A sense of beauty

Our thirteenth season of concerts in the series “Novecento e presente” (The Twentieth Century and the Present) will commemorate a number of important dates in recent music history. One of these is the centenary of the birth of John Cage, once the enfant terrible of the new music, and perhaps the most brilliant and influential figure of the historical avant-garde. We are dedicating to Cage not only a concert of some of his most important works, but also an afternoon “happening” at the Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana, in which the very young students of the Music School will take part.

We will celebrate Hans Werner Hense’s eighty-five years with a concert performance of his Elegy for Young Lovers, but will also commemorate the death, twenty-five years ago, of one of the most important representatives of American music, Morton Feldman, by presenting Words and Music, a radio drama born of an intense collaboration between Feldman and Samuel Beckett. We welcome two renowned Italian composers to our season, Azio Corghi and Salvatore Sciarrino, who will join us in Lugano for concerts dedicated respectively to their works. We will be introduced to some historic examples of musique concrète and electronic music, at times used in conjunction with traditional acoustic instruments, in a concert featuring works by Pierre Schaeffer, Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna, as well as some more recent compositions. We will conclude the season with a highly ambitious project – a reconstruction of the stage work Le dit des jeux du monde by Paul Méral and Swiss composer Arthur Honegger, produced as a SUPSI interdisciplinary collaboration between the Conservatorio, the degree course in visual communication and the Scuola Teatro Dmitri. We hope that the variety of these programmes will appeal to the audiences who have supported us for so many years, as well as attracting new admirers of a kind of music that, for all its experimentation and innovation, has never lost its sense of beauty.

Arturo Tamayo

Complete 900presente italian version