Statement for “50:50 in 2030”

This year I was lucky enough to have two dear pieces of mine performed at Wien Modern — MOULT, performed by the RSO conducted by Marin Alsop, and dead wasps in the jam-jar (iii), performed by Arditti Quartet.
It has been a really inspiring week, meeting and talking with fellow composers and musicians, and walking around Vienna!

As part of Wien Modern, I was also asked to join a panel about gender equality, and what we can do to make our new music community more inclusive. I wrote a short (quite personal) statement, which you can read here.

Audio-visual Installation

Since 2018, I started to collaborate with Eva G. Alonso, an incredible light designer and visual artist.

The first collaborative installation, Untitled #1, was created for the Vernissage of the exhibition Le vent se lève, and realized at the Villa Médicis on May 23, 2019. All sounds are created by an e-bow circuit machine built in collaboration with Jan Bernstein and Mickey van Olst. No electronics, no amplification, what you hear is simply the vibration of the piano strings. All lights are generative.

We are developing the project further for a solo performance for Daniel Walden that will be realized in 2020.

Hear: Eclipse Plumage

You can now listen to the live recording of Eclipse Plumage, performed by Ensemble Oerknal on September 2019 at the Gaudeamus Festival.

It’s my first piece using the Antimachine, an instrument created in collaboration with Jan Bernstein and Mickey van Olst, that generates magnetic fields around the strings of the piano — in the last 5′ minutes of the piece you can really listen to the machine, as there’s no electronics, just piano and a few percussion instruments.

Huge thanks to Daniel Walden, Chris Swithinbank, and the Gaudeamus team.

Premio Una Vita nella Musica — Giovani 2019

Such an honor, to be awarded the prize Una Vita nella Musica – Giovani 2019.
I left Italy more than 10 years ago, my music is mostly played elsewhere, my Italian is not great anymore (am still fluent in Roman though), but receiving such a recognition in my own country feels really good.
Thank you so much, Teatro La Fenice!

Hear: Outer Space

You can now listen to the live recording of the première of Outer Space, performed by Ensemble NIKEL, on July 20th 2018 at the Centralstation, as part of the Darmstadt Summer Course. Please, use headphones or good loudspeakers, and play it loud!

Resident fellow at Villa Médicis 2018–19

From September 2018 until August 2019 I will be living in Rome as resident fellow at Villa Médicis.
I left Italy 12 years ago, and being able to be back here as composer in residence makes me extremely happy. I am looking forward to discovering a city that I don’t know anymore, meeting my colleagues at the Villa, and working on my very first orchestra piece, and my third string quartet!

Outer Space in Darmstadt, Utrecht, and Lausanne

This year has been all about interdisciplinary works. This is a direction that I have always wanted to explore, and I cannot be happier to have found people that will help me in this new path. Stay tuned!

Working on the short film Outer Space, by Peter Tscherkassky, put the research I am doing on visual music on a new level. Even without soundtrack, this film provides a sonic experience through rhythm, noise, and dynamic of the visual. Composing a music that could add a layer of complexity to the already stand-alone work has been maybe the greatest challenge I faced within the past years. The flow of information received by the eye is so overwhelming that not surrendering to a mere audio-visual synchronization has been a constant fight that I kept losing. So I simply decided to empower it instead, integrating not only the music, but the musicians themselves to the film.

The piece is a commission of the Darmstadt Summer Course for the amazing Ensemble NIKEL, and will be played in Darmstadt (20 July 2018), Utrecht, as part of Gaudeamus Muziekweek (7 September 2018), and in Lausanne (4 March 2019). I hope to see you there!