Carlo Alessandro Landini (born April 20, 1954, in Milan, Italy) is an Italian composer, scholar and essayist.
Carlo Alessandro Landini began his musical studies in the piano and composition classes of the Milan Conservatorio "Giuseppe Verdi", under the guidance of Piero Rattalino and Bruno Bettinelli respectively, graduating in 1978 and 1979. However, his interests did not limit themselves to the sole field of music but led him to graduate in 1982 in Modern Literature, with a dissertation[1] dedicated to the Capuchin nun Saint Veronica Giuliani, a text later on revised and published in the form of a more extensive essay.[2]
After graduating in composition, Landini followed, between 1975 and 1978, the specialization courses held by Franco Donatoni at the Accademia Chigiana (Siena)[3] and again, between 1978 and 1986, the summer courses in Darmstadt held by the masters of French "spectral music" (Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, Hugues Dufourt).[4] He then attended courses with Iannis Xenakis, György Ligeti (Aix-en-Provence) and Witold Lutoslawski (Grožnjan). In 1979 he moved to Paris, where he received lessons from Olivier Messiaen and, once admitted to the prestigious CNSM, attended the classes of Ivo Malec and Claude Ballif. He was awarded the Premier Prix by a unanimous jury. In 1981 he moved to the United States on a Fulbright Fellowship. He resided in San Diego for two years, where he studied and taught at the University of California, eventually graduating in 1983.[5]
From 1983 he taught in the Conservatory of Piacenza with the role of Professor with tenure, eventually retiring in 2021.[6] Appointed at Columbia University (New York) in 2003, he works with Jonathan Kramer, attending Fred Lerdahl’s lessons, thus investigating the modelling of tension and relaxation in pitch-space. A Fellow of the Italian Academy (Columbia, New York),[7] he served as Visiting Professor at the University of Maryland in Baltimore (2006),[8] the Musikhochschule in Trossingen (2010), the Hamu in Prague (2012).
His works have been performed in important contemporary music festivals, including the historic Ferienkurse in Darmstadt,[9] [10] Chigiana in Siena, the Venice Biennale,[11] the World New Music Days in Vienna-Bratislava, the Prokofiev Festival in St. Petersburg, Salle Gaveau in Paris, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Pomeriggi Musicali in Milan, the Roy O. Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Livewire Festival in Baltimore, JD Robb Composers’ Symposium in Albuquerque, the Autunno Musicale Campano in Caserta,[12] the Filharmonia Śląska Season in Katowice and many others. His works are published by Pizzicato, Sonzogno, Alphonse Leduc, Curci, Carisch.
Landini is the winner of important international awards for his compositions, such as the Valentino Bucchi (Rome, 1986),[13] Ernest Bloch (Lugano, 1994), K. Serocki (Warsaw, 2002 and again 2004),[14] Athens (2010),[15] the prestigious W. Lutosławski (Warsaw, 2007), being the first and only Italian ever to have won this contest. He also emerged as the winner in the "Francesco Siciliani" Competition (Perugia, 2016) with his Kyrie for choir of 9 mixed voices.[16] [17] [18]
His Sonata No. 1 for piano (1981) lasts over an hour[19] his Piano Sonata No. 2 (1987) an hour and a half, his string quartet Changes is a single, long and uninterrupted movement of 40 minutes (its first performance, entrusted to the prestigious Arditti quartet, took place on August 5, 1994, in Darmstadt)[20] the Sonata No. 5 lasts "seven hours without even a break"[21] whereas its short version lasts 2 hours and a half.[22] [23] The "mammoth"[24] score of this huge work (dedicated to the Genoese pianist Massimiliano Damerini) consists of 650 pages and has been defined a "massage of the body and mind"[25] pretending to give the listener "hours of reflection, rest, well-being".[26]
The musicologist Quirino Principe sees in his music "a search for beautiful sound"[27] that is, the sound vehicle of beauty, which is not present in other composers". In his music the durations are always, continues Principe, "in an organic and necessary relationship with the gradualness that carves the beauty of sound". The cultural sphere in which his music moves is, as the musicologist Renzo Cresti states, "closely linked to the Middle-European one, expanded to the ancient Greek-Latin civilization", such as to situate Landini "a thousand miles away from a volatile communication that doesn't convey anything meaningful: the composer ends up being obsessed with a subtle chisel work that digs and deepens, like a spiral that plunges into the meanders of being".[28]