Composer? Curious by default.
Italian-born, composing from Tāmaki Makaurau. The route here involved several drums, computer code, and a few genres I probably should have left alone.
Comfortable with wrong turns
The path from a Casio keyboard and a school trombone to contemporary composition was not exactly direct: there were rock bands, dusty jazz clubs, a stint behind the drum kit that never quite ended, and a parallel career writing computer code that probably explains my fondness for systems and structure.
That duality (engineer and composer, performer and listener, Italian upbringing and Pacific home) turns out to be less a contradiction than a method. The music starts with architecture: grids, constraints, formal logic. What I'm after is the point where those systems crack open and something organic takes over.
Recent efforts
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A daily commute is never quite the same trip twice. The route shifts, the pace changes with the weather or the traffic or sheer luck, and somewhere in the repetition a pattern forms that isn’t really a pattern at all.
Five sonic snapshots from different journeys to work: alternative routes dodging the usual congestion, strategic early departures, the liberating emptiness of school holidays, and moments of acute frustration. The fixed media track draws pitch material from journey data, rhythmic patterns from each day’s character, and field recordings captured along the way. The live performer gets a map and a few indications; the rest is theirs to interpret through the drum kit. Routine provides the scaffolding. Everything interesting happens in the gaps.
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Despite growing up in Italy, I’d somehow never been to Pompeii until 2024. The scale of it (an entire city, preserved with that eerie completeness) left me genuinely stunned, but it was the mosaics that planted the seed I couldn’t leave alone. A tessera on its own is nothing; a few hundred of them, placed with intent, become a dog that has guarded a threshold for two thousand years.
The piece borrows that principle. Each of the seven movements responds to a specific Pompeii mosaic, built from rhythmic microstructures (the musical tesserae) that combine, shift, and accumulate into larger forms. The compositional method stays consistent across movements; what changes is the character of the source image and whatever it pulls out of the material.
The movements: Beware of the Dog, Memento Mori, Plato’s Academy, Marine Life, Unknown Portrait, Dionysus on a Panther, Orion’s Myth.
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A few years ago, I stood in front of Jackson Pollock’s “Number One” in Los Angeles and couldn’t move. Something kept shifting in the way I saw it: one moment I could take in the painting as a whole; the next, my eyes would isolate a single thread, picking out a colour or a layer, almost as if it existed separately from the wider context.
The idea of recreating this sensation through music came to me relatively recently, after seeing a photograph of the painting and recalling the experience. I wanted to compose a piece where the entire material is presented in the first few bars, much like Pollock’s canvas. Beyond that, I sought to guide the listener through the process of isolating the multiple threads, textures, and the changes in rhythm and pace within the work. Eventually, the piece comes full circle, allowing the listener to experience the wholeness once again, almost ready to loop and restart.
The opportunity to workshop this with the NZSO felt like the kind of coincidence you don’t question.
From the notebook
The image is the videotrack
It all started with the idea of a multimedia installation where images serve the music. Turns out that's harder than it sounds.
Tools all the way down
Counterpoint rules, tape splicers, stochastic processes, and now a machine I can talk to. The lineage of compositional tools is longer than the current debate suggests.