Starting in January 2009 Di Pietro will be SICA (Stanford Institute for The Creative Arts) Composer in Residence.He will undertake a variety of projects in a campus wide intiative including writing his orchestra piece "Finale", teaching Music 158 "Wired Sound" with Chris Chafe on INet2 with Pauline Oliveros and Chryssie Nanou, working as guest composer with Jonathan Berger in the Graduate Composer Seminar,writing a new section of "The Comedy of The Real" for Ge Wang and the Stanford Lap Top Orchestra at CCRMA (Center for Computing,Research,Music and Acoustics) and performing in public concerts of his music.
Di Pietro's most recent concerns are the transitioning away from completed projects that have moved along the life course:The "Prison Dirges" cycle,after ten plus years working as a prison educator-habilitationist, overlapping with "The Lost "Project series-now completed. This time as a social worker mentor who celebrated his tenth anniversary in the field and now a new series after years of teaching Electronic music and Critical Theory in Music and Art Since 1940 for Columbus State College:"The Comedy of the Real" . This makes reference to La Divina Commedia (Dante) the Le Comedie Humaine (Balzac) and the consciousness studies of Julian Jaynes.This radio novella to his own texts is a work in progress written in a series of "positions" which traverses his recent concerns of creating something transgressive within post-modernism,simulation and the hyper-real.
At this writing three of the positions are complete."The Third Position" was released in a limited edition in 2006 and was broadcast on Art@ Radio in New York,Amsterdam and Helsinki.The Fourth and Fifth Positions are complete in which the narration moves from an "I" of the "Third Position" to a" he" of the "Fifth Position"and lastly to an "it" of the in progress "Sixth Position".His "Postcards from the Impossible" (In Memorium Justin Isom) is another such new work,as is his" Rhizome for Evelyn Glennie" (percussive stones as drops of consciousness).
He is attempting to create a world of authentic feeling within a world of "Can Thought go on Without a Body" and hence transgress the encroaching robtics of the Matrix.In this same vein of pure feeling of a 'self under siege',(or Singularity) he is working on two more protests of light and dark:"Caravaggio/Chiaroscuro II" (for Jordi Savall) and "Dowland/Chiaroscuro I." Music then could end up in this current climate,as a contestation:of human alienation in a world of utility and abstraction.Rocco Di Pietro was born in Buffalo, New York in 1949. He
studied composition and piano with Hans Hagen and Lukas
Foss in Buffalo and at the Berkshire Music Center, Tanglewood.
He studied in New York and Darmstadt with Bruno Maderna
and was a freelance composer for twenty years before earning
degrees from SUNY Buffalo and Vermont College.He became
an interdisciplinary adjunct professor teaching in prisons and
on many college campuses throughout New York, Ohio, and
California. He toured California prisons as artist-in-residence
and conducted four years of interviews in Chicago with Pierre
Boulez. The resulting book, DIALOGUES WITH BOULEZ, was
recently published by Scarecrow Press. He composed Prison
Dirges I for the Kronos String Quartet.
Di Pietro's music has been performed by many musicians in
venues throughout the world. These include: Christiane Edinger,
Christobal Halffter, Lukas Foss, Julius Eastman, Bruno Maderna,
Frances Marie Uitti, Yvar Mikhasoff, Jan Williams, Anthony
Miranda, Gunther Schuller, Dennis Russell Davies, Robert Dick,Kathy Supove,Cristina Valdes,Larry Marotta,the Buffalo
Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra, The Brooklyn Philharmonic, the
Bavarian Radio Orchestra, Pro Musica Chamber Orchestra, CETA
Orchestra, Ojai Ensemble Sonor, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra,
Columbus Wind Orchestra, Earlham String Orchestra, the Avant
Collective, and the Madd Lab Orchestra. Venues include: The
Kitchen, La Mama, Roulette,Bang On A Can Festival,DIA Foundation,Cooper Union, Society for Ethical Culture,Third Street Music School,92nd Street Y,in New York,
Contemporary Music Society of Seoul, South Korea and American
Academy in Rome among others. Recent performances of LOST and other works
have been featured at Dartmouth College ,Stanford University,Los Angeles Sonic Odyssey,BEAF Festival,Washington,Florida International University,Miami and the ISIM Festival,Ann Arbor.
Recently, his work has developed on several fronts. Sound
text radio works have developed simultaneously with his teaching
at Columbus State College of electronic music and other courses
in the Humanities. These works have been broadcast on radio
stations in Seattle, Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, New York and in
Europe, in Naples, Rome, Vienna, Prague, Budapest etc.
Rocco has composed a new piece for the internationally renowned percussionist Evelyn Glennie. The work is called "Rhizome for Evelyn Glenn and will be premiered by Anthony Miranda and Stephen Smith in 2008.
The composition requires the help of LA sound percussionist Stephen Smith, who is constructing an all-stone instrument to be connected to real-time live electronics.
As a teacher he has mentored many students in both electronic music,composition ,piano ,critical theory,and art since 1945-some of them appear below as friends,including;Derek Zoladz,,Maxx Davis (Naserine Machine),Becky Henkel (Bexley), David Maglia, Christina Pagura and Claud Del Gado,among others.His most recent performance was a one man show in New York City at Roulette Experimental Inter-Medium at Location One,where he performed with new music specialists Kathy Supove ,Robert Dick and larry Marotta.A live from Roulette cd is in the works as are several new cd's on works from the seventies being transfered from magnetic tape and often reconstructed in new versions called :"The Caprices,Desperations and Disasters Series"
He recently interviewd John Chowning at Stanford University and is transcribing the interview on Chownings "Voices" for Soprano and computer.
