Luciano Chessa Petrolio portrait du compositeur Cahill Froh Williams Kreith Wang

As a composer, conductor, pianist, and musical saw/Vietnamese dan bau soloist, Luciano Chessa has been active in Europe, the U.S., Australia, and South America. Recent compositions include Set and Setting, a San Francisco Contemporary Music Players commission premiered by Steven Schick and the SFCMP in February 2014 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, LIGHTEST, a SFMOMA commission presented in November 2013 at the SF Columbarium, Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze!, a large-scale work written for the quartertone vibe/quartertone electric guitar duo The Living Earth Show, A Heavenly Act, an opera with original video by Kalup Linzy commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and premiered by Nicole Paiement and the Ensemble Parallèle. Chessa is the author of Luigi Russolo Futurist. Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult, the first monograph ever to be dedicated to the Futurist Russolo and his Art of Noise, out on University of California Press in 2012 to critical acclaim. Chessa’s Futurist expertise has resulted in an invitation by the New York-based Biennial of the Arts PERFORMA to direct the first reconstruction project of Russolo’s earliest intonarumori orchestra, and to curate concerts of music specifically commissioned for this project. This production was hailed by The New York Times as one of the best events in the arts of 2009 and is now touring internationally. In March 2011, the Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners was presented in a sold out concert by Berliner Festspiele-Maerzmusik Festival. In December 2011 Chessa conducted the project with the New World Symphony in their new Frank Gehry designed Concert Hall as part of a Performa-produced event to celebrate 10 years of Art Basel | Miami Beach; the performance included the world premiere of Lee Ranaldo’s It All Begins Now (Whose Streets? Our Streets!). In May 2013 he presented at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires a series of events to celebrate the Centennial of Russolo’s Art of Noises. A double LP dedicated to the Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners and documenting the first phase of this project has been released on the Belgian label Sub Rosa in November 2013. In December 2013 Chessa conducted the Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners to a sold-out crowd at the RedCat in Los Angeles. Additionally, Luciano Chessa has been performing futurist sound poetry for well over 10 years. His reading of Italian poetry to accompany a performance of the Grammy Award Nominated New Century Chamber Orchestra in San Francisco’s Herbst Theater in 2000 was granted with enthusiastic reviews in the San Francisco press, and in 2001 he has given the modern premiere of Francesco Cangiullo’s explosive Futurist sound poems Piedigrotta and Serata in onore di Yvonne, subsequently presenting them in several countries all over the world. In June 2014 Chessa performed three concerts with Futurist Sound Poetry at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, as part of the retrospective exhibit on Italian Futurism; his voice reading Marinetti’s 1909 Manifesto and poetry to accompany Jen Sachs’ videos has been experienced by all exhibit visitors, from February to September 2014. Two additional videos by Jen Sachs, cut to his reading of two Marinetti’s poems, have been commissioned by the Getty Museum of Los Angeles for the exhibit on WWI that opened in November 2014.