Edition: IV
Bio/Studies
Riccardo Piacentini (born July 3, 1958 in Moncalieri, Province of Turin) is an Italian Composer and pianist. He graduated in 1980 in Composition and Piano at Turin and Alessandria Conservatories, as well as in Literature and Music History at Turin University with a thesis on the orchestral works of Goffredo Petrassi.
He studied with Carlo Pinelli, favorite pupil of Giorgio Federico Ghedini and Franco Donatoni. He participated also in courses and workshops with Sylvano Bussotti, György Ligeti, Ennio Morricone, André Richard (at the Heinrich Strobel Center in Freiburg, where Luigi Nono worked), Karlheinz Stockhausen, and in 1988 he was among the performed composers at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt.
Career
He is particularly active both as composer of foto-musica con foto-suoni for museums – a new musical technique for counterpointing human voice, acoustic and electronic instruments and environmental sounds -, and as pianist of the Duo Alterno. With this internationally acclaimed ensemble, founded in 1997 together with his wife soprano Tiziana Scandaletti, he has performed all over the world, keeping concerts and masterclasses on the Italian vocal contemporary repertoire (recently at Berkeley University, Stanford University, Portland State University, University of New Mexico, ArtLink Festival in Belgrade, Shenyang Conservatory, Moscow Conservatory, Nuova Consonanza Festival of Rome, etc.).
He is main professor of Harmony, Counterpoint, Fugue and Composition at the Alessandria Conservatory and artistic director of Rive-Gauche Concerti’s season at GAM – Modern Art Gallery in Turin. He has written many musicologic articles and didactic writings, such as Tonal Harmony (Curci, Milan, 1999).
Notes on the Musma Composition
“Così parlò Beatrice”
Così parlò Beatrice (So Beatrice spoke) for 4 chapel voices (2009/13) follows to XXIV for flute, violin and “foto-suoni”© (2004) and XXIV (Paradiso) for flute, violin and 4 rinascimental voices (2009), whose it represents the renewed elaboration for solo voices. The organic can be: 4 mixed voices choir, or 4 solo voices, in both cases without instruments. The score contains, more little and limited to some section of the piece, the divisions of the single voices if the option is a performance for choir. The «hymn to the universe happiness» to which the subtitle refers is inspired to what is incomparably described in the 24th Canto of the Dante’s Paradiso. It is an happiness that I intend vibratil and unquiet, capable of love that lives and is ingenious, dynamic, sweetly swarming, wakeful… The types of vocal emission are synthetically eight: «O sodalizio eletto […] ponete mente a l’affezione immensa e roratela alquanto […]» Così Beatrice; e quelle anime liete si fero spere sopra fissi poli, fiammando, volte, a guisa di comete. E come cerchi in tempra d’orïuoli si giran sì, ch ‘l primo […] quieto appare, e l’ultimo che voli; così quelle carole, differentemente danzando, de la sua ricchezza mi facieno stimar, veloci e lente. Di quella ch’io notai di più carezza vid’ïo uscire un foco sì felice, che nullo vi lasciò di più chiarezza; e tre fïate intorno di Beatrice si volse con un canto tanto divo, che la mia fantasia nol mi ridice. Però salta la penna e non lo scrivo: ché l’imagine nostra a cotal pieghe, non che ‘l parlare, è troppo color vivo. […] Liberamente tratto dal XXIV Canto del Paradiso dantesco Freely extracted from the 24th Canto of Dante’s Paradiso
