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2026 Edition – Giuseppe Chiari: Ways of Playing
Sunday, November 29, workshop fron 11:00am to 2:00 pm | Workshop Showcase Concert at 4:00pm
On the centenary of the birth of Giuseppe Chiari (Florence, 1926–2007), Musica in Prossimità presents *Methods for Playing*, a workshop led by pianist Chiara Saccone and cellist Deborah Walker, exploring the distinctive form of musical notation developed by the Florentine artist between the 1960s and 1970s.
Intended for musical instruments, objects, materials, places, and actions, the Methods for Playing are verbal and graphic scores that challenge the very idea of performance.
Rather than prescribing a specific sonic result, the Methods offer instructions, gestures, and situations to be interpreted, inviting those who engage with them to explore a different relationship with musical creation.
The workshop is the result of more than a decade of research by Chiara Saccone and Deborah Walker into the work of Giuseppe Chiari. Their study of his scores has been interwoven with interviews with performers and composers who knew and worked with the artist—including Alvin Curran and Frederic Rzewski—and with residencies at the GMEA Centre National de Création Musicale in Albi and MAD Murate Art District in Florence, devoted to the hands-on exploration of the materials and performance practices. This work has led the two musicians to present several Methods for Playing in concert and, through practice, to develop a personal interpretation of Chiari’s scores.
the workshop
The session will begin with a shared reading of some of the verbal and graphic scores from the Methods for Playing, focusing on the questions that Chiari’s writing poses to those who interpret it. Through discussion with the workshop leaders, the instructions contained in the scores will become an opportunity to examine musical gesture, the relationship with objects and materials, and the very meaning of the act of playing.
The workshop will alternate between reading, discussion, and experimentation, following an open-ended approach in which there is not necessarily a single interpretative solution.
The aim is not to reconstruct a definitive way of performing the Methods, but to engage with their processual nature, which is renewed through the choices and experiences of those who interpret them.
The Methods for Playing emerged from Chiari’s gradual shift away from composition intended for traditional musical performance towards a practice grounded in action, gesture, and experimentation. The scores, often verbal or graphic, may concern not only musical instruments—such as piano, guitar, or cello—but also materials, objects, places, and actions. Rather than prescribing a sequence of sounds to be reproduced, they offer instructions and situations to be interpreted.
Target audience
The session will begin with a shared reading of some of the verbal and graphic scores from the Methods for Playing, focusing on the questions that Chiari’s writing poses to those who interpret it. Through discussion with the workshop leaders, the instructions contained in the scores will become an opportunity to explore musical gesture, the relationship with objects and materials, and the very meaning of the act of playing.
Workshop Goals
The workshop is intended to provide participants with the tools to approach the Methods for Playing not as a repertoire to be reproduced, but as a set of open-ended propositions that can generate new possibilities for interpretation each time. Through shared reading and experimentation, participants will be invited to explore the relationship between score, gesture, object, action, and listening, engaging with a conception of musical practice grounded in research and interpretative freedom.
Biographies
Chiara Saccone
Chiara Saccone (1985) is a pianist specializing in contemporary repertoire. She has had the opportunity to meet and work with composers including Helmut Lachenmann, Beat Furrer, Simon Steen-Andersen, Frederic Rzewski, Vinko Globokar, Wolfgang Rihm, Sofia Gubaidulina, Jennifer Walshe, Francesco Filidei, and Filippo Perocco.
She works closely with some of the most significant Italian artists of her generation, commissioning and performing world premieres for piano and chamber ensembles. Since 2012, she has pursued research into the music of Giuseppe Chiari, the Florentine composer and artist. In 2019, she presented part of this work at Dialoghi sul comporre in Reggio Emilia, performing Gesti sul piano and Metodo per suonare il pianoforte.
In May 2021, she was invited to the conference Framing the Normal, organized by the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp (Belgium). In April 2020, together with cellist Deborah Walker, she took part in an artistic residency at the GMEA Centre National de Création Musicale in Albi (France). She has also performed works by Chiari at Centro Pecci in Prato, the TRK Festival organized by Tempo Reale, and the Fabbrica Europa Festival in Florence, as well as at the Italian Cultural Institute in Bratislava and the University of Udine.
