Composers

As a composer, pianist, musical saw and Vietnamese dan bau soloist, Luciano Chessa has performed his music in Europe and the U.S. Humus, his first recording, received outstanding reviews in all the major Italian musical magazines (Rumore, Fare Musica) and was voted by Rockerilla's critics as one of the 10 best Italian recordings of 1997. Among his compositions, it is worth mentioning a piano and percussion duet after Pier Paolo Pasolini's Petrolio, written for Sarah Cahill and Chris Froh and presented in 2004 at the American Academy in Rome, Il pedone dell'aria  for orchestra and double children choir, premiered in 2006 at the Auditorium Gianni Agnelli of Turin's Lingotto and just released on DVD, Nouronihar for organ, premiered in Fall 2006 at San Francisco's Grace Cathedral, and Cinabro for viola and piano, premiered in Fall 2006 at Genoa's Biblioteca Berio and soon thereafter broadcasted by RTSI-Radio Svizzera, the Swiss National Broadcast Channel. In the next few months there will be a number of premieres in venues ranging from Rome's Auditorium/Parco della Musica and UC Davis' Mondavi Center: Louganis, for piano and TV/VCR set, Inkless Imagination IV for viola, mini-bass musical saw, turntables, percussion, FM radios, blimp and video projection (both works in collaboration with media sculptor Terry Berlier), Polinesiano for quintet, a recently orchestrated version of his Recitativo, aria e coro della Vergine (the pivotal scene from his oratorio-in-progress Urlo impietrato), and Strelitzie, a newly published work for baritone and string orchestra. His next composition projects include a piece for the Berlin-based dhrupad singer Amelia Cuni, a guitar solo for Antonio d'Augello to be published in May 2008, and the completion and staging of Urlo impietrato. Dr. Chessa has been producing concerts of contemporary music for almost ten years. He worked from 1996 to 1998 as concert producer for Bologna's L.I.N.K. PROJECT, an internationally-renowned multifunctional center for production and distribution of contemporary arts, for which he created and directed his own concert series, Convergenze parallele. Since summer 1999 he is the Musical Program Coordinator for the Italian Cultural Institute in San Francisco, where he presents concerts of Italian contemporary and 20th-century music in partnership with many Californian concert institutions and universities (RedCat, San Francisco Performances, LA's Monday Evening Concerts, SFCMP, LCCE, CalArts, UC Davis, Stanford University, UC Berkeley...). He is also the curator of Primavera Italiana. The Spring Festival of Italian New Music, whose first edition took place in April 2007 in several Bay Area venues, from Mills College's Concert Hall to the Koret Auditorium of the de Young Museum. As a musicologist, his areas of research competence include twentieth-century, experimental, and late fourteenth-century music. His Ph.D. dissertation, which he has presented internationally, has shown for the first time the occult relationship between Luigi Russolo's intonarumori and Leonardo da Vinci's musical machines. He is currently working on Luigi Russolo, futurista. Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult the first English monograph dedicated to Russolo, to be published by the University of California Press in 2009.
Dr. Chessa has taught at the Conservatory of Music in Bologna, at the University of California at Davis, at Columbia University, and at the University of California at Berkeley, and has been interviewed at the CBS (KPIX/KBHK) television channel as an expert on Italian hip-hop. Chessa currently teaches History of Contemporary Music at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. His music is published by the Italian National Broadcast Channel's music publishing company, RAI TRADE, and distributed in the U.S. by The Theodore Presser Company.