(b Ferrara, 19 Jan 1920; d Milan, 24 Dec 2002). Italian composer. He took diplomas in violin (Ferrara, 1941) and composition (Milan, 1945, under Renzo Bossi), as well as gaining a degree in literature at the University of Bologna. He took part in Votto’s conducting course and attended Hindemith’s postgraduate composition classes in Salzburg in 1948. In addition to being music advisor to RAI (1951–67), he held a number of posts as advisor or artistic director in various Italian musical institutions: La Scala (1968–71; 1977), the Teatro Regio in Turin (1972), the Teatro Angelicum in Milan (1973–5), the Verona Arena (1975–6) and the Teatro Comunale dell’Opera, Genoa (1983). He taught at the conservatories in Perugia and Milan, in the latter as lecturer in composition (1969–83). His first compositions reveal his attachment to a neo-classical idiom, somewhat influenced by Hindemith, as in the contrapuntal linearity of his Toccata for strings (1948) or the Ricercare (1950). His subsequent stylistic evolution can be easily traced in the series of sonate tritematiche which reveal, among other things, his movement towards 12-note composition (Sonata tritematica no.10, for string quartet, 1960). Although 12-note technique never became a technique that he would use automatically, it did characterize his output in the 1960s. It was in the 1950s and 60s that he began to compose music-theatre works, and this genre occupies a central position in his creative development. He collaborated with Dino Buzzati, who provided the librettos for several works written between 1955 and 1963. Buzzati’s surreal poetic world proved endlessly fascinating to the composer and had a specific influence on him, right up to the one-act opera L’aumento, of 1996. In the 1970s his style entered a new phase, which he defined as the ‘dilution of serialism’, based on ‘de–formalized’ structures. This transformation, the aim of which is to express a kind of ‘sonic hallucination’, first appeared in the Variazioni nel sogno (1972) and the opera Sogno (ma forse no) based on Pirandello. Some important works belong to this fundamentally eclectic period, such as the orchestral Contrappunti a quattro dimensioni (1974) and Es-Konzert (inspired by psychoanalysis), as well as the Missa Papae Pauli (1966) with its archaic modalism and the Kinder-Requiem (1977) written in response to a massacre of children by Nazi soldiers.(Grove Online)