In recent years, her musical research has led her to explore the role of the performer, focusing on the importance of the musician’s body and on the use of everyday objects as sound-producing objects.
Biographies
Deborah Walker
Deborah Walker (1981) is a cellist active in the field of contemporary and experimental music. Her work focuses on forms of musical creation connected to gesture, sound exploration, and interaction with other disciplines. Walker has collaborated with composers including Pascale Criton, Éliane Radigue, Phill Niblock, Philip Corner, and Catherine Lamb, presenting world premieres of their works.
She is a member of the French ensemble Dedalus and the improvising orchestra ONCEIM. For more than 20 years, she has regularly performed as a duo with violinist Silvia Tarozzi. Their repertoire includes contemporary and experimental music, as well as reworkings of traditional songs from Emilia-Romagna. Deborah has also composed and performed original music for dance, circus, and theatre productions.
She has performed at festivals and venues including I Suoni delle Dolomiti, Italia Wave, ZKM in Karlsruhe, Centre Pompidou (Paris and Metz), the Lyon Opera, Festival d’Avignon, Festival Nomad in M’Hamid (Morocco), Switch ON (Malaysia), Tectonics (Glasgow), REDCAT (Los Angeles), Ultima (Oslo), and Audible Edge (Perth, Australia). In 2020, she earned a PhD in Art from the University of Lorraine, with a dissertation on the collaboration between Fluxus artists and the Pari&Dispari editions in Reggio Emilia and Cavriago.
Biographies
Giuseppe Chiari
Giuseppe Chiari (1926–2007) was a composer and conceptual artist. After studying mathematics and engineering at university, he turned to music, taking private lessons in piano and composition. In 1961, he founded the association Vita musicale contemporanea with Pietro Grossi. Around the same time, he came into contact with the work of John Cage, Sylvano Bussotti, the Gruppo 70, and members of the Fluxus movement, which he joined in 1962. The discovery of this new musical landscape led him to abandon conventional staff notation and begin creating his first graphic and verbal compositions.
The first of these was Gesti sul piano, written in 1962 and presented that same year by American pianist and composer Frederic Rzewski in Wiesbaden, as part of the first Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik, an event that marked Chiari’s first contact with the Fluxus group. Action and gesture thus became central to his musical practice, which sought to explore new ways of interacting with musical instruments, materials, and objects. His work moved away from the figure of the specialized musician, making room for that of the experimenter. In the mid-1960s, Chiari decided to engage directly in this research, in a kind of passage à l’acte. Rather than continuing to write pieces for other performers, he began conceiving performances for himself, a practice he continued throughout the rest of his life.
During this period, he developed the Methods for Playing, often written in prose in a personal and poetic style. The Methods are intended for musical instruments (piano, guitar, cello, accordion), as well as for objects and materials (water, containers, stones). Chiari also produced an extensive body of visual works, drawing on the graphic experimentation of his scores, the gestural explorations of his performances, and his conceptual approach to art and music. His involvement with Gruppo 70, a Florentine collective associated with concrete poetry, greatly encouraged this aspect of his practice. These works often take the form of assemblages made from fragments of musical scores, sometimes incorporating instruments themselves—mostly guitars—glued onto canvas and then altered by the artist with brushstrokes that disrupt their musical content or appearance.
Chiari is also known for his statements. Strongly rooted in conceptual art, these short phrases were often handwritten or printed on paper. Among the best known are ART IS EASY, MUSIC IS EASY, and L'ARTE È FINITA, SMETTIAMO TUTTI INSIEME. His experiments and research into musical practice gradually led him to reflect on questions concerning musicology and the history of music. This resulted in a number of essays, published mainly during the 1990s, including Teoria (1994) and Storia dei modelli musicali (1996). During the same period, Chiari returned to composition, which he had abandoned some twenty years earlier, writing a series of works for piano in traditional notation.
Giuseppe Chiari died in Florence on 9 May 2007, aged 80. His life was devoted to a constant search for a new relationship with music, through a reconsideration of its history, roles, and categories.
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