Aldo Clementi was born in Catania, Italy, on 25 May 1925, to a family of doctors and amateur musicians. Clementi’s grandfather, promised Theodor Billroth, a Viennese surgeon and friend of Brahms, for whom he worked as an assistant, that his children would study music, and Clementi’s father, an amateur violinist, played Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Schumann. Aldo Clementi began studying piano and learned to read music at the age of thirteen and received his diploma in 1946, having studied with Giovanna Ferro, a student of Alfredo Casella. In 1947, in Siena, Clementi took master classes with Pietro Scarpini, a celebrated perfomer of Bach and part of the Vienna School, with Busoni, and with Dallapiccola. In parallel, in 1941, he began studying composition with the composer and conductor Gianni Buccèri, then with Giovanni Pennacchio, the conductor of the Catania marching band. Between 1945 and 1952, in Catania and in Bolzano, Clementi was the student of Alfredo Sangiorgi, who had studied with Schoenberg in Vienna in 1922-1923, where he learned twelve-tone composition. The first performance of one of Clementi’s works, Poesia di Rilke took place in 1947 in Vienna with soprano Lydia Stix and pianist Erik Werba.

In 1952, Clementi moved to Rome, where he studied with Goffredo Petrassi at the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia, graduating in 1954. From 1955 to 1962, he participated in the Darmstadt Summer Courses, where three of his compositions premiered: Tre studi for ensemble (1956-1957), Composizione n. 1 for piano (1957), and Triplum for flute, oboe, and clarinet (1960). His Cantata for narrator, soprano, choir, and ensemble, based on a fragment by Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1954), was broadcast by Radio Hamburg in 1956 as part of its Das neue Werk series. Shortly before, in 1955, Clementi met Bruno Maderna, which would be a decisive encounter for him. He, Luciano Berio, and Luigi Nono collaborated with Clementi at the RAI Studio of Phonology in Milan, where he created Collage 2 (1960), Collage 3 (Dies Irae) (1967), and the azione mimo-visiva Collage 4 (Jesu, meine Freude) (1979).

In 1961, Collage (1961), a work based on an argument and visual material by Achille Perilli, was presented at the Accademia Filarmonica Romana in Rome. In the early 1960s, Clementi was one of the founding members of Nuova Consonanza in Rome, along with, notably, Mauro Bortolotti, Franco Evangelisti, Domenico Guaccero, and Francesco Pennisi.

Clementi taught music theory and composition at the Conservatorio Statale di Musica Gioachino Rossini in Pesaro (1967-1973), at the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi in Milan (1973-1975), and at the Conservatoiro Giovanni Battista Martini in Bologna (1975-1979) before becoming a professor of music theory in the DAMS (Discipline delle Arti della Musica e dello Spettacolo) program of the University of Bologna, a position he held from 1971 to 1992. He was a frequent guest lecturer at institutions in Italy and around the world. His music is still regularly performed and broadcast, and his compositions were commissioned by many prestigious Italian institutions, including the Teatro alla Scala de Milan, the Venice Biennale, and the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome.

In 1992, Clementi’s opera Interludi. Musica per il mito di Eco e Narciso (1992) for twelve vocalists and twenty-four wind instruments, with his own libretto, was performed during the Orestiadi Festival in Gibellina. Another opera, Carillon, in one act, after Hofmannstahl’s Difficult Gentleman, premiered in concert in Venice on 28 September 1996.

En 1995, Clementi received a DAAD fellowship to spend the semester in Berlin, where he composed Sei momenti (1996) for six instruments. In 2005, in honor of his eightieth birthday, the University of Catania organized an international conference on his music and presented him with an honorary doctorate; during the Festival Pontino di Musica, the Incontri Internazionali di Musica Contemporanea organized two concerts devoted to his work, a round table, and the first ever retrospective of his graphic art; during the Festival Suoni e Colori in Toscana (Rignano sull’Arno), the composer received the Prize of the President of the Italian Republic; and the University of Bologna awarded him the DAMS Special Prize for lifetime achievement.

Clementi, in addition to these honors, received a great deal of recognition throughout his career: he won second prize in the ISCM Competition in 1959 for Episodi for orchestra (1958) and first prize in 1963 for Sette scene for ensemble (1963)n as well as the Franco Abbiati Prize (a prize established by Italian music critics) in 1992 for Interludi (1992). In 2006n he was named honorary director of the Istituto Musicale Vincenzo Bellini in Catania. A concert cycle dedicated to him was performed in Oslo in 2009 during the Ultima Festival. Aldo Clementi died in Rome on 3 March 2011.