About Me
I was born in 1975, and began playing the piano at the age of 7, soon enrolling to the Conservatory of my hometown, Mantua (Italy). After the BM degree, I began studying composition with Paolo Perezzani, a former assistant of Salvatore Sciarrino's. My first piece, "Idiosincrasia" for solo cello, was selected and premiered in Reggio Emilia in 1999 during a composition masterclass given by Helmut Lachenmann. This and other masterclasses, given by György Ligeti, Gérard Grisey, and Salvatore Sciarrino himself, to quote only a few, ended up being decisive for my aesthetic vision. Since my research is mainly focused on the quest for the properties making sounds closely similar to living beings, a first important result was "Doppia Elica" (double helix) for flute quartet (2001). The struggle to apply DNA rules of organization into a music piece, though, suggested me to stop composing for a while, in order to develop a better comprehension of the main issues of contemporary science. Nonetheless, the works I wrote in that period (1998-2002) have been performed in many venues in Italy (Milan, Bologna, Palermo, Imola, etc.).
In the meantime, the aesthetical dichotomy between Grisey and Xenakis, with their two opposite visions of time (continuous and always moving, according to the first, static and theorethically absent according to the second) was the main topic of research of my MA thesis in musicology (University of Parma, 2004), currently near to become a full lenght book. Between 2004 and 2006 I played in Timegate, a quintet devoted to the so-called minimal music, an experience that made me rather well acquainted with that repertoire and better focused on the active role of the listener in making music possible.
In 2001 I also began studying organ, eventually achieving my second BM in 2006.
Since August 2006 I am a fellow graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign School of Music, concurrently helding a Teaching Assistantship from the Department of Spanish Italian and Portuguese of the same university, and a Concert Scholarship from the Westfield Center for Early Music.
I'm completing a Master of Music in organ performance, and studying electro-acoustic composition with Scott Wyatt. ____________________________________________________________
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ABOUT THE TRACKS:"Asymptote" (track 1, 5'04'', first mix) was composed between the months of August and December 2007 at the Experimental Music Studios of Urbana, IL. It is an electronic sequence made using 50 sounds designed on a Kurzweil K2000 syntheziser, and then composed together on Digital Performer. It deals with a status of constant anxiety between contrary emotions and moods that has characterized my life in that period, and makes use of a flashback technique aimed at recreating the sense of discontinuity between the initial order, the intermediate chaos, and the final progression that leads to the final unison, yelling at the listener as to remind him/her of the instability that characterizes human beings throughout their experience of life."Taprobana" (2007, 10'28") was composed in the month of July 2007 in Paris, at the Centre de Création Musicale Iannis Xenakis, as an original project then premiered at the end of the course. It was made using UPIC, a sound design hardware originally created by Iannis Xenakis himself, plus some KYMA and a good amount of editing on ProTools. The first part (track 2, 4'26"), is charactherized by a long crescendo that culminates with an "explosion" of the sound matter. The second part (track 3, 6'18") is a long rarefaction towards the void of the soul."Beat of Gregory" (track 4, 2007, 3'07") was also projected and engineered at the UIUC Experimental Music Studios in Urbana, Illinois. It is based on an interview given by Gregory Corso in which he talks about his difficult youth, the lack of a real family, the thefts, the jail. It is a concrete-electronic piece in which the text is first developed using a ring modulator, then edited on protools, and finally mixed with an electronic sequence generated through a Roland DX-11 syntheziser and performed on Digital Performer. Voice: Peter Thoegersen.
