Luca Francesconi

Luca Francesconi (born 17 March 1956) is an Italian composer.

He studied at the Milan Conservatory, then with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio.

Luca Francesconi was born in Milan.

His father was a painter who edited Il Corriere dei piccoli and conceived Il Corriere dei ragazzi, while his mother was an advertiser.

Francesconi spent his early years in QT8, a working class quarter in Milan.

At the age of five he began to learn the piano.

Although he was accepted into the junior high school section of the city's conservatory six years later, he pulled out.

Instead, Francesconi opted to attend the junior high school in QT8.

We need to profoundly rethink and filter in a determined way the enormously rich potential that has been elaborated in the past and to use it for expressive purposes.

Francesconi returned to the Conservatory of Milan in 1974, while he was still attending the Berchet Classical Languages High School, and explored the musical landscape, taking an interest in different sounds.

He played in jazz and rock groups as well as in classical concerts.

Francesconi worked as a session man in recording studios, and composed music for theatre, cinema, advertising, and television.

Francesconi attended the Milan Conservatory and enrolled in the composition course conducted by Azio Corghi.

"From him I learnt the trade, the fundamentals, counterpoint and those things, professional seriousness and open-mindedness."

In the meantime he continued to explore electronic music and in 1977 took time out to immerse himself in jazz at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.

''The mountain is in front of us, and it is necessary to pass over it, with enormous force and patience.

It's not enough just to contemplate it nor to sneak by it via secondary paths much less go backwards claiming that the mountain is not there.''

Donnerstag aus Licht went on stage at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan in 1981.

Stockhausen is a historical reference point: Francesconi admired him for his extraordinary organisational consistency, for his tireless search for a linguistic unity.

He was also deeply struck by the visionary quality of this initial opera.

He wanted to observe the composer at work, so he enrolled in the intensive course that Stockhausen held in Rome that same year.

"From him I learnt rigor, at first imbibing it by osmosis, and then demythologising it."

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''Luciano didn't talk much about the more 'technical' and delicate aspects of his work as a composer.

I remember that when he least expected it, I would fire questions at him point-blank, hoping to pick up some tips.

His replies were like enigmas.

They had something sacral about them and they required divining rituals to decode them.''

With Berio, Francesconi studied above all in the field, just like the workshop artisans of old, acting as his assistant from 1981 to 1984.

He worked directly on the score of La vera storia and participated in the production as rehearsal pianist and second conductor/substitute maestro.

In 1984 he collaborated with the composer in the rewriting of Monteverdi's Orfeo.

He was also present with Berio at Tanglewood where he attended one of his famous summer courses.

In 1984 three of Francesconi's pieces, including Passacaglia, for large orchestra (1982), were selected for the Gaudeamus International Composers Award in Amsterdam.

This first important recognition on the international scene created a useful tie with the Dutch music scene and laid the foundation for further commissions.

Meanwhile, in Italy, thanks to a commission from the Teatro Lirico di Cagliari, Francesconi had the opportunity to seriously put into practice for the first time his idea of a "polyphony of languages": Suite 1984.

The polyphony that I have in mind hasn't got anything to do with the "postmodern" or collage, the exotic pastiche, the provincial chinoiserie of our grandparents (but also of Stockhausen and certain pop groups).

Instead, it is a free fusion of ideas in a compact and linguistically very solid body that reveals its profound energies in its inner profundity and not in an exterior heterogeneity.

Energies that come from the earth, from popular culture, from ancient African and Oriental cultures.

"In 1984 the Teatro Lirico in Cagliari presented a quartet made up of the pianist and composer Franco D'Andrea together with the group Africa Djolé led by the master percussionist Fode Youla from Guinea. The idea was then conceived that the music of this group be recreated in symphonic form (Suite 1984) by the 28-year-old Luca Francesconi for a performance by the theatre's orchestra under the direction of Francesconi himself, a recent product of rigorous musical studies, assistant to Luciano Berio and 'jazz student of D'Andrea', as he used to like to define himself. The concert attracted experts anxious to hear novelties and promising syncretisms of various musical civilisations, and it was a triumph."

"Orchestra, African percussionists and jazz quintet: the choice of instrumental make-up itself contained in an explicit manner the generative nucleus of one of the principal aesthetic motors of the music of Luca Francesconi: the tendency to place alongside one another, following the rules of contrast and fusion, sounds and languages of highly diverse origins."

Francesconi's first record, an LP recorded in the United States, contained Viaggiatore insonne, on a text by Sandro Penna.