Franco Evangelisti

Franco Evangelisti
(b Rome, 26 Jan 1926; d Rome, 28 Jan 1980). Italian composer and theorist. In 1948 he abandoned his engineering studies for music, taking lessons in composition with Daniele Paris and the piano with Erich Arndt.

His move to Freiburg in 1952 led him to complete his cultural and musical education in a German context at the city’s university under Genzmer, to attend the Darmstadt summer courses until 1962, to work in the WDR studio in Cologne (1956–7) and, above all, to become a point of contact between new German music and musical life in Rome. On his return to Italy, he became a key figure in the Rome-based group Nuova Consonanza, whose stated aim at its inception in 1960 was to ‘revive’ contemporary music. He also contributed to the organization of the Settimane Internazionali di Nuova Musica in Palermo (1960–68), founded the Gruppo d’Improvvisazione di Nuova Consonanza in 1964 and helped to set up both Studio 7 for electronic music in Rome (1968–73) and, in 1970, a study group on ‘sound phenomenon’, co-ordinated by the engineer Lorenzo Viesi. He taught an experimental course in electronic music first at the Accademia di S Cecilia (1969) and then, on a permanent basis, at the Rome Conservatory (from 1974), where, at the time of his death, in 1980, he was a lecturer in composition.