Artist description Giovanni Grosskopf is best known for his instrumental chamber music and his electronic music. Renowned interpreters have made his music known internationally and present it in their repertoire. His communicative, accurately built atonal music is truly contemporary, yet points to his many interests and is linked to a deep humanistic and scientific culture, to the past, to history and to the other arts, and to life: one perceives the influence of authentic field-recorded ethnic music (of which he has a large collection), baroque music, medieval music, French and English Impressionism, the interest for the great painters of any epoch, the interest for art cinema and the poetry of many great film directors (Tarkovskij, Kurosawa, etc.), the deep affection that links him to the mountains and especially to the Alps, the love for nature, its sounds and structures, and a certain primitivism often expressed through a feeling of awe for nature, the many suggestions coming from the Nordic Countries, birds, anthropology, the study of folk traditions, the world of the fairy tales, the importance of memories, the extreme care for harmony and the tone color of chords, which he calibrates with rare skill and sensibility.

Music Style Classical contemporary

Musical Influences Messiaen, Lutoslawski, Castiglioni, Takemitsu, Berio, Nordheim, Ives, Bartok, Ravel

Artist History Born in Italy in 1966. Piano graduation in 1988, Composition graduation in 1994, Computer Music graduation in 1997 with full marks, all at the Conservatorium "G.Verdi" of Milan. International Piano Master Class at the Academy of Music "G.Marziali" in Seveso (Milan); Composition Master Class at the Municipal Music School of Milan, Contemporary Music Section. Among his teachers there are Bruno Canino (piano), Niccolò Castiglioni (composition), Pippo Molino (composition), Maria Cecilia Farina (ancient music), Luigi Zanardi (piano). He attended a Master Class with Franco Donatoni and a seminar with György Ligeti at the I.C.O.N.S. in Novara. Since 1985 he has been playing as a pianist in concerts and recitals in many towns of Italy, dealing mainly with Bach and the 18th Century age, with monographic concert programs devoted to rarely performed pieces, with the 20th Century composers and moreover with contemporary music. He has a great activity as a composer: his music has been performed in international and national musical seasons both in Italy (Milan, Bolzano, L'Aquila, Massa, Busto Arsizio, Amandola, Portogruaro, Mogliano Veneto, Monza, S.Giorgio del Sannio, Appiano Gentile, Montefiore, Brugherio, Arese, Cogorno, Rovereto, Brescia among others) and abroad (Regentenkamer Theater in The Hague, Netherlands, S.Paulo University Concert Season, Brazil, Omni Foundation in S.Francisco, U.S.A., Adelboden Guitar Master Class, Switzerland, 7.Internationale Musikfreizeit in Limburg, Germany, ArcoArtis Concerts in Amadora, Portugal, Dorset Guitar Society, England, and in the near future in Spain and other Countries) and appears regularly in the repertoire of many performers. A composition of his has been awarded with an official note of merit by the jury of the National Composers' Competition "Eolo Prima'93" in Prato (Florence). He has worked or is collaborating with many ensembles (Gruppo Kairòs and Insight Quartet in Bolzano, Paul Klee Quintet and Compagnia della Luna Nuova in Milan, Trompeten Ensemble Linz, Austria, Grandi Quartet in Bologna, Duo46 in Cyprus, Trio Subtilior in Madrid, duo Cuypers / Lop in Tarragona, Spain, duo Henosis) and soloists such as the singer Gemma Bertagnolli, the guitarist Silvia Cesco, the conductor and pianist Gianandrea Noseda, the oboist Daniele Scanziani, the guitarist Emanuele Segre, and many others. In January 1999 the Vatican Radio has dedicated to his compositions a whole episode of a program about contemporary composers, and in similar programs his music has been presented also by the National Italian Radio RAI-RADIOTRE and by the National Radio of Argentina. Some compositions of his are published by Suvini Zerboni, Milan, Italy. He has worked with electronic music and computer-aided analysis, in his own studio and also with Agon, an important computer music studio in Italy, and with GMT, a Brazilian association for the musicological research. He is the author of studies about 20th Century harmony, the way of analyzing atonal non-tertian chords (his NonTonalAnalysis software, developed together with Didier Guigue, is known worldwide), and the relationship between "learned" and ethnical music traditions. He has been invited to give lectures on these subjects in Italy (Congress 'Nella memoria di un popolo' on folk tradition arts at the S.Ambrose Basilican Museum in Milan; National Congress 'La Terra Fertile' on electronic music at L'Aquila, 1998, organized by Istituto Gramma) and abroad (International Congress 'The Principles of Musical Composition' organized in Vilnius, Lithuania by the Lithuanian Academy of Music and the Lithuanian Composers Union, 1999 and 2001; also invited in 2002). He has published essays on the music magazine "La Rassegna Musicale Curci", conference proceedings (as in JIM 2001, Bourges, France, and Vilnius 1999, Lithuania) and Internet pages. He has also an extensive didactic activity, teaching composition, piano, harmony, and guided listening. He is currently teaching Harmony at the State Conservatory of Music in Cagliari (Italy).

