Luca Francesconi

Luca Francesconi (born 17 March 1956 in Milan) is an Italian composer. He studied at the Milan Conservatory, then with and Luciano Berio.

Luca Francesconi was born in Milan. His father was a painter who edited Il Corriere dei piccoli and conceived Il Corriere dei ragazzi, while his mother, an advertiser, created a number of famous advertising campaigns. Francesconi spent his early years in QT8, a working class quarter in Milan that rose up alongside a huge pile of post-war rubble which would later become Monte Stella. At the age of five, won over by a concert by Svjatoslav Richter, he began to learn the piano. Although he was accepted into the junior high school section of the city's conservatory six years later, he instinctively pulled out, thinking that it was too academic and conventional. Instead, even though he had in the meantime moved with his family to a more central quarter of Milan, Francesconi opted to attend the junior high school in QT8. In this way from a very early age his relationship with music and life in general took on a course of responsibility and constant choice, of research and direct experimentation.

We need to profoundly rethink and filter in a determined way the enormously rich potential that has been elaborated in the past and to use it for expressive purposes.

Francesconi returned to the Conservatory of Milan in 1974, while he was still attending the Berchet Classical Languages High School, and explored the length and breadth of the musical landscape, taking an interest in every possible dimension of sound. He played in jazz and rock groups as well as in classical concerts, he worked as a session man in recording studios, and he composed music for theatre, cinema, advertising, and television. These were all rewarding experiences, not least from an economic point of view, but they were not enough. He realised that a truly living language, while looking at the present, draws its lifeblood from its roots. The time had come for him to dig into the tradition of music to which he belonged. The Milan Conservatory was opening more and more space to contemporary music so Francesconi enrolled in the composition course conducted by Azio Corghi. "From him I learnt the trade, the fundamentals, counterpoint and those things, professional seriousness and open-mindedness." In the meantime he continued to explore electronic music and in 1977 took time out to immerse himself in jazz at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.

The mountain is in front of us and it is necessary to pass over it, with enormous force and patience. It's not enough just to contemplate it nor to sneak by it via secondary paths much less go backwards claiming that the mountain is not there.

Donnerstag aus Licht went on stage at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan in 1981. Stockhausen is a historical reference point: Francesconi admired him for his extraordinary organisational consistency, for his tireless search for a linguistic unity. He was also deeply struck by the visionary quality of this initial opera. He wanted to observe the composer at work so he enrolled in the intensive course that Stockhausen held in Rome that same year. "From him I learnt rigor, at first imbibing it by osmosis, and then demythologising it."[7]

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