Local audiences can consider themselves lucky that they’ll soon have a chance to see electroacoustic pioneers Musica Elettronica Viva in concert—and the members of that group can consider themselves fortunate to be here at all.

Back in 1966, when American expats Frederic Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum, and Alvin Curran first convened in Rome, electronic music was not only an aesthetically risky proposition, it also involved real physical danger.

“Like many of our generation, we learned it from scratch,” explains Rzewski, interviewed by phone from his home in Belgium. “People today don’t have that privilege. You kind of buy the chips, or it comes with your iPhone; you don’t have to think about it....

“But we were armed with soldering irons. We were putting things together without knowing what we were doing, and sometimes in a dangerous way. I mean, we didn’t understand how dangerous electricity could be in damp Roman cellars, working with no ground. In a way, we’re lucky to be alive.”

It’s possible to look back on Musica Elettronica Viva’s 50-year trajectory and argue that any number of familiar sonic tropes were generated in those subterranean spaces: sample-based music, for one, or the fusion of electronics and improvisation, or even ambient sound, at least in the broader sense of Brian Eno’s term.

But Rzewski, who was there at the beginning and is still artistically provocative at 78, says it’s necessary to look back even further to find the true roots of electronic music’s less dance-floor-friendly variants.

“I don’t think we invented anything, actually,” the Massachusetts-born pianist and composer stresses. “We borrowed a lot of things from John Cage and David Tudor and the Living Theatre and various jazz groups who were passing through Rome at the time. And there was a lot of mutual borrowing, of course. The jazz people also borrowed from the classical people very heavily—starting with Ornette Coleman.”

It’s hard to say if Rzewski is being self-deprecating, or simply realistic. What’s undeniable, though, is that once he and his bandmates graduated from playing written scores by Cage, Tudor, Robert Ashley, and David Behrman, they soon codified several historically important developments.

Curran’s use of found sound—at first on reel-to-reel tape and now delivered via sampler—has become standard practice in electronic dance music, rap, and even pop. And Teitelbaum, who owned the first Moog synthesizer in Europe, showed his then-radical keyboard to a number of musicians—including Tangerine Dream’s Edgar Froese and other Krautrock pioneers—who would go on to revolutionize rock.

What allows MEV to be vital today, however, is that its members have abandoned genre altogether. With the virtuosic Rzewski concentrating on piano, the group is no longer entirely electronic. (In recent performance footage, Curran and Teitelbaum play sleek electronic keyboards rather than bulky tape recorders or banks of electronic modules.)

And if the three performers haven’t entirely abandoned form, they’re dedicated to making it up on the spot, with little in the way of pre-show preparation.

“If we try to rehearse anything, we’ve kind of wasted it, because then we might tend to repeat something in the performance, and it won’t be as good,” Rzewski says. “So we avoid rehearsing, since there really isn’t anything to rehearse.

“It’s important not to know what you’re going to do,” he continues. “The only thing that I think is really important is that we all have ears. What all three of us have is this ability to respond to something that we hear—and this is a mysterious process.”

That’s literally Rzewski’s last word on the subject—immediately afterward, the line to Belgium goes dead and can’t be revived. Even in today’s wired world, it seems, unpredictability is everything.

Musica Elettronica Viva plays the Western Front next Thursday (November 3).