Writing
Italiano & EnglishNobody taught me anything, and it wasn't their fault
I studied with distinguished masters and not one of them ever taught me a procedure. For years I took it as a failing on their part. It is in fact a consequence of how competence works.
What expert knowledge is
The beginner has rules and applies them. The expert has cases and recognizes them. It is not more information: it is the same thing in another form, and that form is not made of words.
A teacher is a verifier, not a transmitter
If what matters does not travel through words, what does a master actually do? Three things, and none of them is explaining. The most important is the only one that cannot be recorded.
Decompiling your own automatism
If competence is compiled and the teacher does not transmit it, where does a procedure come from? From a breakdown. And why the strongest objection to all this is also the one that saves it.
The art without the collectible
Why three validators are enough to create a phenomenon in contemporary art, and why no number of them is enough in music. Two opposite markets, and a single object of difference.
I sight-read brilliantly and memorize terribly
Why a good reader can have a terrible memory, what the four channels of musical memory actually are, and who is playing when you are not thinking.
How I memorize now: a spoken index
A procedure, almost an algorithm: build a spoken index, calibrate it, maintain it, and use it to come back after a break. The thing nobody at the conservatory ever taught me.
Gallery
Studio & portraitsScroll sideways · Photos: Agnese Micheluzzi
About
"Writing and performing music is for me an act of joy and at the same time an act of discipline. Every idea deserves exaggerated attention, and only those ideas that run away for no reason from my critical judgment, from that infernal mechanism, survive. Discipline is enduring all this."
Approached the piano at 8 and composition at 11. Studied Composition and Piano at the Conservatory of Milan, becoming the youngest composition teacher in Italian conservatories, then left teaching for music technology and composition. Recognised in the 1990s in the contemporary and experimental scene, releasing LPs with BMG and working for the main European institutions. Since 2015 the work has moved towards neoclassical, minimalism and electronics.
- Studied with
- Franco Donatoni, Emmanuel Nunes, Gérard Grisey
- Commissions
- Radio France, WDR, RAI, IRCAM, BBC, Teatro alla Scala, Gulbenkian
- Published
- Works 1987–1994, BMG Ricordi
- Taught
- Composition, Conservatory of Trento, 1987–1992
- Based in
- Milano