Rossella Spinosa, record-breaking composer: “Music resurrects silent cinema”

If there were no less mundane ambitions, one might suggest a Scarlett Spinosa to submit his name to the Guinness Book of Records. A certificate would conquer him thanks to the number of silent films that he has set to music, bringing them back to a second life with the soundtrack they didn’t have in the first, when the pianists concocted precarious accompaniments for the enchanted and smoky audiences of the cinemas.

Milanese, professor at the Conservatory of Mantua, tireless and omnivorous composer for artistic tastes, Spinosa is proud of two things: absolute pitch and cycling passion. Loving Bartali no less than Brahms, she would have waited for him to appear sitting on top of a curbstone, like Paolo Conte, “among the French who are pissed off and the newspapers flying around”. Not being able to, she made up for it by making him, too, a gift of notes.

When did it start?

At the age of six, casually listening to the “Pictures at an exhibitionby Musorgsky. So I announced to my mother that I would become a pianist, but I had to insist to be believed. There were no precedents in the family and she was convinced only when my teacher noticed that I had a peculiar ear. I graduated in piano, harpsichord and composition in Milan, but the turning point was admission to the Accademia Chigiana, when I measured myself with other genres that were taboo in the conservatory, especially film music.

Did you meet Luis Bacalov there?

There were already professionals in his class who knew how to compose and I felt very intimidated. She finally assigned me some film sequences to score within three days. I put everything I could into it, he looked at the score and said to the other musicians: “I’ll conduct it”. Then he explained to me: “You haven’t written film music, but mysteriously it works on images.”.

What was the film?

Songs of “Shining”. But the greatest satisfaction came when Bacalov wrote the “Baires 1 Suite” for two pianos and asked me to play it with him. We rehearsed in Chigiana and he was not happy: “You are the typical Milanese pianist, very precise, but tango is something else, you have to learn to understand it”. For a month I studied like crazy, when I came back my legs were shaking but I made it: “Now I can tell you that you are a tanguera”. We premiered the Suite in 2009.

Which silent film did you first score?

“Modern Times” in 2007 but without bringing it to the stage. At first it seemed crazy: writing music for the silent film means filling the whole film. I also won with “The Nibelungs” by Fritz Lang, which passes the five hours. To date I have set to music and staged 132 non-sound films.

Most recent works?

For example those on the first Italian director Elvira Notari. This year I set to music “’A Santanotte” from 1922, presented on September 23rd in Milan and on October 19th in Palermo. Or the four DVDs of Cineteca Umanitaria’s new series of Silent Cinema: “The triumph of life”, “Assunta Spina”, “Der Golem” and “Battleship Potëmkin”, for which I had already written the music in 2013, but since St. Petersburg wanted a score that paid homage to Tchaikovsky, I reworked it imagining his orchestrations.

In a difficult period for Russian culture.

Music and literature must disregard political events and artists must guarantee their independence. It also happened in the past for Wagner, who despite everything no one can deny he was a genius.

She also composes absolute music. Does it coexist with the film one or is it in opposition?

For the cinema pioneer Mabel Normand I wrote three different scores performed at the Bicocca on 9 November: a traditional one, one with new timbre sonorities and a third that develops between tradition and driven innovation. So the research can take place in any expressive context.

Why does he say that the composition is comparable to cycling?

Music and cycling are united by the need for a lot of effort: the composer’s abnegation is like that of someone who climbs hills, with the satisfaction of the summit when you’re done. For the Ghisallo Museum I created the music for four DVDs packed with historical materials, dedicated to Bartali, Coppi, Magni and women’s cycling.

Next job?

I’m in the final bars of a work for countertenor, reciting voice and orchestra with piano inspired by Kepler’s “Somnium”, a famous story in which there are points of contact with psychoanalysis and the fairy-tale vision that have always fascinated me. It will be premiered in Matera.

What music do you listen to, and how much?

Constantly and I have never accepted caesuras between genres: even if there is a lot of bluffing in popular music, I like songwriters who communicate important meanings. With my husband, who is the conductor, we listen to everything, even our five-and-a-half-year-old daughter’s songs. But when she heard a piece of Brahms’ Symphony No. 3 the other day, she said: “Mom, how beautiful she is”.