Carlo Pedini was born in Perugia in 1956.
He was a self taught musician before taking his Diploma at Perugia Conservatory with Fernando Sulpizi and subsequently working with Franco Donatoni at Accademia Chigiana in Siena and Salvatore Sciarrino in Citta’ di Castello.
He now teaches at the Perugia Conservatory, having previously taught in Avellino, Adria and Pesaro.

Beginning in 1980, he was the winner of many competitions in composition, including
Belveglio National Competition, G.B.Viotti International Competition, Premio Bucchi - Rome, Venezia Opera Prima and Accademia Lirica Osimo International Opera Competition which marked the European Music Year.
In 1995 his poem for orchestra Il Cantico dei Cantici won first prize at Bologna's 2 August Competition.
In 1990 the RAI Radiotelevisione Italiana gave him the XLII Prix Italia (Palermo - September) for his Predica agli Uccelli for soprano, piano, synthesized voice, tape and orchestra (RAI Turin Symphonic Orchestra, conductor Vittorio Parisi) on a text by Lucio Lironi and Claudio Novelli.
In 1993 the RAI broadcast commissioned his Dramatic Oratorio Il Mistero Jacopone (the story of Jacopone da Todi, the greatest Italian poet prior to Dante Alighieri) for four voices, baritone, medieval instruments, chorus and orchestra (Orchestra Sinfonica della RAI, conductor Karl Martin, voice of Jacopone Mario Scaccia - Compact Disc Quadrivium).

Pedini was a member of Commissione Artistica of A.R.C.UM. (Regional Association of Choruses of Umbria) and from 1989 to 1994 he was Artistic Director of Divertimenti Musicali in Perugia. From 1996 to 2003 he was Artistic Director of the "Sagra Musicale Umbra", one of the oldest and best known festivals in Europe, founded in 1937.
For the "Sagra Musicale Umbra", he commissioned works and organized the world premieres of many great composers of our time:
"Songs of Milarepa" by Philip Glass (1997), "Grido" of Ennio Morricone (1998), "Concerto-Cantata de Perugia" of Leo Brouwer (1999) and "Missa Solemnis Resurrectionis" written by eight Italian composers for the 2000 Jubilee, performed in Rome, Campidoglio Square (16 August 2000).
From 2004 until 2005 he was composer in residence for the Sagra Musicale Umbra Festival.
In 2005 his Requiem was given its world premiere in the Kutastsu Summer Festival in Japan and was recorded in Compact Disc by Camerata (Tokyo).
On May 27, 2007 the Boys Choir and the soloists of Teatro alla Scala, with Bruno Casoni conductor, performed his Magnificat for choir and instruments at Teatro alla Scala (Milan).
From 2007 until 2011 he was a member of the music commission SIAE (Society of Italian Authors and Editors)
and from 2011 until 2015 President of Foundation "Guido d'Arezzo"
His works have been performed in and broadcast by the most important theatrical and musical associations in Italy, as well as in France, Germany, Sweden, Greece, Russia, U.S.A and Japan.
His Opera, "JAGO", was presented by International Opera Theater in concert at The Niagara International Chamber Music Festival in Canada in July 2009.
JAGO hade its world premiere in Teatro degli Avvaloranti, Citta’ della Pieve in August 2009 and its American premiere in Philadelphia in May 2013.
In 2016 "Agnus tropato" for 12 voices choir was performed in London by BBC SINGERS with James Morgan conductor. In 2019, january "H2O" Concert for piano & Strings had the first performance at the International Cartagena Festival (Colombia), and the first italian performance in june at the Spoleto Festival.

Pedini has a full catalogue published by Casa Musicale Sonzogno, Milano (www.sonzogno.it)
representing almost 30 years of composition, including more than 20 works for orchestra, 8 operas/ballets, works for chorus and organ or instruments and chamber music works in addition to 8 recordings.
He is presently writing a book entitled Musical Forms: Analysis and History with Piero Caraba (www.pierocaraba.it).
In March 2012 by the publisher "Cavallo di Ferro" (Rome)has published the novel "La sesta stagione" (The Sixth Season) selected with the 12 finalists to LXVI Premio Strega. The novel is a kind of "experiment of composition" in which the author chose to apply the rules of musical composition to the creation of a literary text. To do this he based the text on the structure of the Thomas Mann novel "Buddenbrooks", respecting the plant and filling it with original content.
Together with Piero Caraba he published the volume "Le Forme della Musica" (Ed. Sinfonica, 2nd ed. 2012) and in 2017 "Carissimo Renzo ..." (Ed.Ilmiolibro, ISBN: 9788892325845) autobiographical reflection on composing and today's music.
In 2021 he published the manual "Tonal harmony and the given bass" (Ed. Sinfonica)
On 24 April 2022 he received the honorary citizenship of Città della Pieve
with the following motivation:
"Considering him an integral part of the Pievese community. For his tireless commitment to the dissemination of musical culture in Città della Pieve, the Polyphonic Pievese and local community life, always with great generosity and self-denial".






