Music, and the Art of Running Off the Rails
I wasn’t born in a musical family, nobody encouraged or forced me, I chose on my own. Except discovering, after taking up musical studies, that my grandpa played the saxophone in the town band, just the instrument I had chosen, even though I’ve never loved town bands.
My passion for music grew within the “Cantiere Internazionale d’Arte” in Montepulciano, a cradle of artists and ideas that – for a couple of weeks every year – makes you feel like a real musician even if you’ve just finished primary school, and straight away confronts you with exhausting rehearsals, scores written by composers such as Detlev Glanert or internationally famed conductors such as Roland Böer, an artist I will always be thankful to, for his wisdom and his trust.
The next stage was at the Music Academy in Florence, where I graduated under the guidance of Maestro Roberto Frati, a veritable musical father as well as my fellow countryman, with whom I’m so lucky to work and to share car trips, talking, for once, more about football than about music.
In the meanwhile, and after coming back to Montepulciano, the passion that always led me swerved suddenly. Alongside my academic studies and my intense teaching activity, I’ve always born a big curiosity towards composition, applied music, sound, electronic music, digital visual arts.
So I found myself, as it is happening now, turning from chamber music acoustic sounds with “Florentia Saxophone Quartet”, “Atman Sax” and “SteelWind”, to electronic/contemporary/jazz/rock music with different ensembles such as “Ensemble degli Intrigati”, “The Bad Mexican”, “Fad3d”, “VR electronic & CO”.
With these ensembles, I met wonderful places and artists, from country pubs to the “Mozart Festival” in Rovereto, from “Live Rock Festival” at the Italian Culture Institute in Bruxelles, where I had the honour to premiere my electro-acoustic work “Grinding”.
My love for sound and digital art brought me to get a “Videogames Music Master Degree”, a field where I can combine the “subtleties” of “cultivated” music to the freshness of interactive and non-linear sound, beside the visual power of graphic design software; this is the most exciting thing you can apply to your projects, where the instrument physicalness merges into digital fantasy.
The will to run off the canonical trails of the musician who can only play his instrument has always led me. In my present and future, there will be much experimentation, contamination and eagerness to astonish, both in concerts and in productions.
