Luigi Ceccarelli

Luigi Ceccarelli (born 20 April 1953 in Rimini, Italy) is an Italian composer.

Luigi Ceccarelli completed his musical studies in the ‘70s at the Gioachino Rossini Conservatory of Pesaro (Italy) where he studied Electronic Music and Composition with Walter Branchi, Giuliano Zosi and Guido Baggiani.

His career as a composer began in 1975, and was strongly influenced by digital technology and research into Sound Spatialisation.

In addition to his exclusively musical work right from the start he dedicated a significant part of his professional activity to experimental theatre, contemporary dance, cinema and visual arts.

After moving to Rome in 1978 he began to collaborate with the Gruppo di lavoro intercodice - ALTRO (inter-codex work-group), an artistic association led by the painter Achille Perilli, and during this period his contacts with artists in various other disciplines allowed him to develop forms of music that were closely related to the visual arts and the theater.

With ALTRO he wrote and performed the music for the performance Abominable A, which was staged at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome.

Since 1979 he has been the head professor of Electronic Music Composition at the Conservatory of Perugia.

In 1981 ALTRO became a dance company with the name of AltroTeatro and, with the choreographer Lucia Latour, Ceccarelli wrote and performed the music for the group’s performances until 1994.

These included the show Anihccam dedicated to the Futurist artist Fortunato Depero and staged at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, which launched Ceccarelli’s international career.

At the end of the ‘90s Ceccarelli founded Edison Studio together with the composers Alessandro Cipriani, Mauro Cardi and Fabio Cifariello Ciardi with whom he created various soundtracks for silent movies from the second and third decades of the 20th century.

These soundtracks, performed live by the composers themselves during screenings of the films, have included those for four particularly important movies: The Last Days of Pompeii, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Blackmail and Inferno.

In 1994 he made the radio-film (a story told only with sounds and music) La Guerra dei Dischi (The War of the Records), which was commissioned by Rai Radio 3 and based on a text by Stefano Benni.

This was the beginning of Ceccarelli’s research into the relationship between music and recited texts, which led the composer to create a series of radio plays and audio plays for Rai Radio 3.

In 1996 his work Birds for bass clarinet and birdsong was awarded the first prize in the competition of the IMEB (Institut international de musique électroacoustique de Bourges - France).

This institution then invited Ceccarelli to work in Bourges and commissioned various electroacoustic works from him, including De Zarb à Daf for Iranian percussion instruments.

Starting from 2000, he realized a series of compositions for musical theater and site-specific art installations for the Ravenna Festival, including In Die Resurrectionis, for the Basilica of San Vitale (Ravenna) and Bianco Nero Piano Forte, in collaboration with the photographers Lelli & Masotti and the writer Mara Cantoni, which was located in the Biblioteca Classense.

Also beginning in 2000 Ceccarelli began an artistic collaboration with the Teatro delle Albe, culminating with two works of musical theater, L’isola di Alcina (The Island of Alcina) and Ouverture Alcina, with a text by Nevio Spadoni in Romagnol dialect.

These two creations were staged in Italy, as well as in several European cities (Paris, Berlin, Moscow) and in New York.

Another work of musical theater that Ceccarelli realized in the same period was the Requiem staged by the theater company Fanny & Alexander and performed for the first time at the Ravenna Festival in 2001.

For these works he received the Italian Theater Critics Award of the Premio UBU (an award where the jury consists of the reviewers in the most important Italian newspapers and magazines) in 2002 (which on that occasion was awarded to a musician for the first time), as well as the prize of Belgrade International Theatre Festival (Serbia) and that of the MESS International Theatre Festival of Sarajevo.

During this period Ceccarelli continued to compose music for dance performances, and he composed the music for Live* with the Norwegian dance company Wee/Francesco Scavetta.

Ceccarelli’s particular interest in the relationship between music and film have led him to carry out intensive studies on contemporary cinema and in 2007 he published an article on Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.

From 2009 to 2011 he worked with the South African choreographer Robyn Orlin and in collaboration with Alessandro Cipriani he created the music for several dance performances including Have you hugged kissed and respected your brown Venus today?, which was staged at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris and the Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg.

The DVDs with the soundtracks of Inferno realized by Edison Studio were released in 2011 by the Cineteca di Bologna (in the series Cinema ritrovato).

In 2012 Ceccarelli met the double-bass player Daniel Roccato and with him he established an improvisational duo with the double-bass as a source for the electronic processing of sound in real time.

In 2013 he returned to composing for the cinema and with Alessandro Cipriani he made the music for the film by Michel Comte The Girl from Nagasaki, a reworking of Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly set in the '60s, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2014.

Luigi Ceccarelli’s works have been released on CD by RaiTrade, CNI, Luca Sossella Editore, Edipan, BMG-Ariola, Newtone Gmeb / UNESCO / Cime and the Venice Biennale.