Magma, or The See-Through Wilderness [1996-1998] 70’, commissioned by CIDIM, Rossini Theatre in Lugo and Toscanini Foundation in Parma.
2 actors – Uomo, Donna
4 singers – Soprano, Mezzo, Baritone, Bass
orchestra – 1.1.1.1 1.1.1.0 2 perc [marimba, vibraphone, wood blocks, wood chimes, logdrum, 2 big maracas, 4 congas, timbales, snare drum, triangle, tuned gong Bb3, 5 cymbals, 2 Chinese cymbals] MIDI keyboard, strings 2.1.1.1
live electronics 2 operators, Tempo Reale, Florence
text by Sebastian Schloessingk

Tre Variazioni [1993] 12’, for orchestra.

...the sun is out, the sun is out [1994] 8’, for large orchestra.

Alúna [2005] for viola, ensemble and live electronics; written for Rivka Golani; orchestra – 1.1.1.1 1.1.1.0 1 perc [marimba] piano, strings 2.1.1.1 viola solo, live electronics 2 operators.

Studio [1986] 8’, piano.

Kamu-purrui [1992] 9’, alto flute; written for Carlo Ipata.

Per Iona [1992] 4’, piano.

Boys And Girls Between The Wars [1993, rev. 2001] 8’, mezzo-soprano, flute [doubling alto flute] piano and cello; on a poem by Sebastian Schloessingk.

Il divo Claudio [1994] 6’, narrator, flute, clarinet, guitar and cello; on a poem by Zbigniew Herbert, commissioned by Nicola Campogrande.

Three Sephardi Melodies [1994] 8’, baritone, flute, clarinet, guitar and cello, commissioned by Alberto Iona.

Cinque Amori [1994] 10’, narrator, flute [doubling alto flute and bass flute in C], clarinet [doubling bass clarinet and Eb clarinet), guitar and cello; on texts by Thomas Moore, Russian folklore, Simone de Beauvoir, Aristophanes, Maynard d’Aubigné; commissioned by Paola Roman and the Toujours Ensemble.

Il racconto delle nuvole – Sette scene musicali [1995] 15’, narrator, flute [doubling alto flute], clarinet [doubling bass clarinet], guitar and cello; text by Marco Vacchetti, commissioned by Paola Roman and the Toujours Ensemble.

Antidotes: Red-earth [1997] 7’ for natural trumpet and live electronics; commissioned by Gabriele Cassone.

Touch [2001] 11’, piano and live electronics.

river teach me [2002] 10’,mezzo-soprano and string quartet; on a poem by Zbigniew Herbert, written for Monica Bacelli, shortlisted by the SPNM in 2003.

Flectar [2004] 8’, trombone and live electronics, written for David Purser.

A poem para Gloria [1991] 6’, a cappella chamber choir [SATB]; on a poem by e.e.cummings.

Novecento [1999] 25’.

Colombia Nuevo Mundo by Mauricio Garcia Matamoros, (Colombia-Italy 1992)

Lifers by Enrica Colusso (Metafilm, Italy 1995)

No Risk No Champagne by Enrica Colusso (Fandango, Italy 2003)

Novecento, electro-acoustic soundtrack for a series of sixty programmes on the
20th century by RAI RadioTre, Italian National Radio (first broadcast in 1999).

Intercos with AGON at Bologna’s COSMOPROF (2000), a six-room interactive environment with audio and video events triggered by visitors through gesture-controlled sensors.

Opera e No: l’altro Ulisse di Luciano Berio, (co-authored with Piero Berengo Gardin) a television documentary on the Italian composer and his opera Outis; selected by the 1998 Classique en Images Festival in Paris, 60’, RAITre, Italy 1997.

The Integra project, Ensemble Network Meeting, Copenhagen 2006.

Panelist on the Sligo New Music Festival Open Forum on the music of Luigi Nono and Morton Feldman, Sligo 2006.

Music technology past, present and future, presented at the Music as Memory conference, Ultima Festival, Oslo 2006.

Modernising live electronics technology in the works of Jonathan Harvey [ICMC Proceedings, Barcelona 2005] with Jamie Bullock.

Modernising musical works involving Yamaha DX based synthesis: a case study [Organised Sound, vol 11 no 3, December 2006], with Jamie Bullock.

Integra, a novel approach to live electronics [Nordic Sounds, December 2006]

The strange creatures inhabiting this site are reproductions of Gloria’s thread on canvas artworks. They are all © Gloria Toro Ceballos. Music excerpts, scores, images, audio and video clips are all © Lamberto Coccioli when not stated otherwise.

Wordpress is a wonderful tool to create blogs and much more. Many thanks to Matt Mullenweg, the creator of Wordpress, and to the many developers that have improved on the core functions of the software.

