Francesco Fiorenzani
Composer · Guitarist
"Where jazz, rock and contemporary composition meet, and where music is meant to be seen as well as heard."
Francesco Fiorenzani (b. Siena, 1989) is an Italian composer and guitarist based in Florence. He is a PhD candidate in Musical Composition at the Hochschule Luzern (HSLU). He is a selected artist of Phantomnesis, the international call from Cambiata Arts, and his work appears in the compilation Phantomnesis: Residues and Recalls.
Fiorenzani began his musical path in jazz and graduated in jazz guitar from Siena Jazz University in 2016 with a grade of 110/110 with honours. His work as a performer led to two albums with his own ensembles: Silent Water (2018, Francesco Fiorenzani Quintet), released by Auand, and Klondike (2023, Francesco Fiorenzani Trio). His interest then moved steadily toward contemporary composition. In 2024 he completed a Master's degree in Classical Contemporary Composition at the Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano (5.8/6.0), studying with Nadir Vassena and Giovanni Verrando.
His training includes two years of masterclasses with Salvatore Sciarrino, as well as masterclasses with Georg Friedrich Haas, Stefano Gervasoni and Giovanni Verrando. He has also studied privately with Philippe Manoury, Marco Stroppa, Francesco Filidei, Francesca Verunelli and Peter Eötvös. In 2023 he worked with Eötvös at his foundation in Budapest during the Ligeti centenary week.
His catalogue covers solo works, chamber music, ensemble pieces and works with live electronics. It includes Sognare in silenzio for solo violin, Trenodia per Zaytoun for piccolo flute and electronics, Quasi parlato for string quartet, and Hommage à R. Mutt for mixed ensemble and live electronics. It also includes the vocal works Tre canti notturni and Cielo fermo. Edizioni Suvini Zerboni (SZSugar) publishes several of his scores: La caduta e il movente (2024) for solo percussion, From the Absence (2025) for ensemble, and Deus exmachina (2025) for mixed ensemble. Since 2022 he has collaborated with composer and conductor Andrea Molino on two projects dedicated to Tchaikovsky, writing original music for soloists of the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana.
His music has been recognised internationally. In 2022 Sognare in silenzio received a scholarship from Salvatore Sciarrino at the Accademia Chigiana and was premiered by Aldo Campagnari, to whom the piece is dedicated. In 2024 Fiorenzani won First Prize at the Int-Act Festival / TMAO in Bangkok with Taceti Ensemble. In 2025 he received a Special Prize at the 5th Ise-Shima International Composition Competition.
He has collaborated with ensembles and soloists including Quartetto Prometeo, Divertimento Ensemble, Aktapha Ensemble, Barcelona Modern, Taceti Ensemble and Icarus vs Muzak, and with Francesco Dillon, Pierre Delignes, Alexandra Segal, Elide Sulsenti, Carlotta Raponi, Elio Marchesini and Ivano Battiston. His music has been presented at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena, LAC – Lugano 900, Mixtur Festival in Barcelona, Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan, the 54th Poznań Musical Spring, Ligeti 100 (Peter Eötvös Contemporary Music Foundation) and the Gustav Mahler Research Center.
Alongside composing, Fiorenzani is committed to teaching and to the institutional side of music education. Since 2022 he has taught jazz guitar and music theory at Siena Jazz University, where he also tutors in composition and performance. Since 2025 he has served as the university's Erasmus+ Coordinator. In that role he manages student mobility and designs Blended Intensive Programmes with partners such as the Sibelius Academy, KUG Graz, RIAM Dublin and ESML Lisbon. He also manages institutional agreements with The New School and the New England Conservatory. He sits on the university's Evaluation Board and was Production Director of the Synthesis project, a collaboration between Siena Jazz University and the Accademia Musicale Chigiana. He has also given a masterclass on 20th-century repertoire in a conducting course at the CSI in Lugano and worked as composer tutor for the 7×7 Project in Basel.
Highlights
Phantomnesis selected artist, Cambiata Arts
Featured in the compilation Phantomnesis: Residues and Recalls
First Prize, Int-Act Festival / TMAO, Bangkok (2024)
Special Prize, 5th Ise-Shima International Composition Competition (2025)
Scholarship from Salvatore Sciarrino, Accademia Chigiana (2022)
Two years of masterclasses with Salvatore Sciarrino
Scores published by Edizioni Suvini Zerboni (SZSugar)
PhD candidate in Musical Composition, Hochschule Luzern
Selected works
Hommage à R. Mutt (2026), for mixed ensemble and live electronics
From the Absence (2025), for ensemble. Edizioni Suvini Zerboni
Deus exmachina (2025), for mixed ensemble. Edizioni Suvini Zerboni
La caduta e il movente (2024), for solo percussion. Edizioni Suvini Zerboni
Trenodia per Zaytoun, for piccolo flute and electronics
Quasi parlato, for string quartet
Sognare in silenzio, for solo violin
Tre canti notturni, vocal work
Cielo fermo, vocal work
Hommage à R. Mutt
Phantomnesis selected work · for mixed ensemble and live electronics
"Two sealed chambers of Fiorenzanis life, communicating with each other."
