Aldo Clementi
From May 22, 2007, on the unanimous decision of the academic board, the honorary director of the Istituto Musicale Vincenzo Bellini of Catania is Aldo Clementi.
Aldo Clementi was born May 25 1925 in Catania. At 13 he started studying piano under the guidance of Giovanna Ferro, graduating in 1946. In 1947 he furthered his studies with the pianist Pietro Scarpini in Siena. He started studying composition in 1941 very soon becoming pupil of the catanian Alfredo Sangiorgi (one of the few italian pupils of Arnold Schonberg), through whom he entered into contact with the music of the Second Viennese School and the twelve tone system. In 1947 in Vienna, there took place the first performance of one of his compositions (Poesia di Rilke for soprano and pianoforte).
In 1952, he moved to Rome where he became pupil of Goffredo Petrassi, under whose guidance he graduated in 1954. From 1955 to 1962 he was present at the vacation courses of Darmstadt, where his music was performed; meanwhile, in 1956 there took place the first important performance of a work of his (Cantata on a fragment of Calderon de la Barca, 1954) for Radio Hamburg, for the series Das neue Werk.
In the second half of the 1950s he had the chance of meeting Bruno Maderna, so beginning a rapport that Clementi himself defined as "of decisive importance". Just as important for his career was his experience at the Studio of Musical Phonology of the Radiotelevisione Italiana in Milan, where he realized works such as Collage 2 (1960), Collage 3 (Dies irae) (1967) and Collage 4 (Jesu, meine Freude) (1979). At the beginning of the 1960s he was one of the founders of the Rome association Nuova Consonanza, together with Mauro Bortolotti, Franco Evangelisti, Domenico Guaccero e Francesco Pennisi.
From 1971 to 1992 he held the professorship of music Theory at the department DAMS (discipline in arts, music & performance) of the Arts faculty of the University of Bologna and was often invited to hold courses and seminars of composition at various italian and foreign institutes . He received various prizes and much international recognition, including second prize at the competition of the Società Internazionale di Musica Contemporanea (SIMC) in 1959, and first prize in the same competition in 1963, not to mention the prize "Premio Abbiati" assigned to him by the critica musicale italiana in 1992.
Clementi is composer of a vast and varied catalogue of works. Convinced assertor of the so-called structuralists of post-webern mark, he has always conjugated his own exquisite sensibility of sound with rigorous formal patterns, in the definition of which his profound knowledge of counterpoint in all its manifestations has a fundamental role.
After his first composing period, corresponding to his years of study, in which his spirit was already close to that of the Second Viennese school, Clementi approached the structuralism of the second half of the 1950s, once he was frequenting the courses in Darmstadt. His closeness to artist-painter environments like the group Forma 1, to artists like Piero Dorazio, Achille Perilli, Antonio Sanfilippo and others, is emblematic of his interest towards visual art, which was to be of extreme importance in the years to come. Almost wanting to create a corresponding to informal art, in the 1960s Clementi produced works like gli Informel, le due Varianti and i Reticoli, works where the dense chromatic counterpoint (in the Variante A he utilizes, incredibly, 144 real parts) is there to constitute a sort of multilayer continuum, in which every single voice is annulled, drowned in a great wash of sound whose texture is in continuous movement; for these reasons the musical language of Clementi is often put on a par with the drippings of Jackson Pollock, or the mobiles of Alexander Calder.
Successively, already in the 1970s Clementi developed his own musical language utilizing material ever more diatonic, often coming from past works (the frequent use of the theme BACH can also be seen, or of choral melodies), and ever greater attention is given regarding harmonic verticality.
Typical of his mature output is the constant use of the rallentando applied to cyclic repetitions of the same material, almost wanting to make a sort of progressive enlargement of contrapuntal devices, highlighting very explicitly their intrinsic functioning.
His music is currently performed and transmitted on the radio, in and outside Italy, often commissioned by organizations of great importance (The Teatro alla Scala of Milan, Biennale of Venice, The Accademia Filarmonica Romana of Rome, The Accademia nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, The Orestiadi of Gibellina (in Sicily), only to cite some of the important ones in Italy). The music of Aldo Clementi is edited by Suvini Zerboni (Milan).