I thought that setting up a nice blog with some static pages and media content would have been a straightforward affair. It turned out to take an inordinate amount of time and effort. On top of digging deep into Wordpress documentation and forums, I had to learn the basics of the PHP scripting language, MySQL and phpMyAdmin; a good deal of HTML and CSS and bits of UNIX commands and Apache… Just by counting the acronyms in the previous sentence you’ll have to agree that something is wrong here!

We are still a long way from having simple, user-friendly yet flexible tools to create personal blogs and web pages. Although Wordpress is one of the best publishing platforms and offers a very friendly admin interface, it still falls short of my requirements for a usable and flexible tool. But then, the intricacies of how a web page is generated, and the need to support different implementations will always be a barrier for developing more intuitive tools. With time…

This site uses a slightly modified version of the simple yet subtle Hemingway theme by Kyle Neath, and the following Wordpress plugins:

flickrRSS 5.1 by Dave Kellam and Stefano Verna
Get Custom Field Values 3.0.1 by Scott Reilly
Related Articles 0.2 by Lamberto Coccioli
TextileWrapper 2.8 by Joel Bennett
Time of Day 1.0.1 by Phu Ly & Dunstan Orchard & Michael Heilemann [in order to make it work you need to duplicate the function the_time and call it the_time2 in wp-includes/general-template.php. This is the code I use:
//added by me to make the timeofday plugin work (lc)
function the_time2( $d = '' )
{echo apply_filters('the_time2', get_the_time( $d ), $d);
}
Xspf_player 3.4a by José Rodriguez (a.k.a. Boriel)

I’m currently using in the Portfolio section two great web services, Soundcloud for listening to audio files and issuu for visualising scores and documents.

[updated December 2009]

Somehow I was going to be an architect, seduced by the impossible beauty of the city where I grew up. I remember fondly my assiduous frequentations of Rome’s old courtyards during the never-ending summers of my youth: the sudden coolness of the air after the scorching heat of the narrow cobbled streets, the subdued light, the stillness.

The enchantment lives on, but it has acquired a different, more abstract quality: instead of buildings, I ended up crafting sounds, as far away as you possibly can from the solid boundaries of materials and shapes. Many years after abandoning my architecture studies I had a painful glimpse of a parallel universe: I was interviewing Renzo Piano for a television documentary in his studio perched on the hills west of Genoa, overlooking an infinite blue among the olive-trees – the essence of the Mediterranean, the South, in a civilised, tamed version, but still quite powerful… – and I wondered if this visible outer order, the purring organisation of a world-class architecture workshop in the background, this almost indecent convergence of aesthetic and practical values, were the right answer to my restlessness.

Like many in this strange business of composing music, I crave concentration and silence: the freedom of solitary creation is pure joy, day after day. Yet, I could not at the time, and still cannot, come to terms with the narrow, artificial, often sad world of so-called contemporary music. It is a fine but ultimately empty construct, soon to be catalogued as a historical oddity. It seems to me that contemporary music is lacking three fundamental elements: it has no name, it has no audience and it has no real cultural role. As a niche in a niche, it perpetuates itself on the belief that it has some intrinsic value.

During a rainy summer holiday in Switzerland, I was about twelve, we visited for a few days St Moritz. At the Belvedere, in one of the empty reception rooms overlooking the valley, an ancient Blüthner grand piano seemed to wait for my brother and me. I can still feel the physical pleasure of touching the keys, and improvising endlessly on a descending tetrachord taken from Modern Jazz Quartet’s Blues on Bach. The rich, mellow consistency of the octaves in the bass, the sweet, harmonious midrange: pure bliss… This, and the memory of listening over and over again to John Coltrane’s version of My Favorite Things some years later, late at night in my bedroom.

For all of us the most enduring musical memories are always the earliest: the aura of Pollini’s Deutsche Grammophon recording of Chopin’s Études, a moving combination of the sepia cover, the unattainable perfection of the performance, and the spell of the quiet streets of the Aventino in Rome, where my friend Pietro lived and where I discovered classical music; Miles Davis’ Carnegie Hall concert, Schönberg’s piano pieces, again performed by Pollini, Astrud Gilberto and Erroll Garner all retain their initial magic.

If I have to single out one episode, it will certainly be the unforgettable afternoon when I attended for the first time a classical music concert. I was thirteen, spending three weeks in a kind of summer camp to learn English called “The Meadows” near Lucignano, in Tuscany. The enlightened owners had prepared a varied cultural programme for the kids, and one afternoon we found ourselves on the way to Gargonza castle, a haunting, Dantesque fortified village perched on a hilltop amidst forests and rolling fields. I don’t remember who played the piano that afternoon, but I do remember two pieces in the programme – Debussy’s L’île joyeuse and Barber’s Piano Sonata. I listened in awe as a new world opened before me – the experience deeply transformed me. On the way back, on the bus, I told my somewhat sceptical friends that it had been the happiest day of my life.

