Silvano Bussotti, known as Sylvano, is an Italian eccentric, some say genius, and the word ‘flamboyant’ appears in many articles about this modern Renaissance man. He is a composer, poet, set and costume designer, painter, journalist, actor, singer, theatre and film director and sometime bad boy of the arts. Internationally he is more known as a composer, and the Oxford Grove Music Encyclopaedia describes his music thus:
His music at once exults in and criticizes the decadence of modernism: his notation is often flamboyantly virtuoso in its graphic style and fiercely demanding to perform; his works tend to abound in cross-references, to each other and to his personal life, which would seem colourful; he mixes a sensuousness amounting to eroticism with an extreme artificiality.
However it is Sylvano Bussotti’s theatre work (as a 3-in-1 package: director, set and costume designer) that concerns Vittoria Crespi Morbio’s new monograph for the Amici della Scala.
Sylvano Bussotti was born 1 October 1931 in Florence, and as a child became a prodigy on the violin. He went on to study at the city’s Conservatory from 1941 to 1948. At the same time he studied painting and applied the principles of aleatory (or “chance”) music, championed by John Cage and others, to the page he designed on as well as that he composed on.… [continue reading]
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