Alessandro Cipriani

ALESSANDRO CIPRIANI

Tivoli (Rome), 1959

Cipriani completed his studies in music composition and electroacoustic music at the Conservatorio S.Cecilia in Rome. He studied for a time with Barry Truax in Vancouver, (Canada). He attended the School of Sound in London (Walter Murch, Dogma 95, etc.) and is presently deepening his interest in the relation between sound and image in the digital domain.

Since 1989 he has worked on intermedia pieces and audio-video multichannel and interactive installations, often in collaboration with visual artist Alba D'Urbano and director Giulio Latini, and on pieces for instruments and tape. More recently he has composed electroacoustic pieces with traditional religious singers and soundtracks for creative film-documentaries and silent movies, integrating an advanced concept of fusion between dialogue, sound environment, and music, including the soundtracks of "The Last Days of Pompeii" (1913) Hitchcock's "Blackmail"(1929), "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" (1919), the expressionist masterpiece by Robert Wiene, "Battleship Potemkin" (1925) by Sergei M. Eisenstein and "Dante's Inferno" (1911) (the last three have been released in surround 5.1 on DVD by Cineteca di Bologna) in collaboration with Edison Studio composers. He has co-written two musical works for the Beijing Opera Theater and composed the soundtrack of Michel Comte's movie "The Girl from Nagasaki" (selected at Sundance Film Festival 2014) in collaboration with Luigi Ceccarelli.

His works have received honors and have been selected for performance by government arts commissions, professional organizations and festival organizers including Bourges, Government of Canada Award, International Computer Music Conference 1994 (Aarhus-Denmark), 95(Banff-Canada), 99 (Beijing-China), 2002 (Gothenburg-Sweden), 2003 (Singapore), 2008 (Belfast-Ireland), International Symposium on Electronic Arts (Montreal - Canada), Musica Nova (Praha), Newcomp (U.S.A.), Memorie Sonore (Stockholm - Sweden), Inventionen (Berlin), Nuova Consonanza (Rome), Festival di Ravenna 1999 and 2008, Engine 27 (New York), Redcat Festival - Walt Disney Concert Hall (Los Angeles), Venice Biennale 2009, Contemporanea (Roma, Auditorium - Parco della Musica), Gewandhaus - Mendelssohn Saal - Leipzig, Alte Schmiede Kunstverein - Wien, Miso Music (Lisbon-Portugal) Festival International de programmes audiovisuels-Biarritz, Mip'Doc-Cannes, Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, Festival Mix-Brasil, Torino Film Festival, International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (2008) etc.

He has been a tenured professor of electroacoustic music at the Conservatory of Catania (Ist. Mus. V. Bellini) from 1995 to 2003 and at the Conservatory of Frosinone (Rome) since November 2003. A compilation of electroacoustic pieces by his students from Sicily has been published on the EMF label. He has taught and lectured about his music and his theory of 'electroacoustic tradition' at several Academies (Sibelius Academy - Helsinki, Accademia S.Cecilia- Rome, etc.) and Universities in Europe, Canada and the U.S. (Californian Institute of the Arts (Los Angeles), University of Rome 2, University of California - Santa Barbara, Tchaikovsky Conservatory, DMU University, Leicester, etc.). He has published analytical and theoretical papers in several journals (Organised Sound, Musica/Realtà, etc.) and has published the textbook "Virtual Sound", on sound synthesis and signal processing with Csound (in collaboration with R.Bianchini on ConTempo) adopted for computer music courses in various Universities and Conservatories in Europe, South, and North America. In 2010 he has published, in collaboration with M.Giri, "Electronic Music and Sound Design Vol. 1 and Vol.2" a new textbook on live electronics with Max-MSP software (available also in Italian).

His CD "Il Pensiero Magmatico" in collaboration with Stefano Taglietti is available on the Edipan label. Other pieces can be found in the International Computer Music Conference '95 and ICMC'99 CDs. A monographic CD, "Al Nur", including all his works with oral tradition musicians and his trilogy on religious chant, was released on CNI Compagnia Nuove Indye in 2001. Computer Music Journal selected one of his multi-channel pieces (in surround 5.1) to be included in the annual DVD in 2003, released on CMJ 27 (4). A piece was written for Iranian percussionist Mahammad Ghavi Helm has been published on the CNI-RAI Trade label in 2006. A 5.1 piece on DVD has been released in 2007 on Everglade Records (USA) and an acousmatic piece on XXI Musicale - Elettronica Italiana Vol.2. His music has been broadcast by RAI, CBC, and several other national radio networks as well as performed at festivals in Europe, China, South-America, Canada, and the U.S.A. He is one of the founding members of Edison Studio in Rome. He is also a member of the Editorial Board of the review Organised Sound (Cambridge University Press). For this review, he has been guest editor of a special issue dedicated to the relationship between electroacoustic music and Local/Global culture.