Residency Artist - Music

Rocco Di Pietro

1551 King Avenue C
Columbus, OH  43212
Phone: (614) 487-6844
Email: rdpietr@ccrma@stanford.edu
Website: http://www.dipietroeditions.com/

I am a composer and pianist who has written music out of life experiences.
I also wanted to be a pianter but was seduced by the piano.This marked me as my work has a strong interdisciplinary and literary aspect.

I write stories called "Rajas" with music and recite them live with musicians. "Rajas" are inspired by Indian 'Gunas' and African story tellers. I also compose music with visual cameo portraits of models embedded in the music score called "Taubes".

I am a teacher in the Humanities at Columbus State and received my dual MA from Vermont College in Music and Social History where I wrote my dissertation and opera on 'Menocchio' a sixteenth-century Italian peasant- miller who was burned at the stake for saying: "If I was a Turk or a Jew it would be just as good as being a Christian".

I worked in prisons in California at San Quentin for the William James Society and through out Ohio as a habilitationist educator for ten years.I then worked for another ten years as a social worker for Franklin County.

I made music out of all these experiences composing "Prison Dirges"for the life stories of prisoners I collected called" "The Normal Exception". I also composed for Christian Boltanski "The Lost Project" where I translated the musical monograms of lost (and dead) children that used to come on milk cartons,into a shamanistic work of memorials.

I was recently SICA composer in residence at Stanford University, and this year at Western Washington University Seattle and Bellingham. I have been a Fellow of the MacDowell Colony,Yaddo colony and ASCAP Fellow of the Berkshire Music Center, Tanglewood.