Francesco Fiorenzani is one of the composers selected for Phantomnesis, an international call from Cambiata Arts for contemporary music, experimental composition and heritage-rooted works. His piece Hommage à R. Mutt is published in the compilation Phantomnesis: Residues and Recalls. The call sought pieces that explore the forgotten, the near-forgotten and the reimagined. It welcomed works that bring neglected musical systems, regional practices, extinct gestures or overlooked aesthetic pathways into today's listening.
An international jury of six professional composers, performers and researchers reviewed each submission. Their own careers embody the premise of the call. Each has spent years bringing overlooked musical systems, regional practices and reimagined traditions into contemporary listening. The jurors work in Toronto, Hannover, Skopje, Bangkok and Tehran, and across Vienna, Graz and Klagenfurt in Austria. Their practices range from electroacoustic composition and open-source technology to somatic voice and live electronics, traditional Thai instruments, artistic research and jazz scholarship. They considered each work for its engagement with forgotten or near-forgotten material, its compositional richness and its artistic conviction. The five works in the compilation emerged from that process, and their composers are also invited to join the Cambiata Arts roster.
Hommage à R. Mutt was born from a desire to make two sealed chambers of Fiorenzani's artistic life communicate with each other. He calls this his "artistic bipolarity". On one side is everything he learned from improvisation, jazz and rock, which shaped the first thirty years of his life. On the other is what he has absorbed over the last five or six years about contemporary, electronic and classical music. The piece is an attempt to understand how these two parts of him can talk to each other.
At the time, Fiorenzani was composing mostly through a kind of maquette technique. He built sound agglomerates in Reaper from audio files of various kinds, then transformed them and re-orchestrated the result. He believes this method is more widespread than people realise, especially after the period that gave us a broader, spectral conception of timbre. For this piece he collected samples from jazz records, some of them very short. He used them to create a distorted audio structure that he could reuse. On top of this structure he placed very characteristic, idiomatic gestures for each instrument of the ensemble.
The guitar plays virtuosic gestures that echo the post-1980s world of the electric guitar, particularly alternative rock, with Steve Vai as a reference. The saxophone, trombone and piano draw on micro-fragments of melodic ideas from great jazz masters such as Charlie Parker, Bud Powell and J.J. Johnson. These materials form islands of sound and gesture. The islands then find their own development and formal narrative, and the result is a sort of collage piece.
The slightly provocative title refers to Marcel Duchamp, an artist Fiorenzani admires deeply. R. Mutt is the name Duchamp signed on Fountain. Fiorenzani's attempt is similar in spirit: to re-present materials that have become commonplace, and often automatic through habit, in a different light. That is also what places the piece within Phantomnesis, where overlooked and familiar material is heard anew.
Fiorenzani's ears were formed not on Beethoven or Mozart but on The Cure, Radiohead and jazz. He finds himself in a mixed, hybrid zone, certainly a highly contaminated one. He believes this hybridisation allows less academic strategies to flourish, and he is learning to recognise it as a distinctive point of his personality.
Seeing as well as hearing. This is also where his constant interest in what he can see, as well as hear, comes from. His way of experiencing music is deeply rooted in composition, and just as deeply rooted in listening and in vision. That vision branches in two directions.
Notation as a sign system. It is a way of communicating to himself, so that he can better understand his own ideas and keep control of form and of sound. In contemporary music, he believes, form and sound are aligned.
The scenic act. This comes later and concerns how a work presents itself visually, when the work is given back to an audience. It does not imply theatre, multimedia or cross-media work. It implies attention to a kind of writing that leads to an act that must be seen from an aesthetic point of view, not only heard.
Research at the Hochschule Luzern. This has become part of his research project at the Hochschule Luzern. He is finding out more about the compositional processes behind music that must be seen as well as written and heard. He thinks this opens an interesting area, one that abstracts somewhat from stylistic decisions.
A multiplicity of currents. He works in a context where there are perhaps no dominant currents today. He says it is not for him to judge whether that is good or bad. The disruptive force of past currents (structuralism, spectralism, post-serialism, minimalism) has not been exhausted. They now coexist and perhaps feed on one another.
He feels he belongs to this multiplicity, so well described by Michel Serres in Genesis. He is a child of this artistic multiplicity, which finds strength in it and also a certain unease. It is a very Pirandellian condition: being "one, no one and one hundred thousand."