Ada Gentile

Ada Gentile, born in Avezzano on 26 July 1947, is an Italian composer whose career combines composition with musical management. She trained in piano and composition, and afterwards completed a postgraduate course in composition with Goffredo Petrassi at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, between 1975 and 1976. Her name became known through various international competitions, among them Gaudeamus in 1982, the ISCM in Budapest in 1986 and Essen in 1995.

Alongside her compositional activity, she served as adviser to the Venice Biennale between 1993 and 1997 and held artistic directorships at several institutions, including Nuovi Spazi Musicali in Rome, from 1979, the Goffredo Petrassi Chamber Orchestra, also in Rome, between 1986 and 1988, and the opera theatre in Ascoli Piceno, between 1996 and 1999. From 1978 she taught at the Conservatory of Rome. In 1988 she received an award from the Polish Ministry of Culture for her services to culture.

Her music is characterised by an experimental attitude towards timbre, with sounds often situated at the threshold of audibility. Her expressive language rests on an ethereal sonic world, in which the most minimal gestures emerge elegantly from silence while the texture continually fragments and recomposes itself. In her chamber and orchestral works she seeks a counterpoint of diffuse sounds that collide with one another in very rapid rhythms, producing a kaleidoscopic sound web in constant flux. Her works are distinguished by structural unity and great stylistic assurance.

Among her titles are the chamber opera La liberazione di Ruggiero dall'isola di Alcina, premiered in Munich in 1994 as a free reconstruction of a work by Caccini, and numerous pieces for soloist and ensemble, such as the string quartets and Landscapes of the Mind. Her scores are held at the Gaudeamus Foundation in Amsterdam and in libraries and universities in Chicago, and her principal publishers are Ricordi and Edipan.