Rocco Di Pietro

Rocco Di Pietro (born 1949) is composer, pianist, author, teacher, and habilitationist whose work crosses multiple disciplinary boundaries. "His work has a literary and visual component linking him with the romantic tradition.".

Rocco Di Pietro was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1949. He studied composition and piano with Hans Hagen in Buffalo and at the Berkshire Music Center, Tanglewood, where he won an ASCAP Fellowship to study composition with Lukas Foss and Bruno Maderna. While at Berskire, Gunther Schuller performed Di Pietro's Drafts (1971) with the Berkshire Music Center ensemble. Di Pietro's teacher Bruno Maderna commissioned the work Piece for Bruno (1974) for the Nancy Meehan Dance company, which was conducted by Dennis Russell Davies with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra at the American Dance Festival in New London, Connecticut, 1974.

Di Pietro worked exclusively in musical composition for 20 years before earning degrees from SUNY Buffalo and Vermont College. He combined his musical and academic experience as an interdisciplinary professor teaching in prisons and at colleges in New York, Ohio, and California. He toured California prisons as an artist-in-residence. In 1988, Di Pietro finished his first book, A New Peasant Consciousness: Menocchio The Precursor. Presented to Vermont College as his thesis, he was granted a Master of Arts in Music and Social History. The book also included the musical works Etudes for Menocchio and Annales For Menocchio,and ultimately served as the basis for an interdisciplinary work combining opera, film, lecture, slides, and music.

Di Pietro taught the historiography of Annales in prisons throughout New York, Ohio, and California as a guest of the William James Association. From there, he expanded his research and teaching to courses in sociology, anthropology, abnormal psychology, critical theory, philosophy, musicology, and art theory. One current ran throughout his scholarship and teaching: examining the subject in terms of its relationship to power. At the end of this 11-year period, he returned to music, with literature a primary influence. His work in prisons led to an Ohio Arts Council grant to attend What Next, a conference in San Francisco on the state of United States prisons. In 1995, he was named artist in residence at the Headlands Center, California.

While teaching in prison, Di Pietro published highlights of five years of his conversations (1996–2000) with noted composer Pierre Boulez in the book Dialogues with Boulez, (Scarecrow Press, 2001). His main question for the maestro: where did the new music of the mid-20th century go? Gramaphone said of the book: "You can admire Di Pietro for his persistence in persuading Boulez to participate in these exchanges, and for provoking a number of reasonably stimulating comments, not least about his continuing desire to write an opera." Upon publishing the book, Di Pietro presented it to IRCAM in Paris, France, and was invited to speak about the book by Mills College and Stanford University. He also attended the Stockhausen Summer Course for Music in Kürten, Germany. His essay Musician Without Notes, based on his experiences in Kürten, found the composer re-assessing his relationship to composition.

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