Prison Dirges (Model Version B)

Rocco Di Pietro was born in Buffalo, New York in 1949. He studied composition and piano with Hans Hagen and Lukas Foss in Buffalo and at the Berkshire Music Center, Tanglewood. He studied in New York and Darmstadt with Bruno Maderna and was a freelance composer for twenty years before earning degrees from SUNY Buffalo and Vermont College. He became an interdisciplinary adjunct professor teaching in prisons and on many college campuses throughout New York, Ohio, and California. He toured California prisons as artist-in-residence and conducted four years of interviews in Chicago with Pierre Boulez. The resulting book, DIALOGUES WITH BOULEZ, was recently published by Scarecrow Press. He composed Prison Dirges I for the Kronos String Quartet. Di Pietro's music has been performed by many musicians in venues throughout the world. These include: Christiane Edinger, Christobal Halffter, Lukas Foss, Julius Eastman, Bruno Maderna, Frances Marie Uitti, Yvar Mikhasoff, Jan Williams, Anthony Miranda, Gunther Schuller, Dennis Russell Davies, the Buffalo Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra, The Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Bavarian Radio Orchestra, Pro Musica Chamber Orchestra, CETA Orchestra, Ojai Ensemble Sonor, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Columbus Wind Orchestra, Earlham String Orchestra, the Avant Collective, and the Madd Lab Orchestra. Venues include: The Kitchen, La Mama, Bang On A Can Festival, in New York, Contemporary Music Society of Seoul, South Korea and American Academy in Rome among others. Recent performances of LOST have been featured at Dartmouth College and Stanford University. Recently, his work has developed on several fronts. Sound text radio works have developed simultaneously with his teaching at Columbus State College of electronic music and other courses in the Humanities. These works have been broadcast on radio stations in Seattle, Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, New York and in Europe, in Naples, Rome, Vienna, Prague, Budapest etc.

The concept of multiples and doubles (the theme of this CD’s) and the re-cycling of the works sometimes from many years ago is a process that began in the early nineties and co-incided with three artist colony sojourns. First at Mac dowell Colony, then at Yaddo Colony and last at the Headlands center. The reflective look over an entire oeuvre became a mechanism that accelerated. At first it consisted of the Cageian gloss of playing entire works with other works, either simoultaneously on top of each other or sequentially in parts or sections. Then with digital network musics and the home computer came the text-radio works, creating new sound designs, playing them with old often ambient analog tape works. Finally the process became quite complex using simulation and photo-real aural sound soundscape in creating sonic atmospheres and doubles of all kinds. This De Chirico-like aping of former material has became quite developed and culminates in the Wave Fugue.