updated 6 November 2023

Patricia Alessandrini

American composer born in 1970.

Patricia Alessandrini studied composing with Ivan Fedele, Tristan Murail, and Thea Musgrave and took courses in composition with Georges Aperghis, Franco Donatoni, Brian Ferneyhough, Jonathan Harvey, Michael Jarrell, Betsy Jolas, Helmut Lachenmann, Philippe Manoury, and Marco Stroppa. She graduated with a degree in composition from the Conservatoire de Strasbourg and took part in an experimental course in composition and live electronics at the Conservatorio di Bologna with Adriano Guarnieri and Alvise Vidolin. She participated in Cursus (IRCAM’s composition and computer music course) in 2006 (Cursus I) and 2010 (Cursus II). In 2008, she received a doctorate in composition from Princeton university; the same year, she received a fellowship to pursue a second PhD at the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) in Belfast, where her research focused on real-time physical modeling.

Her work has been performed at many festivals, including Agora (Paris), Archipel (Geneva), Darmstadt (Germany), Tempo real (Bogotá), Musica (Strasbourg), Musiques Inventives d’Annecy, and Sonorities (Belfast), and by ensembles including Accroche Note, the Arditti Quartet, Ensemble Aleph, Ensemble Alternance, Ensemble InterContemporain, l’Itinéraire, and New Millennium. Alessandrini has also collaborated with the Ballet de l’Opéra National du Rhin and in multiple multimedia projects, including with the performer/choreographer Yann Marussich, the sculptor Rukiye Sahin, the filmmaker Shirin Abu Shaqra, and the video artist Chiara Vecchiarelli. She has collaborated with institutions including the IRCAM, le CENTQUATRE-PARIS, the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), La Muse en Circuit (Paris), Musiques Inventives d’Annecy (MIA), Elektromusikstudion (EMS-Stockholm), as well as many other centers for research and the arts. She has received numerous honors and awards, including first prize in the Sond’Arte Composition Competition for Chamber Music with Electronics in 2009 and a Förderpreis in Composition at the Darmstadt Summer Course in 2012.

Most of Alessandrini’s recent work includes electronics, particularly live electronics, a reflection of her acute interest in the possibilities offered by multimedia creations, collaborations with artists working in other media, and political and social issues. Many of her compositions are built around strategies for reexamining and rereading canonic works in ways that explore questions of representation, interpretation, reception, and memory.

She was a guest composer at the Soundscape festival (Italy) in July 2011 and with the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) in 2011-2012. In 2015-2016, she led the “Sound Kitchen” project with the Ensemble Intercontemporain, a series of four concerts at the Gaîté lyrique (Paris) focusing on the discovery of contemporary music for new audiences through technology, and presenting several of her works, as well as a multimedia theatrical creation.

Patricia Alessandrini has taught courses in computer-assisted composition at the Accademia Musicale Pescarese in Italy. She currently teaches at Sonic Arts at Goldsmiths College, London, where she heads the Unit for Sound Practice Research. There she works specifically on the piano, which she confronts with live electronics and robots, a research embodied by the Piano Machine, integrated into some of her pieces such as Tracer la lune d’un doigt (2017) and Ada’s Song (2019). Since 2018, she has taught composition at Stanford University. She also conducts research at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics there (CCRMA).

Patricia Alessandrini sits on the international board of Share Music & Performing Arts.


© Ircam-Centre Pompidou, 2010

Sources

Site de la compositrice, Conservatoire de Strasbourg.

Liens Internet

(liens vérifiés en octobre 2023).

Bibliographie

  • Patricia ALESSANDRINI, Lloyd MAY, Margaret SCHEDEL, Chris STOVER, Sofy YUDITSKAYA, « Inclusive Listening. Developing Multiple Theory-Based Practices for Aural Studies », in Openwork, Columbia University Libraries, vol. 1, 2023.
  • Patricia ALESSANDRINI, « Five suggestions for an aspiring composition teacher: towards an inclusive compositional pedagogy », in Tempo, vol. 76, 2022, p. 42–51.
  • Patricia ALESSANDRINI, « Not All Ideas Are the Same », in Array. the Journal of the ICMA, 2020, p. 7–14.