Luciano Chessa
Luciano Chessa is a composer, conductor, audiovisual and performance artist, and music historian. His compositions include e.g. the opera Cena oltranzista nel castelletto al lago (a work merging experimental theater with reality TV which required from the cast over 55 hours of fasting), and A Heavenly Act, an opera commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Chessa has been commissioned multiple times by the Performa Biennial, and in 2014 he presented three events at the Guggenheim Museum as part of the exhibition Italian Futurism, 1909–1944. His work appeared more than once in Artforum, Flash Art, Art in America, and Frieze. Chessa is also a music historian specializing in 20th century Italian and 21st century American repertoire. He is the author of Luigi Russolo, Futurist: Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult (2012), the first book dedicated to Russolo and his Art of Noise. In 2009, his Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners (OFNI) was hailed by The New York Times as one of the best events of the year; Chessa has conducted this project across the USA and internationally. With this project, he collaborated with the likes of Joan La Barbara, Mike Patton, Lee Ranaldo, Ellen Fullman, Blixa Bargeld, Pauline Oliveros, among others. His record Canti felice, was August 2018 Record of the Month for one of Italy’s leading music magazines, Rumore. His most recent record, The Noise of Art, produced by Prague’s Opening Performance Orchestra, came out in March 2019. In the winter 2018, while in residency at the Steel House in Rockland, ME, he developed the audiovisual installation #00FF00 #FF00FF and prepared the diplomatic edition of Julius Eastman’s Symphony No. 2, the world premiere of which he conducted at Lincoln Center. His chapter on Eastman’s Gay Guerrilla closes the book of the same title – the first ever dedicated to Eastman’s music.
