A Week of Encounters, Sound and Insight at URTIcanti

I am delighted to share that my solo violin piece Obsession was recently selected by Ivan Fedele to be part of the URTIcanti Festival. The work was performed last week in the courtyard of the Ancient Baronal Castle of Cellamare (Puglia) by the extraordinary violinist Paride Losacco, whose interpretation brought new life and depth to the score.¹² Hearing the piece resonate in that space—shaped by his sound, presence and heartfelt interpretation—was a truly meaningful experience for me.

Participating in URTIcanti has been much more than attending a performance of my music. The festival created a true space of encounter: with fellow composers, with Ivan Fedele, with new ideas and with performers capable of inhabiting contemporary music with dedication and personality. At URTIcanti I met colleagues whose paths and aesthetics differed from one another, yet with whom dialogue emerged naturally—through rehearsals, concerts, and the simple act of being in the same place, listening.

The memory of Gianni Lenoci—a pianist and composer who passed away in 2019—was deeply felt throughout the festival. Our meetings took place in his former studio in Monopoli, a space where his presence could still be felt in his books and traces of his life. One of the most striking moments was hearing Ivan Fedele speak about composition, the parallels between music and language and elements of his own creative inventory. There is something rare in listening to a composer who has inhabited several musical generations and yet speaks with the freshness of someone still searching. I was genuinely surprised to discover how much of his thinking resonated with my past research on composing without requests.

The concert featured a rich and varied programme, giving voice to a new generation of composers. All the pieces were either for violin (Paride Losacco), piano (Benedetto Boccuzzi), or both, with or without electronics. Here is the full lineup:³

Francesco Lamagna, Due dimensioni contigue, for piano
Stefano Gioffré, Obsession, for violin
Silvio Lotito, Kalvi, for violin with heavy mute and live electronics
Donatello Notarnicola, 2 Little pieces, for violin and piano
Gabriele Cavallo, Lo scarabattolo, for piano
Alessio Roma, Torsioni del reale, for violin
Giulio Cattaneo, La mia firma nel tuo codice, for violin and piano
Jacopo Cenni, Achillea, for violin and live electronics
Hyunsu Kim, Meditation, for violin and singing bowls

Hearing the sequence of works—each with its own poetics and material world—was a reminder of how many different ways there are to think about sound today. The concert was beautifully held together by the dedication and versatility of the performers, with Paride Losacco offering a performance of Obsession that was precise, emotional and personal, shaped by a real sense of tension and interior movement.

For me, Obsession is a piece about fixation, return and the way a musical idea can generate its own gravitational field. Among the other works, it occupied a space of inward tension and recurrence, and experiencing it in that context made me perceive its identity more distinctly. But, most importantly, hearing it in Cellamare through Paride’s interpretation offered new perspectives on what the piece can or wants to be, beyond what I imagined while writing it.

URTIcanti gave me the opportunity not only to showcase my work, but to place it within the present musical landscape, in a context of open-minded curiosity and listening. I return from the festival with new questions, renewed energy and gratitude for the new friends I met—composers, musicians, and the team who made the event possible, especially Raffaella Ronchi, Fiorella Sassanelli and Ivan Fedele. Music continues to live in encounters: between writing and performance, between thought and sound, between one artistic voice and another. I look forward to seeing how the conversations and sounds from this week will resonate in my next projects.

Below are a few photos from the festival kindly shared by Roberta Giordano.⁴