MICHAEL GALASSO

Michael Galasso, internationally acclaimed composer, violinist and musical director, was born in Hammond, Louisiana in 1949. Beginning as a violin prodigy, he started his career composing music for Robert Wilson’s The Life And Times Of Joseph Stalin, A Letter For Queen Victoria (for which he received a TONY nomination for Best Musical Score), The $ Value of Man and Ouverture, and in 1998 for Donna del Mare and Dreamplay. Recent collaborations with Wilson include a sound installation for Le Tombeau de Suger for the Festival de Saint-Denis in 2000 and also a score for Three Sisters by Chekhov in 2001.

Galasso has constantly stretched the boundaries of contemporary music: from his early use of evolving music technologies, to working with Iranian, Indian, South American and African Musicians, to his present use of MIDI violin and the Internet. After more than 300 concerts all over the world he continues to perform in groundbreaking places; the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, The Kitchen in NY, the Médersa in Marrakech, the Roman Amphitheatre in Malaga. Gallasso’s work has been presented in such festivals as the Festival d’Automne in Paris, The Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy and the Festival de Musique Montreux-Vevey.

In the visual art context Michael Galasso has realized various projects such as his performance at P.S. 1 in NY for the opening of Art of the World’s Edge of Awareness exhibition in 1998. In 1999 he has also composed a song and accompaniment for the exhibition Il Dialogo nella Pallude with Marco Bagnoli in Sienna, Italy. In 2000, Galasso created a music installation for the Giorgio Armani retrospective at The Guggenheim Museum in NY, the first sound installation in the Guggenheim’s history. He has also given solo concerts in the Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art NY and the Stedilijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Galasso’s compositions have been commissioned by many choreographers, including Andy DeGroat, Lucinda Childs, Karole Armitage and Paola Rampone for the Roma-Europa-Festival. In 2001, the Venice Biennial comissioned a composition for a dance by Carolyn Carlson. His works have also been included in the repertoire of the Paris Opera Ballet.

From 1980-1984 Galasso composed and performed the music for the Belgian theatre group Plan K, directed by Frederic Flamand, e.g. Quarantine and Scan Lines.

In film and video, he has written scores for My Chauffeur; Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai’s Chun King Express and also for Seuls, a film by Swiss Francis Reusser, premiered at the Cannes festival in 1981. In 2000 he realized the score for Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000), which won the European Critics Award and the César for the best foreign film.

While composing for theater, film, dance and creating sound installations, Michael Galasso continues to experiment with the melodic and rhythmic synthesis of Eastern and Western music. This synthesis is one of the elements of his enchanting work.

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