Press Reviews "I now have a collaboration with some young Italian composers... What I am looking for is a composer who is able to have what I call a "stage feeling". There are not so many of them. By stage feeling, I mean people who can write music with the right dramatic effect... some of them are quite talented and it has been interesting to collaborate with them. Giovanni Grosskopf is 33 years old; Carlo Boccadoro is 36..." - Emanuele Segre, guitarist, on the Classical Guitar Magazine, September 2000 -------"Your music, by the way, I found very refreshing to hear, in the midst of the clamour of post-serial 'free dissonance' and tired, monotonous ideas which lost their freshness in the 60's. Your system of writing is very clearly goal directed without being founded in the tradition of tonal music, and that means that it's expressive without being conventional. I especially like the fact that you don't assault the listener with clouds of notes, as is so easy for inexperienced composers to do, but take extreme care that every note is vital to the perception of the form and progression of the work." - David Golightly, composer, U.S.A., in a private letter, 2000 -------"...young emerging composers: Giovanni Grosskopf and Carlo Boccadoro" - ("Sei Corde", October-December 2000) -------"Giovanni Grosskopf, a pianist and composer born near Milan in 1966, whose compositions have already been performed in The Netherlands, Brazil, U.S.A., Switzerland and, of course, Italy, is today the subject of our program. He graduated at the Conservatory of Milan in Composition, Piano and Electronic Composition which he masters with amazing competence. He was one of the dearest pupils of Niccolò Castiglioni, from whom he has inherited the same natural touch, the crystal-clear tone colours, the religious and magic feeling of sound. Among his teachers there are also Pippo Molino, Donatoni and Ligeti (composition masterclasses). He has always been interested in the practical application of electronics in music, and he has developed a software to analyze and classify atonal chords on the basis of their individual timbre. Since his first compositions Grosskopf has shown his deep love for ethnic music from all over the world and he has passionately investigated into some peculiar features of folk music: immediate, true, but shrill beauty of timbre, natural and each time new, typical of those remote auditive landscapes, microtonal scales, peculiar ways of producing sound in open-air environments, naturally and spontaneously irregular and elastic rhythms, ornamentation of melodic lines, continuous desire for irregularities, perceived as more natural than regularity, very close relationship between teacher and pupil, total involvement in experiencing the musical event, naturalness, spontaneousness. Grosskopf's music exceeds the context in which it begins to exist, it overhangs on us in a challenging way, as it were a fraternity act with Nature, according to the beautiful definition by Renzo Cresti. Music comes to Grosskopf as leaves in the wind (as we could say recalling Keats), it's spontaneous, sprightly music. It loves the material concreteness of vibrating wood, of a bowed or plucked string; it mixes with modern world through many ethnic quotations, but it is always unreducible to any specific geographical definition. It is nowadays music, but it refers to something else, it "hints at", it "pays homage to", it contains much more than what we can see on the written page. It cannot be reduced by an analysis to any sociological, militant, partisan interpretation: these always turn out to be asphyxiant, suffocating approaches. Grosskopf simply welcomes the sounds he meets and writes them down on the score or fixes them on the tape. He waits for the auditive events that occur around him and he questions them, he captures the satellites in orbit around him and makes them move in his own atmosphere. Grosskopf's poetry and talent, together with deepness of language, unexpectedness, beauty tout court also includes the use of intense lyric melodic phr ases, very tuneful ones, in an atonal melodic and harmonic context. Very powerful suggestion comes from Grosskopf's electronic music. Natural events, water, earth, fire, and air mix with sounds, birds and other animal cries. The mystery and the grandiosity of nature find their ideal space in this huge formal container. Grosskopf contemplates the nature with amazement and with the eyes of a child, reinventing sonorities and paths of the human wonder. The world that takes life from Grosskopf's sounds never is described in a banal way. It is recreated by electronics, but never is cold nor abstracted, it is not "virtual", according to nowadays fashion. On the contrary it is intense, majestic, full of sacred and religious awe. A wise explorer in front of the sacred immensity of the big mountain. Grosskopf's amazement develops into questioning, waiting, waking, into a wish to know deeper, a wish of adventure, a travel into knowledge. Never is Nature reduced, observed only from a single point of view: it is often a cruel Nature, marked by awe and sorrow. However, in the end, contemplation of beauty, at first only indistinctly seen, prevails. "Yesterday I was not here, today I am", says Grosskopf's music. "It isn't me who makes reality, but I'm fond of it", it seems to go on." - Enrico Raggi, musicologist, Vatican Radio, January 6th, 1999

Location Sesto San Giovanni, MI - Italy

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