Marco Stroppa

The composer, music researcher, and educator Marco Stroppa was born in Verona in 1959. He studied piano, choral conducting, composition, and electronic music in Italy and was a Fulbright scholar at the MIT Media Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 1980 to 1984, he worked at the Centro di Sonologia Computazionale at the University of Padua, gaining attention with such works as Traiettoria for piano and computer. In 1982, Pierre Boulez invited him to work and teach at the Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique (IRCAM) in Paris, where he later directed the department of musical research. This collaboration had a profound impact on Stroppa’s musical development. In 1987, he founded the composition and computer music course at the International Bartók Seminar in Szombathely, Hungary, where he taught for 13 years. He has been a professor of composition at the Stuttgart University of Music and Performing Arts since 1999 and was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin in 2019-20. Stroppa’s compositions often take the form of thematic cycles and draw inspiration from poetry, mythology, and ecological and socio-political issues, as well as from ethnomusicological research and his personal interactions with musicians. He coined the terms “electroacoustic totem” and “electronic chamber music” to describe the unique the sound projection in his instrumental-electronic pieces. His opera Re Orso, based on a text by Arrigo Boito, premiered at the Opéra Comique in Paris in 2012, and his work Come Play with Me for solo electronics and orchestra was unveiled in 2018 at the Donaueschingen Festival. During his Lucerne Festival retrospective as composer-in-residence at the 2025 Summer Festival, Stroppa is presenting a new version of this work. A new piece for accordion and electroacoustic totem will also receive its world premiere.

March 2025