me is a work for three self-built electromechanical instruments, two performers, and electronics. Each instrument incorporates motorized mechanisms, actuators, and moving elements that animate its strings, surfaces, and resonating bodies; it is these components that lead a double life, capable of generating sound on their own, moving autonomously, or of entering into dialogue with the performer, setting other bodies into vibration and cooperating with their gesture.
The instruments were designed on the basis of compositional needs that emerged during the making of the piece itself: the need to govern the evolution of a sound in a particular way, to prolong the performer's gesture in a precise direction, to obtain specific behaviours arising from the very nature of the instrumental apparatus.
The bodies that produce the sound are among the most varied, ranging from strings to flutes, from tubes to surfaces of different materials, all the way to metal and wooden tongues; a dense network of microphones, pickups, and contact microphones gathers their vibrations. Nothing, however, remains as it was: the entire sonic material is captured, reworked in the instant, and returned by loudspeakers housed within the instruments themselves. Each instrument thus becomes, at one and the same time, source, ear, and diffusion speaker, and the sound it has generated continually re- enters it, enclosed in a circuit that binds the mechanical gesture to capture and the processing to re-emission.
In this circularity, the instrument lends itself to being read through the categories that Carlo Sini elaborates in L'uomo, la macchina, l'automa. An automaton is a prosthesis, an extension that performs only that for which it was built, and precisely for this reason it is not the simple double of the human being, but the sign that the human itself, in the history of its body and its labour, has always been an automaton on the move. The machines of Machines Inside Me arrange themselves along this line on three levels. They are first of all an appendix and extension of the sounding body, a prosthesis that multiplies its gestures and possibilities. They are then a mechanical performer, a prosthesis of the human player whose action they prolong when it comes to a halt and sustain when it continues. And they are, finally, taken as a whole, a prosthesis of the compositional thought that imagined them: an apparatus in which writing does not remain external to the instruments but settles into their very mechanics, and in which to compose ends up coinciding with building the device that renders that thought audible.
During the performance, machines and performers work on the same material, without any hierarchy becoming fixed between them, and little by little the boundary between playing and controlling grows thinner, and with it the one between human initiative and that of the instrument, in a relationship made as much of understanding as of resistance. It is the performers who open the piece, present from the very first instant; from there time proceeds by alternation, between moments of collaboration, moments in which the performers are left alone to carry the discourse forward, and moments in which it is the machines that continue on their own. Only towards the end does this play of presences find repose: the instrumentalists lay out a thin, continuous carpet of sound, uponwhich the last breaths of the machines surface — the bare sounds of their electromechanical components, let emerge for what they are as the work slowly fades out.