Enore Zaffiri

Who is Enore Zaffiri?

Enore Zaffiri (born in Turin on March 29, 1928) is an Italian composer. He studied composition and pianoforte at Turin Music Conservatory and subsequently with Tony Aubin at the "Conservatoire National" in Paris. He perfected his piano studies with Guido Agosti at the "Accademia Musicale Chigiana" in Sienna.

From 1954 to 1982 he held the Chair of General Music Culture at Turin Conservatory. In 1964, he became lecturer on electronic music and founded SMET (Studio di Musica Elettronica di Torino). Zaffiri’s first objective there was to overcome the historical elementary principles which coordinate the relationships between the sounds of traditional musical language for acoustic instruments and then concentrate his efforts on electronic means, searching for new sound perspectives originating from a structural principle based on the Euclidian plane geometrical figure by which means the various sound parameters can be coordinated and the formal and spatial dimension extracted. In 1965, together with other operators in the visual field, he set up the "Studio di Informazione Estetica" and started an interdisciplinary research into sound and visual phenomena. The main objective of this research was to generate the elements relevant to the sound and visual fields from a single basic structure. The extreme limit of the formal rigorism was achieved in 1968 with the project "Musica per un anno," the purpose of which was the sonorization of environments.

From 1970, Zaffiri turned his attention to the live performance of electronic music. He combined electronic sound with the human voice (sometimes crossing the border into total theatre) as in "Il giuoco dell’oca" which is inspired by the E. Sanguineti's novel, and in "Raptus," a composition based on a text by M. Châtel. In that period, the first scores for synthesizers appeared and the live performance of pieces specifically written for this instrument began. At the end of the seventies he extended his research into visuals to the video, maintaining the interdisciplinary process by using the instruments that technology offered and which represented, for the author, the means and support for what he intended to express. At the end of the eighties he produced the video "L’arte nella Storia" published by Cooperativa Books and Video in Turin.