Martino Traversa (1960)

Martino Traversa began studying music as a self-taught musician at the age of seven. He later pursued formal studies in piano, composition, jazz, and electronic music with various teachers.

While enrolled in the Faculty of Chemistry at the University of Catania, he won a competitive selection by the National Research Council (CNR, Italy) and was appointed Permanent Research Fellow in Information Technology. He was subsequently assigned to the University of Parma, where he worked for seven years.

He earned a diploma in piano improvisation techniques at the Accademia di Alto Perfezionamento di Pescara and attended masterclasses at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), Stanford University. From 1987 to 1989 he studied composition with Luigi Nono.

In 1990 he founded and conducted the Ensemble Edgard Varèse. In 1991 he established Traiettorie, the international festival of modern and contemporary music. In 2008 he founded Fondazione Prometeo, dedicated to supporting artistic and scientific research in music and the arts. In 2011 he founded Ensemble Prometeo, and in 2016 the musicological journal Nuove Musiche.

He has served as Professor of Musicology at the University of Parma (Faculty of Humanities). Alongside his activity as a composer, he conducts research in electronic technologies applied to musical acoustics and sound spatialization.

He collaborates with leading soloists and ensembles in the field of contemporary music. His works have been recorded for NEOS, Die Schachtel, Stradivarius, and Kairos, and are published by Edizioni Suvini Zerboni and Universal Edition (Vienna).

In 2024, a monographic volume devoted to his work, Martino Traversa. L’utopia nostalgica, edited by Gaetano Mercadante and Stefano Lombardi Vallauri, was published by NeoClassica.