Works
Selected compositions for acoustic and electronic forces. Some with scores, some with recordings, some others you can only imagine. Or get in touch for a chat.
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.
Tesserae
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.
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.
FoMo
Fifteen microscores interspersed with faux-advertisements, designed to be performed in any sequence (chosen or random). The abrupt transitions between segments mirror our unconscious compulsion to jump, scroll, and skim through digital content: that restless pursuit of “just one more” piece of information or entertainment, often at the cost of appreciating what’s already before us. Digistraction at its best.
The tone is decidedly satirical, but the piece is genuinely meant as an invitation to contemplate our relationship with digital platforms. An economy of attention where focus is the most valuable commodity, and our social worth is seemingly measured by our ability to consume (or produce for someone else!) an endless stream of information.
Inspired by an e.e. cummings poem with the same title.
The loneliness in that poem is neither melancholic nor purely desolate. “Everybody’s elsewhere,” yet the empty park, the autumn landscape, the sparrows, and the pouring rain converge as symbols of an unexpected epiphany. A loneliness that doesn’t weigh down, but opens up (a moment of understanding beyond the mere absence of something).
The piece follows the poem’s structure (its stanzas, verses, and length) and walks the fine line between fragmentation’s anxiety and the possibility of a melody. Like cummings’ scattered syllables that hint at both isolation and connection, the music inhabits the space between dissonance and harmony, sound and silence.
It premiered at the HighSCORE Festival (IT) in July 2024, performed by MDI Ensemble.
The mild winters of these latitudes often spark nostalgic memories of my childhood: snow piled higher than my small frame, the intense orange glow of the wood stove, and the characteristically peculiar colour palette of 1970s ski gear. There’s a single photograph at my parents’ house that perfectly captures this confluence of memories.
These vivid recollections became the foundation for a composition commissioned for the 2023 CANZ Composer Workshop. Writing for piano, viola, and clarinet, I translated five distinct colours from that “kodachrome era” into musical expressions. Each movement is a tone painting inspired by those striking hues of my winter memories.
The piece premiered at the workshop’s closing concert in Otautahi Christchurch (NZ) in September 2023, where it was performed and recorded.
Reckless Hands
I wave a lot when I talk. Can’t help it, I guess it’s in my Italian DNA. I fidget and finger-drum a lot when I’m supposed to be idle as well. Can’t help that either; it’s in my drummer’s DNA (I’d like to believe that’s a thing). But there’s only so much one can move their hands before they become dangerous. Reckless, in fact.
This short piece, my first for this instrumentation, attempts to depict those spikes in tension caused by the ‘overuse’ of one’s hands. From innocent paradiddle warm ups on the kitchen table to that shit-I’ve-just-tipped-a-whole-jug-of-water-on-the-boardroom-table-during-a-crucial-meeting moment we all dread (or is it just me?).