The record Interplay: Duet for One and for the Other brings together two albums for piano and Disklavier — Diagram and Projection and Spring Scenes — which engaged me as pianist, composer, and producer throughout 2024 and 2025, and which were conceived as an artistic inquiry into the shifting boundaries between human agency and machine autonomy in the contemporary world. This project was realized with the support of Bösendorfer Klavierfabrik GmbH.

The two suites form a unique project worldwide that places Disklavier technology at the very center of both composition and performance — not as separate stages, but as synchronous and interdependent acts within a single creative process. Indeed, until now the Disklavier has been employed as a medium — for performance, recording, or composition — but never as the core of an aesthetic in which all these phases are integrated and mutually influence one another by virtue of it.

I chose to regard the aesthetic framework as the common thread linking both suites, while at the same time expressing it in different ways in each project.

In Diagram and Projection, the relationship between pianist and Disklavier unfolds through alternating roles during the recording process: I performed my album on a Bösendorfer 280VC Disklavier, extracted the MIDI data of my performance, edited it in Logic Pro, and then re-imported it into the Disklavier, which replayed my edited performance while being captured with microphones for the record. This recording process implements a MIDI pre-production approach, as opposed to the traditional method of audio post-production. Finally, I chose to re-record those more “human” passages that the Disklavier could not fully render.

In Spring Scenes, the relationship between pianist and Disklavier develops as a live performance duo: the pianist plays directly on the Disklavier while the instrument simultaneously performs its own part. The pianist interprets musically expressive passages that the Disklavier could not optimally render, while the Disklavier manages rhythmic and mechanical sections beyond the pianist’s physical capabilities. Yet at times, their roles blur, as if they were influencing one another: the pianist imitates the mechanical precision of his partner, while the Disklavier acquires a more human breath.

It works like a four-hands performance. If not for the fact that the Disklavier has infinite hands. If not for the fact that the pianist is not confined to sitting on one side of the bench and playing mainly on one half of the keyboard. If not for the fact that the pianist can wait for the Disklavier, but the Disklavier cannot wait for the pianist.

Spring Scenes is connected to Diagram and Projection not only through the shared idea of human– machine interaction and the use of the Disklavier, but also musically. Indeed, the first often presents themes drawn from the second, and even when it introduces new musical ideas, it does so while maintaining the same stylistic gestures as its predecessor.

Interplay: Duet for One and for the Other is a project born from the versatility of my artistic identity and from the need to express all of its professional facets within a unified creative vision — from pianist to composer, from sound designer to producer.

Academic expectations have often pushed me to define myself either as a composer or as a performer — or, at times, as a composer of “absolute” music rather than of film scores, or as a classical pianist opposed to a figure closer to pop. Yet I have always believed it possible to inhabit all these roles within a single art, and that to be everything does not necessarily mean to be less of something. It matters to me to highlight how Interplay: Duet for One and for the Other marked a turning point in my artistic identity, becoming — for me more than for anyone else — the tangible proof of that professional convergence I had long envisioned. A synthesis not born of eclecticism for its own sake, but one that constitutes the very foundation of this music’s existence.

I have also always found it difficult to write for piano. On one hand, the reason is one shared by many pianist-composers: after studying the masterpieces of the piano repertoire daily for years, one fears not being up to the task when it comes to writing something of one’s own for the same instrument. On the other, the decisive factor was that, once I began composing electronic music, I felt I could fully express my artistic vision, free from the mechanical, timbral, and technical limits of traditional instruments and their performers — since my musical ideas are often more complex than what analog instruments can realize. From here arose the initial impulse to use the Disklavier as a medium of technical extension, in some way bringing the piano closer to the world of electronics.

This strong bond I have with electronic music and with composition for images also emerges in the compositional language of these pieces, which seem to strive to transcend the mechanics of the keyboard in order to achieve results similar to those I create in audio editing software. In my piano writing, I focus on frequent and detailed changes of dynamics, meter, tempo, and pedalization. This writing represents the sound closest to the transformations I can obtain through channel equalizers, reverb, delay, and similar effects in music production software. For me, this kind of writing is almost more important than the notes themselves; it dismantles every traditional superstructure in the pursuit of preserving an idea born as a free soundscape. Thus I shifted my attention away from the keys and the notes they produce toward the allure of the instrument’s distortion: it is a piano that does not wish to sound like one.

Often, what interests me most are resonance and reverberation — not as consequences of music, but as its very principle. Instead of composing a passage and passively enduring its natural resonance, I use music to recreate a precise resonance. It is not resonance that exists thanks to my music, but my music that exists for its resonance. Resonance, which normally follows sound, paradoxically comes first.

A final link with electronics lies in the use of the Disklavier itself, as it has allowed me in practice to merge live performance and production — enabling me to shape my performance through the DAW, and the DAW through my performance.

Diagram and Projection is characterized by a hybrid and aesthetically ambiguous identity: the final recording is, in fact, a performance by the Disklavier, which is nothing more than the edited reproduction of my original performance, almost in a relationship of essence and representation.

Following Kantian philosophy, one could say that the Disklavier performance functions as the phenomenon in relation to the noumenon, which would be my original performance.

This work also echoes Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe. Just as Magritte invites the viewer to question the reality of an image — a painting of a pipe that is not a pipe — this project invites the listener to reflect on the very nature of performance: is the reproduction of a performance itself a performance?

It also follows a Pirandellian perspective on identity: in the end, who is the true performer? Me, the Disklavier, both — or paradoxically, neither?

The human–machine dualism continues to evolve even after the recording, when I chose to re-record those more “human” passages that the Disklavier could not fully render — an act that demonstrates what the machine still cannot replace: human uniqueness. This reveals a dynamic of mastery, control, and subordination, in which the human uses the machine as an extension of themselves and their abilities. Conversely, the Disklavier executes with technical precision those passages physically demanding for the pianist. They become extensions of one another — a concept that, while marking the culmination of Diagram and Projection, is the starting point for Spring Scenes. In Spring Scenes, sometimes it is the pianist who plays alone, almost rebelling against the relationship with the machine; other times, it is the machine that takes the lead. Sometimes they engage in a harmonious dialogue, sometimes a conflicting one.

If we consider these two projects as reflections of the rise of technology — and in particular of artificial intelligence — as historical and social phenomena, it is no coincidence that Spring Scenes follows Diagram and Projection.

In Diagram and Projection, the Disklavier is approached with a utilitarian mindset: it is treated as an instrument. Regardless of the concept of hybrid identity, technology remains a means that the pianist employs to produce a recording. In Spring Scenes, by contrast, the approach is no longer utilitarian but existential: the Disklavier is an equal, a dialogue partner. In the first case, the machine is used; in the second, one coexists with the machine. This reflects the historical evolution of the human– technology relationship: from instrument to a condition of existential symbiosis.

Above all, Interplay: Duet for One and for the Other looks to the present and the future, offering an aesthetic reflection on the crisis of humanitas in the face of an ever-pervasive symbiosis with artificial intelligence. It is a hybrid project that seeks to unite human and machine in a relationship at times peaceful, at times conflictual — a dynamic that alternately glorifies one or the other, sometimes with critical accents, sometimes as an act of celebration. The music remains suspended on that thin line between the allure of utopia and the fear of real dystopia in contemporary society.