Herds

I was born in Perugia on 19 June 1956, in Brunamonti street, in the district of Monteluce. I began the study of music to 13 years from self-taught. Before I have learned to play not very well the guitar and then, always so clumsy, the piano. At the same time just the interest for design and graphics, creating comics and cartoons humorous. My first musical passion were the Beatles: of their example remains track in the technique of stratifications harmonics and instrumental many pieces that I composed later (on the model of their engravings of the' 67-69); the appearance, form round of all my glasses, as John Lennon. In 1976, I entered in the class of composition of the Conservatory. Without much conviction I followed also Legal Studies at the University of Perugia, where I were graduated in law. Despite Conservatory were nicknamed "the legal Pedini" I have never played this activity, abandoning this field immediately after graduation. Vice versa I started immediately the profession of composer and, from 1981, a teacher in various Italian conservatories. Many people know my commitment as an organizer musical. Few people know my instead much more recent activity in the field of the figurative arts. In reality since small have been accustomed to the presence of paintings, brushes, and stands for house: those who know my father, Bruno ("brupe"), knows his paintings (scattered in private homes and university institutes of half Italy despite the fact they were never presented in public exhibitions), paintings that I have seen the birth, change in style, and in the midst of which are grown. As soon as I started to sound out the countless publications of art that represented one of the most substantial of the library of the House. This is that, technically speaking, I can say that I approached the painting without specific knowledge. However, in part the old passion for graphics to black ink (poured in my scores of the 1980s, before the computer will replace the art musical-amanuense), I had never dealt with seriously or, if you prefer, systematic, the painting technique. And, therefore, in particular, the use of color. The opportunity is coming when Piero ostali asked me a photograph "good" for the catalogue of my published work from home Sonzogno. I thought it better than a camera would have been a portrait and so I faeces one. I realise that may seem unlikely but quite correct. That an author of music will devote parallel to the painting is not new: the most illustrious is certainly that of Arnold Schönberg. Friend to see and collaborator of Blaue Reiter, Manifesto of Expressionism, Schönberg gave this movement a decisive contribution. Renowned is the self-portraits, looks wild-eyed of its "visions", or the famous portrait of friend and student Alban Berg: examples pictorial alongside, if you do not anticipate, the climate expressive of his music. But the similarities between music and painting are not only to it, as in this case: not escape anyone the stylistic affinities between the mobility of harmonic arpeggios of shelled "Reflets dans l'eau" of Debussy and breakdown of the image in the reflections of aquatic Monet (would be much more difficult to trace similar affinities between the complex geometries of Bach decorative and the externals of baroque art, a witness to how it is not sufficient a simple "Symbol" to create symmetry between the various fields of art). In addition to the portraits outlined here I engaged in a series of studies landscape, all on varied tones yellow ochre and of land. I do not know if it supported Johannes Itten is true (Kunst der color, 1961), and that is that everyone, unconsciously, is compelled to move closer to its natural colours (aiming in particular in the physical sense, of its appearance), but these colors, I believe, are very, very close to my natural colours (of the eyes and hair, for example). The only presence "alive", in these landscapes, is that of ewes: the choice is mainly technical, to give a clear dimension to the spaces reproduced (i.e. to understand that this is of mountains and hills the bigger the smaller is the animals). Therefore, in principle, horses or cows would have gone well also. However, I must admit that the sheep, peaceful and indifferent, that continues to sea in quiet file ordered under the grow thick calm or threatening clouds, it seemed to me the animal best achieved a kind of contrast between the movement of nature, by definition "inanimate", and the almost static nature of animals, furniture for definition. This is never the human figure: would give a bucolic connotation that I would really avoid, as well as timing too defined. Thus, alone, could be sheep today or 10,000 years ago. In designing and developing these studies pictorial I found gravest links with the writing music. In part the different language, the construction of an idea project and the search of the necessary solutions to its software requires an approach mental essentially identical. However, there is an essential difference: while a musical work is divided along a scan time during which occur movements within the same, the figurative art is static, the single painting is "blocked" in its final realisation. As a snapshot. A difference that requires a comparison not so much between individual works, but on the work compositional in general (but also of a single piece of music) and the specific examination of more achievements pictorial considered in a specific period of time. write music is much more laborious that painting. And it is also much more complex in the structuring of the work (it is an assumption that it was not always valid in every age, but has become that at least by Beethoven onwards). This is that the paces we can find in a single piece of music, in the work is necessary pictorial compare them on time and more works. I spoke of studies because working on these frameworks (but also meditating in a more general) I am convinced that each painting was not finished in itself but constitutes a single stage in a speech in the making, where the search of color and form should be constantly amended, finished, updated (in this sense the painting experience of Franco Passalacqua remains the only one). A kind of slow metamorphosis, somewhat similar to the concept of "change" in music (which is then contained all the sense of musical development), where the subject chosen (a landscape with sheep) is all the time taken to be continually subjected to microvariazioni next. Almost as single frames of film. Each Painting will not therefore never equal to another (even if I will not be able to implement two paintings absolutely identical), but a single stage of a change in the making. will not, to those who know these aspects, the affinity constructively with the "minimalism", the current American aesthetic that more affected in the different artistic production, teaching to put a new, more, sometimes systematic attention to detail. From here the choice of figurativismo, in a position to better define, in relation to abstraction, the subject analysed (particularly in the form, and in color). A choice certainly similar to that of the musicians minimalist and post-minimalist in its work using always solutions harmonics simple and clear (usually of derivation tonal), to make it clear to listening musical transformations made (which had never been able to hypertrophic construction of strutturalisti 1950s and' 60). These studies on ochre if they are then alongside others in tones more red or shifting to orange, often with the only silhouette of the sheep in backlight. After this experience I noticed that in this way was reversed that relationship Bike/stalemate between the environment and animals done in paintings described above: to clear skies and real estate has obstructed figures of the sheep that, in this case, leave guess a slow movement in the background light. In this respect I consider these studies "red" a kind of "negative" stylistic of others. However I see more margins of drafting of the first type rather than of the latter, perhaps because it is not made of "my" natural colours.

Carlo Pedini, november 2000