“Organ pipes…” Massimo Bartolini tells me with a sigh, “are complicated.” The sounding tubes of a pipe organ like the one you might find in your local church tend still to be handmade out of flat metal sheets, following much the same techniques as they have for centuries. The precise solution of different elements in the alloy must be exactly calibrated since tiny deviations in the amount of tin or lead or copper or zinc can distort the resulting sound. The solder used to shape and join those sheets has to be just the right temperature: too cool and the solder won’t set, too hot and it’ll melt through the metal. On top of that, the flow of air pumped through the finished pipes must be at just the right pressure: too low and you get pitch fluctuations – or even no sound at all – but if the pressure is too high, the note is overblown and you end up with no more than a thin whistling screech. This becomes especially tricky if, like Bartolini, your organ pipes are seventy-seven metres long and span across seven different rooms of a vast exhibition space in the north of Tuscany.

Visiting the Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato earlier this year, at first glance you might have thought the galleries were still under construction. The white-walled rooms bisected by a sprawling network of scaffolding tubes, like a suspiciously tidy building site, still there were no sounds of drilling or hammering or cat-calling labourers. Instead, the air was filled with an ever-shifting tapestry of tones and drones, a rich composition that would drift through the space like thick smoke billowing through a burning building. The scaffolding Bartolini installed here is no ordinary scaffolding, it is his installation sound work In là (2022). Hiding within its structure lurks an organ, the poles acting as its pipes, playing music specially composed for a work by Gavin Bryars.



Working with Bryars, Bartolini tells me, was “a dream I have had for decades.” As a student, he would listen repeatedly to the album Hommages that the English composer made for cult Belgian label Les Disques de Crépuscule in 1981 – especially its dreamy opening tribute to Bill Evans: My First Homage.  “Gavin is a person who knows about art,” Bartolini says, “unlike so many musicians who are really ignorant about art (while artists know a lot about music). So, he immediately understood the material part of the work.” Since the sculpture itself is so big that no position offers the viewer a perspective on the whole work, Bryars immediately decided, “ok, if you never see the completeness of the sculpture, you will never hear the completeness of the music.” The composer ended up creating a different score for each room, all controlled by huge music-box-like wheel at the heart of the instrument. “So, when I am in room number three, I can’t hear room number seven, but I can hear a little bit of room number four and maybe a little bit less of room number five,” Bartolini explains, adding that “it’s the position of the public that makes the piece.”

There is no possibility of passive spectatorship here. Music and audience exist in a shared dynamic ecosystem, as Bartolini emphasises: “you are there in the room, breathing your air and the organ catches your air and blows it into the pipes and makes a note and then you breath back again the air of that note. You breathe a note, and it makes a note out of your breath – because you are close! You are there!” It’s true that is rare to find oneself so embedded in the guts of such an instrument. Once, interviewing the Irish experimental musician Áine O'Dwyer, she took me into the organ loft, up amongst the pipes, at the church of St. John-at-Hackney. There, as she stabbed at chords and picked out notes, I felt a huge rush of air engulfing me, like being caught in the respiratory tract of some great beast. Bartolini, likewise, describes his sculpture, as “an extra lung.”



There is a rich history of organ building in Prato and nearby Pistoia, stretching back over five-hundred years. Matteo da Prato, born in the city in 1391, was amongst the earliest secular craftsmen in an industry formerly dominated by monks. The monumental sculpture Cantoria by Donatello was originally built to sit at the head of the organ Matteo constructed for the Duomo in Florence. Bartolini was pleased to draw on this tradition, employing local artisans, Massimo Drovandi, Samuele Maffucci, Samuele Frangioni, and Yari Mazza to fabricate his instrument.

This is also not the first organ the artist has created. Since his earliest works in the late 80s, sound has consistently played a major role in the artist’s oeuvre. He first conceived of the connection between scaffolding and pipe organs in 2008, seeing both as “objects that are intended to cover distances,” in terms of the spatial dissemination of sound waves in space, in the case of the latter, or the modular segmentation of a building’s height and expanse, in the case of the former. In that year, he exhibited a work, Organi, consisting of six levels of scaffolding that played a series of variations on John Cage’s Cheap Imitation (1969) at Massimo di Carlo in Milan. In 2017, a monographic show at Fondazione Merz (also in Milan) brought together several of these works under one roof. But Bartolini sees his collaboration with Gavin Bryars as “the most ambitious” of the series.

 
It is not just the vast scale of the work that makes it, in Bartolini’s eyes, the most replete of his organs. By suspending the scaffold a few centimetres from the ground, he sees it as attaining a sort of “weightlessness”; while the music, by contrast, feels more embodied, more physical than ever. “So, the structure became lighter and the music becomes heavier and they find each other halfway,” he says with a smile.

Bartolini has an occultist’s eye for such symbolic resemblances. His eyes twinkle over the Zoom connection as he tells me about the specific semiotic resonances of each of his chosen materials: a particular metal for the scaffold poles, a certain wood for the cams, each with their own significance. Even the electromechanical valves in the organ pipes suggest, to him, an image of neurons firing in the brain. “Everything has a poetic side,” he says. “Material tells a story. There must be a reason, a poetical reason for every single thing. Nothing is innocent. They all have their legend. When you put materials next to each other you put together legends.”