THOUGHTS (2026)
My nature is predisposed to find a composer who is more spontaneous and natural rather than constructed, with strong thematic ideas that remain in the memory and leave an emotional impulse. I need to hear clear, essential musical thoughts that are also contrasting (but deriving), that have a consequence and that create a form that hangs together.
Remember to give identity to a musical idea, obviously rhythmical, melodical/harmonical and also with orchestral colour/pitch. Don’t continue composing until you have a good idea which you like. Improvise at the piano just to relax but be ready with paper and pencil. Thomas Edison said that “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”. I fully agree. When you compose every day and you don’t accept bad musical ideas from yourself, when you have the patience to wait for the next day (or the next week or month) to get enlightened and inspired by your own self-awareness, when you are driven by well-balanced ambition and faith in yourself, when you don’t succumb to depression and you have the good luck to have good health, when you know you are musically gifted and feel generally satisfied with what you have composed, it is your moral duty to continue composing as much as possible. At a certain point you have to accept your own music and not compare yourself to others to be able to continue. One must not feel envious or saddened by other good composers. We are all different. Nobody can copy anyone else, because it will only result in a bad copy, not inspired and not natural music. One can only copy, learn and be inspired from oneself, but of course the great composers of the past can convey a lot of spiritual secrets as well as techniques. Any technique must only be considered a means to express your own ideas, not an end in itself.
One must compose notwithstanding difficulties in life. The compositional part of life is very hard to carry on in the middle of other duties, work and problems. I have passed through all this myself and there have been many, many moments when I couldn’t compose, particularly after I was 26 years old onwards (after the Composition Diploma), when my parents were old and sick and during moments in these last years with my own bad health. I am sure that good musical ideas will come to you just as long as you pick yourself up again and continue to compose, possibly daily.
As we all know the World is changing, or better still, has already changed without many of us of an older generation realizing it till these very last few years, whilst young digital generations do not have any analogical means to feel and understand the past.
I see there is a lack of concentration in people nowadays, due to too much small, disconnected information through the web and in the lack of interest in assimilating the past as a consequence and part of the present. Composers want to to compose even before having felt and understood the meanings and emotions behind all the great music of the past. Furthermore, on the web, the excitement created by the light and movement of continuously different images created on the brain by fragmented digital production does not enable one to read a long book or a work of Music on paper, or listen to a complete Symphony, if only in bits and pieces.
MY REQUIEM AND STABAT MATER (2023)
MY RESIGNATION FROM THE CONSERVATORIO OF MILANO (1st November 2018)
PERSONAL POSITION AND AESTHETICS (1992)
ADVICE TO YOUNG STUDENTS (2018-)
MUSICAL EFFECTS IN PERSPECTIVE (1999)
THE HANS KELLER YEARS (1978-1985)
MY MUSIC AND THE ARTS I LOVE (2007)