Good morning everyone, it is with immense pleasure that I announce the beginning of a collaboration—which we hope will be long and productive—with the cultural association "Experimentum Mundi" of Albano Laziale. We will provide our support on an IT and artistic level, as always, with the sole aim of spreading musical culture to as many people as possible.
I am notifying you of the first in a series of events.
On May 2, 2012, at 6:30 PM, we will involve you in the conference that will take place at the "Experimentum Mundi" archive located in Albano Laziale, Via delle Grazie, 7. Anyone in the area or nearby can come to listen for free. For everyone far away, as you will have seen on the website's home page at the link http://www.pianoconcerto.it, we have added a new menu item: "Web TV On Demand". We have created a streaming TV page, where we will broadcast the conference I am speaking about now and all subsequent events live.
Now let's talk about this conference.
The name of the conference is: "Understanding Music"; unfortunately, this is the last of the conferences on this subject, but the Experimentum Mundi association already has other conferences planned, which we will not miss. The presenter and promoter of this and previous meetings is Valentina Lo Surdo; in the spoiler below, you will find a short biography of hers.
Valentina Lo Surdo (Rome, 1976) is a musician, musicologist, radio and television presenter, concert host, cultural event organizer, talent scout, and teacher. She writes for newspapers and specialized magazines, hosts various programs for Rai, presents concerts in Italy and abroad, attempting to tell the story of music to as wide an audience as possible, taking into account the ear of our time. Her numerous musical travels represent the source from which to draw to devise new perspectives for live classical music, to design alternative paths for future musical professionals, and to support young talents through a constantly expanding network.
Maestro Giorgio Battistelli will also participate in the meeting. You can find a short biography in the spoiler below.
Born in Albano Laziale in 1953, Giorgio Battistelli studied composition at the Conservatory of L'Aquila, where he graduated in 1978, while simultaneously attending seminars by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Mauricio Kagel in Cologne. Between 1978 and 1979, he attended courses on contemporary musical theater by Jean Pierre Drouet and Gaston Sylvestre.
Since 1981, the year of Experimentum Mundi, an intense activity of writing works for musical theater has begun. His compositions have been performed at the Festival d’Automne at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Salzburg and Lucerne Festivals, the Biennale and Gasteig in Munich, the Berlin Biennale, the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, in theaters such as La Scala in Milan, the Rome Opera, the Teatro Comunale in Florence, opera houses in Antwerp, Strasbourg, Geneva, Bremen, Mannheim, Almeida in London, and also in Hong Kong, Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Wellington, Taipei, Tokyo, New York, Washington, Singapore, La Paz, Beijing.
His music has been performed by conductors such as Riccardo Muti, Antonio Pappano, Lorin Maazel, Daniele Gatti, Daniel Harding, Ádám Fischer, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, MyungWhun Chung, Susanna Mälkki, Zoltán Peskó. He has collaborated with directors Robert Carsen, Luca Ronconi, Georges Lavaudant, Mario Martone, Michael Londsdale, David Pountney, Daniele Abbado, Fura dels Baus and Studio Azzurro, and with performers such as Toni Servillo, Bruno Ganz, Ian Mc Diarmid, Philippe Leroy, Moni Ovadia, Vladimir Luxuria. Awarded the title of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture,
he has been composer in residence at the Antwerp Opera, the Deutsche Opera am Rhein in Düsseldorf, and currently at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples. He has extensive experience in artistic direction gained at the Orchestra della Toscana (where he has returned since 2011), the Venice Biennale, the Società Aquilana dei Concerti, the Accademia Filarmonica Romana, the Fondazione Arena di Verona, and the Cantiere d’Arte di Montepulciano.
He has taught at Aldeburgh Music and since this year is a teacher of the Opera Project course at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena. For the inauguration of Expo 2015 in Milan, he received a commission from Teatro alla Scala to write the opera An Inconvenient Truth, based on a text by Al Gore.
Below I attach the presentation text for the series of events.
From classical to pop, passing through jazz and ethnic music, an itinerary to learn how to listen with new ears
If you are not musicians, but this wonderful artistic expression passions you, you have often wondered why a piece sounds"}
Better than another, what are the secrets of a winning musical group's success, how to understand if a given musician is as good as they seem. Or, if you have ever found yourself bored at a concert, you probably wondered what you should have looked for to avoid boredom.
Posing such questions is completely normal, because music is effectively an 'impalpable art', and we owe part of its fascination to its ineffability: we cannot understand it with the same parameters that we use for something written, described, or drawn… Unless one knows - and well - how to write on a musical staff.
Furthermore, we live in a country that, while being unsurpassed in terms of musical expression, neglects music as if it were an optional extra: at school we study literature, philosophy, art history… But we have to study music on our own (and then people wonder why concert halls are increasingly empty).
To understand music, our ears are enough: one can learn to analyze it by identifying its characteristics simply by listening, and listening well.
Bach, Miles Davis, Caetano Veloso, Bob Dylan, Shostakovich, the Beatles, Tiziano Ferro: they seem like incongruous terms in a journey lacking a logical thread, and yet they simply deal with the same subject: the aggregation of sounds, in an infinite variety of colors, melodies, rhythms.
We will thus analyze sounds, structures, arrangements, lyrics, and even a pinch of harmony… By listening to songs, symphonies, jazz improvisations, instruments from various parts of the world, ancient polyphonic pieces, baroque concertos, heavy metal, opera.
Rhythm, melody, harmony. These are the three dimensions of music; whether it is classical or rock makes no difference: by refining our ears, learning to recognize these elements, we will be able to conduct a truly conscious listening of sixties beat songs as well as sixteenth-century vocal polyphonic music, jazz standards, or Sanremo songs.
Of course, the game of music is not simple, but by learning to follow the tempo of a piece, to recognize the flow of the singing, to discern the sources of sounds, recognizing their instruments of origin and possible timbral combinations, we will succeed in fully grasping the taste of music, its complexity and articulation, its value.
Please participate in large numbers; let's try to distinguish ourselves and give strong support to this type of cultural manifestation if it is true that we love music so much. We await you on May 2, 2012, in Albano Laziale or live on the web via the indicated links... We are counting heavily on your presence.
Regards to all,