We have to solve this paradox – contemporary creation versus the museum of classical music: on one hand we have an unbelievably rich repertoire of works from the distant past that never ceases to move and amaze us, on the other a vast, crowded landscape of new creation that demands – mostly very loudly – our attention.

[work in progress]

T +44 (0)121 331 5917
F +44 (0)121 331 5906
E lamberto.coccioli at bcu.ac.uk

In 1994 he began an extended collaboration with Luciano Berio, and two years later he joined Tempo Reale, the research centre for new technologies applied to music founded by Berio in Florence. He worked there as composer, teacher, performer and artistic coordinator. From 1997 to 1999 he was in charge of the music productions of the Centre, and directed the production of Berio’s works with electronics, including Ofanim (Carnegie Hall 1997 and Schleswig-Holstein Festival 1998), Outis (La Scala, Milan, and Châtelet, Paris) and Cronaca del Luogo (Salzburg Festival 1999). In 2000 he was invited by AGON, the Milan research and production centre, to work on interactive installations (Intercos at Bologna’s COSMOPROF) and educational projects (Suoni in Corso).

More recently Lamberto has been responsible for live electronics and sound design in a number of high profile performances with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (for Julian Anderson’s Book of Hours in 2007), Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Athelas Sinfonietta and Den Nye Opera in Bergen (for Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de loin in 2008).

Since arriving in Birmingham Lamberto has been developing a wide range of activities and resources to integrate new technologies with composition and performance. From 2001 to 2005 he directed he Thallein Ensemble, a group of advanced students devoted to new music, promoting the performance of new works and existing repertoire with live electronics. Works by Blondeau, Colombo Taccani, Corghi, Fedele, Jodlowski, Leroux, Romitelli are among the many UK premieres by the ensemble. In 2003 he created the Conservatoire’s Centre for Composition and Performance with Technology, collaborating on performance and research projects with Jonathan Harvey (the modernisation of his older works that use obsolete technology), Julian Anderson (the electronics of Book of Hours, winner of the 2006 Royal Philharmonic Society Award for large-scale composition) and Luca Francesconi (a new version of the multi-media work Lips Eyes Bang) among others. In 2004 he supervised the renovation of the Conservatoire’s Recital Hall, a unique space for the performance of multimedia and live electronics works. Lamberto has designed and developed two new joint courses: the BSc Music Technology (2001) in partnership with TIC, the Technology Innovation Centre, and the MA Digital Arts in Performance (2007) in partnership with BIAD, the Birmingham Institute of Arts and Design.

His music has been performed in Italy and abroad: Milano Musica, Nuova Consonanza Festival in Rome, Novecentomusica in Florence, Music Xtra Festival in the UK. Gabriele Cassone, the renowned trumpet player, commissioned in 1997 Antidotes: Red-earth, for natural trumpet and live electronics. In 1998 a CIDIM commission (Italian National Music Committee), and a joint production of Lugo’s Rossini Theatre, Parma’s Theatre and Toscanini Foundation brought to the stage Magma or the see-through wilderness, an opera on a text by Sebastian Schloessingk for actors, singers, orchestra and live electronics. More recent works include Touch, for piano and live electronics, river teach me, for soprano and string quartet, selected for the 2003 SPNM shortlist, Flectar, for trombone and live electronics, written for David Purser, and Alúna, for viola, ensemble and live electronics, written for Rivka Golani. Lamberto has worked with a number of directors, from Italy and elsewhere, writing music for theatre plays, documentaries and fiction films.

Lamberto is currently project manager of Integra: Fusing Music and Technology, a 3-year, €1,9M project supported by the Culture 2007-2013 programme of the European Union. Started in 2008 as the continuation of Integra – A Composition and Performance Environment for Sharing Live Music Technologies, another €1.2M Culture 2000 funded project, Integra focuses on dissemination and sustainability of live electronic music through a wide range of artistic, scientific and educational activities involving five research centres (Birmingham Conservatoire, Muzyka Centrum, IEM, NOTAM and Malmö Academy of Music) and five new music ensembles (BIT20 Ensemble, Court-circuit, Ensemble Ars Nova, Grup Instrumental de València and Athelas Sinfonietta) across Europe, plus CIRMMT (McGill University) in Canada. As the first coordinated effort among scientific and artistic partners to create a software-based environment for composing, performing and preserving music with live electronics in a user-friendly and reliable way, Integra is quickly attracting international attention.

Papers and articles relating to current research include Modernising live electronics technology in the works of Jonathan Harvey [ICMC Proceedings, Barcelona 2005], Modernising musical works involving Yamaha DX based synthesis: a case study [Organised Sound, vol 11 no 3, December 2006], both written in collaboration with J. Bullock, A novel approach to music with live electronics [Nordic Sounds, No. 4 December 2006], Sustainability of live electronic music in the Integra project [Melecon IEEE Proceedings, Ajaccio 2008] with J. Bullock and H. Frisk, and Towards a humane graphical user interface for live electronic music [NIME Proceedings, Pittsburgh 2009].