Antonio Pileggi, from the San Fedele Cultural Center’s  music department in Milan, reminisces about the last ULYSSES creation, performed two weeks ago at the San Fedele Auditorium (More information about this event here)

For 15 months, 11 young composers worked together on the Dante Divine Comedy, focusing on the idea of travel. 

Petrosino Silvano presented the Dante Project before the performance. Why did you choose a philosopher to make this introduction? 

A philosopher is different from a music specialist because he has more cross-disciplinary point of view; it is a good way to approach different aspects of the creation.

Moreover, the Divine Comedy is an existential journey where all human dimensions come into play,; it is about transformation, maturation. Fort the artists themselves, this project was, as well, a kind of journey.

You say that the 11 composers involved in the Dante Project worked together like a theatre troupe. Why? 

They worked together for 15 months so they had time to learn to know each other.

In the first phase, the necessity was to truly understand Dante’s text. Like for theatre, the composers had to develop an idea together in order to transform their individual understandings of the text into a common understanding. Roaming and travel was the starting point and the main axis from which the young composers’ works developed.

Throughout their journey, they were able to take advantage of support from different specialists. Their initial reflection phase was followed and accompanied by philosophers and anthropologists. Regular meetings were organized with a tutor and conferences-debates were organized with Divine Comedy literary specialists.

This common work carried out on the text over a period of time resembled the work of a theatre troupe.

During the Dante Project, when did the performers (Quartetto Prometeo) take part in the project? And how did this intervention influence the young composers’ work? 

We chose to involve the 4 performers during two distinc moments. The first of these two moments was in March 2012 and the second was just before the concert. These two sessions each lasted two days. The first session gave the composers a time to listen, adapt, and enjoy the presence of the performers and the tutor redirect of modify their compositional works. This time is important because it allows young composers to hear different points of view and advice that make it possible to take a step back and look at his or her work.

For this work, The Prometeo Quartetto was perfect because they are committed to working with young people and are used to doing follow up after a creation.

What does the future hold for the 11 young composers that had the opportunity to participate in the Dante Project? 

The Dante Project was part of a 3-year cycle. The 11 composers that participated this year were selected from last year’s 25 composers. We recently selected 6 composers from the 11 artists who participated to the Dante Project.

Pasquale Corrado, Aurélien Dumont, Evis Sammoutis, Antonin Servière, Franco Venturini and Vito Zuraj will work for this third and final year on the Chinese astrology thematic.