In the summer of 1956, at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, Pousseur met Luciano Berio, who invited him to work at the Studio di fonologia musicale of Radio Milan.
Second, it seemed necessary at that time to use material that avoided the periodic character of traditional music, including the internal structure of the sounds themselves.
Well after Pousseur finished the piece, the composer published an essay called "Scambi - description of a work in progress" (1959).
In place of the concepts of polarity and causality in traditional musical thinking, Anton Webern felt that "Es soll alles schweben" (everything should remain in suspension).
This was an important factor in deciding on techniques that deviated from the microstructural devices accepted almost exclusively in electronic composition until the present time.
An acceleration machine is then used to give each sequence a rising or falling pitch tendency, within which the motion is not even, but is disturbed by small internal deviations in contrary directions.
[10] A second structural level opposes this essentially discontinuous material with contrasting, long-sustained, continuous sounds, again in four types of shape.
[11] Once having produced these thirty-two sequences, Pousseur regarded the work as complete, though with an enormous number of possible realisations—an aleatory principle which had been intended from the outset.
Pierre Boulez attended a concert of electronic music from Milan, given at Darmstadt on 26 July 1957, in which two versions of Scambi were presented, along with Mutazione and Perspectives by Luciano Berio and Notturno by Bruno Maderna.
And then, the white noise at a high level and with glissandos, which might be used for sound effects of storms... and these sorts of vaguely aquatic gurglings, and worse (just like a toilet), I find it abominable!
[18]In his influential early book Opera aperta, Umberto Eco, on the other hand, cites Scambi, together with Stockhausen's Klavierstück XI, Berio's Sequenza I, and Boulez's Third Piano Sonata, as musical exemplars of the "open work", alongside the literary models of Verlaine's Art Poétique, Kafka's The Trial and The Castle, and James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.
[19] For Eco, Scambi represents a "fresh advance" by pointing within the category of "open" works to a narrower category of "works in movement" consisting of "unplanned or physically incomplete structural units", related to products of visual art like Alexander Calder's mobiles and Mallarmé's Livre.
[22] Beginning in 2004, the Scambi Project, directed by John Dack at the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts at Middlesex University, has focussed on this work and its multiple possibilities for realization.