June 15 – “The Flute in Contemporary Music: the Italian experience and the ‘Roman School'” is a lecture-concert to be held by flutist Gianni Trovalusci at the Italian Cultural Institute of New York on Wednesday, 24 June (at 6pm). The school opened in the 1950s and 1960s, and it constituted a real revolution in making music, destined in time to change the composition and interpretation forms and the very idea of understanding the musical language. At the center of it all, there’s the flute. Bruno Maderna first invited flutist Severino Gazzelloni to attend the legendary Ferienkursen of Darmstadt in the early 1950s. And so, a series of masterpieces were composed over time, mainly by Maderna, Luciano Berio, Franco Evangelisti and Domenico Guaccero. Gazzelloni’s experience was followed by that of his number one pupil, Roberto Fabbriciani, who wrote a fundamental chapter of musical history thanks to his collaborations with Luigi Nono, Salvatore Sciarrino and Aldo Clementi. In this context, we can speak of a “Roman School,” in which Italy’s capital served as one of the most significant production centers of the second half of the twentieth century. The key players in this revolution were Franco Evangelisti and Domenico Guaccero, as well as “enlightened” outsiders as Giacinto Scelsi and the still very active Alvin Curran, Walter Branchi, and Marcello Panni. The “Roman School” developed its own specific perspective on writing and interpreting music, combining in interesting ways the fascinating world of aleatory music, a unique and unrepeatable moment of live performance. All the pieces chosen to represent the growth and evolution of the Roman School in the lecture-concert were written under the aleatory music methodology, each with its own rules and principles. (Red)
