Luciano Chessa

Luciano Chessa is a composer, conductor, audiovisual and performance artist. He studied organ with renowned Italian master Andrea Macinanti at Bologna’s Conservatory and with organist and composer Pellegrino Santucci. Throughout the years, Chessa has performed on organs among the finest in Italy and the United States, including two of Italy’s best Tamburini: the Grande Organo in the Sala Bossi, and Grande Organo in the Basilica di Santa Maria dei Servi, as well as the magnificent 7466 pipes Aeolian-Skinner instrument in San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral.

His compositions include the opera Cena oltranzista nel castelletto al lago—a work merging experimental theater with reality TV which required from the cast over 55 hours of fasting—and A Heavenly Act, an opera commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, with original video by Kalup Linzy. Chessa has been commissioned multiple times by the Performa Biennial, and in 2014 he presented three events at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as part of the exhibition Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe. Chessa’s work appeared more than once in Artforum, Flash Art, Art in America, and Frieze.

Chessa is also a music historian specializing in 20th-century Italian and 21st-century American repertoire. He is the author of Luigi Russolo Futurist. Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult (2012), the first monograph dedicated to Russolo and his “Art of Noise.” In 2009, his Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners (OFNI) was hailed by the New York Times as one of the best events in the arts; it continues to tour internationally. With this project he collaborated with the likes of Mike Patton, Lee Ranaldo, Ellen Fullman, Blixa Bargeld, Joan La Barbara, among others. He just completed his residency at the Steel House in Rockland, ME, here he developed the audiovisual installation and prepared the edition of Julius Eastman’s Second Symphony, the world premier of which he will conduct in NYC in the Fall 2018.

Chessa’s newest album, “Canti felice”, has just been released on the Parisian label Skank Bloc Records.

Documentation