Malditas palabras

 

This new book, Malditas Palabras (Cursed Words) was written during the long months of confinement in 2020, and is directly linked to his artistic research project In-Versions (www.in-versions.com). Moving away for a moment from the musicological research that characterized his previous Tone Moves: A History of Piano Technique (English updated version, 2019) and Beethoven at the Piano (English updated version forthcoming), this monograph starts from the use made of some decisive words within music scene (and European classical-music scene, in particular) to demonstrate the fragility of our musical terminology, to argue about the metaphysical halo that frequently permeates it and to denounce the ethnocentrism implicit in the claims of superiority of certain musical traditions over others. With an agile and scathing tone, sometimes ironic and often provocative, Luca Chiantore reveals his most recent ideas in this book full of personal memories and intimate reflections that will surprise those who know his other writings and at the same time will bring the general public closer to the dynamic and unconventional of his lectures and concerts

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inVersions

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The first album born within the framework of the inVERSIONS project. Two CDs dedicated to two giants of the era of the revolutions, Hélène de Montgeroult and Ludwig van Beethoven, whose works are read through Luca Chiantore’s very personal filter.

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Musicological research can prove an unparalleled stimulus for bringing ideas to performance. But I have long been aware that performance can just as easily feed back to musicological thinking. And this is not all. Very often these synergies reveal no clear unidirectional trajectory. I experience this fertile collision with growing interest, in particular because of its potential to reshape our historiographic, stylistic, and professional categories. With this in mind, in November, 2018, I launched this new personal project: concerts, talks, recordings, and other initiatives, some addressed to an academic environment, others to general audiences, the common thread being my yearning to offer alternative ways to perform the classical-music repertoire from a starting point of unconventional musicology-based approaches.

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More information about inVERSIONS: www.in-versions.com

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Luca Chiantore

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Luca Chiantore (Milan, 1966) is an Italian musician and scholar, a prominent figure in today's piano world, especially within the Ibero-American scene. 

 

As a concert pianist, he has performed in major concert venues such as Carnegie Hall (New York), Teatro Colón (Buenos Aires), Palacio de Bellas Artes (Mexico City) and the Museo de Arte de São Paulo. As a musicologist, he has lectured and given seminars at more than 150 universities and music schools in Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

 

Chiantore’s research has mostly focused on 19th-century piano repertoire and the theory and history of performance in Western classical music. His Historia de la técnica pianística, first published in 2001 and continually reprinted since then, is the most read academic text on piano in Spanish-speaking countries; an updated, enlarged, and extensively revised English version of this book (Tone Moves: A History of Piano Technique) has been released in 2019 (Kindle edition, 2020).

 

Luca Chiantore is also the author of the first book to be published on Ludwig van Beethoven’s widely unknown keyboard exercises (Beethoven al piano: Improvisación, composición e investigación sonora en sus ejercicios técnicos, 2010; Italian version, 2014; English version, 2021, forthcoming). In 2016, as co-author alongside Áurea Domínguez and Sílvia Martínez, he published Escribir sobre música, the first Spanish style manual for writing about music. His last book, Malditas palabras, has been released in February, 2021. 

 

He is professor of musicology at the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya, also teaching at the Escola Superior de Música Reina Sofia in Madrid and on the Doctorate in Music at the Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal. Since 2017 he is an integrated researcher at the INET-md institute. He has a PhD in Musicology from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

 

Immersed in the search for new models of interaction between performance and composition, he teamed up with David Ortolà to form Tropos Ensemble, an experimental creation duo with which he has played recitals and international concert tours in USA, Mexico, Colombia, Spain, Portugal, England, Belgium, and Italy, both in acoustic and live electronics formats. Their first album, A Noise of Creation, was released in 2014. They are currently working on a second album together. 

 

In November, 2018, he launched a new artistic-research solo piano project, inVERSIONS, focused on how musicology can offer alternative ways to perform the classical-music repertoire. The inVERSIONS project is planned to run a complex schedule of piano recitals, concert-lectures, publications, and recordings in Spain, Portugal, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Iceland, United States, Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Bolivia, Chile, Singapur, Indonesia, and China. The first double album of this project, inVersions, with works by Beethoven and Montgeroult, was released in 2021. 

 

Since 2003, Luca Chiantore’s activities have been coordinated by Musikeon, a company offering musicological services throughout Spain and Latin America.