Laura Agnusdei is a saxophonist and electronic musician from Bologna, Italy. Her solo project explores the possibilities of electroacoustic composition, creating soundscapes within which the sax remains the main narrative voice. Suspended between the use of melody and timbral research, remnants of song form and improvisational glimpses, her music amalgamates different sound sources. In 2021, she created the site-specific project Ubi consistam, focused on the sonic exploration of Bologna with graphic storytelling by Giulia Polenta. She has a long-standing project with sound designer Daniele Fabris, with whom she composed Riflessi. In 2023 she published Goro, a work inspired by the graphic novel Quasi nessuno ha riso ad alta voce by Pastoraccia. She plays the saxophone in the band accompanying the Italian edition of Lazarus, David Bowie’s testamentary rock opera, staged in 2023. She is also involved in live soundtracks of film materials, in dialogue with realities such as Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino and Home Movies – Archivio nazionale del cinema di famiglia.

www.lauragnusdei.com

Frank Bockius studied at the conservatory in Trossingen, Germany. He works as a drums and percussion teacher and as a freelance musician. For many years he toured with the jazz quintet Whisper Hot and the percussion band Timpanicks. He also played medieval, flamenco and Latin music, and worked with dance companies and for theatres. Twenty-five years ago he started to accompany silent films and since then he has worked intensively for national and international venues and festivals, including Kyoto, Sodankylä, Pordenone, San Francisco, Bologna, London, Paris and Zurich. In recent years he has also collaborated with many other great silent film musicians.

www.frankbockius.de

Neil Brand has been a silent film accompanist for 40 years throughout the UK and at film festivals around the world. He now has a very fruitful relationship with the BBC Symphony Orchestra with his acclaimed orchestral scores for Hitchcock’s silent Blackmail, Asquith’s Underground, Chaplin’s Easy Street and Fairbanks’s Robin Hood, as well as his recent concert drama of The Hound of the Baskervilles for BBC4 starring Mark Gatiss. He is a TV presenter with five Sound of… seasons on BBC4, is a regular presenter on Radio’s Add to Playlist and Soul Music, a Fellow of Aberystwyth University and a Member and Visiting Professor of the Royal Academy of Music. In 2016 he was awarded the BASCA Gold Badge.

www.neilbrand.com

Timothy Brock specialises as a conductor in concert works of the early 20th century and live performances of silent film. As a score preservationist, his work includes the restoration of Shostakovich’s New Babylon, Erik Satie’s Entr’acte, Saint-Saëns’s The Assassination of Duke DeGuise, and Wolfgang Zeller’s Vampyr. Since 1999, he has been working with the Charles Chaplin family and made 15 critical editions of his scores including Modern Times and City Lights. As a composer he has written more than 40 scores for silent films, including Buster Keaton’s The General, F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu and Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Moon. Timothy Brock has conducted some of the most prestigious orchestras in the world, including the New York Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris, BBC Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and Orchestre philharmonique de Radio France. In June 2023 he made his debut with the Orchestra del Teatro dell’Opera di Roma in the live world premiere of Chaplin’s The Great Dictator at the historic Terme di Caracalla.

www.timothybrock.com

Matti Bye has been the permanent silent film pianist at the Svenska Filminstitutet since 1989. He has written a series of innovative scores for such early Swedish silent film classics as Phantom Carriage by Victor Sjöström, Häxan by Benjamin Christensen and Gösta Berling Saga by Mauritz Stiller, as well as countless other silent films. He has developed a personal and contemporary accompaniment style for early film, with a dramaturgical sensitivity that led him to create music for modern cinema and give film concerts worldwide at various film festivals. Other projects include being the pianist on Ingmar Bergman’s silent film The Last Grasp and composing the soundtracks for Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments and Marcel! directed by Jasmine Trinca.

www.mattibye.com

Antonio Coppola began to study the piano at a very early age. In 1965 he enrolled in the Santa Cecilia Conservatory, and followed courses in piano performance, composition and orchestral conducting until 1977. In 1975 the Rome Cineclub L’officina invited him to perform as piano accompanist for a series of silent film retrospectives. Since then, he has dedicated himself exclusively to creating soundtracks for silent cinema. He has been the guest of film festivals and retrospectives around the world, both as a musician and as a member of juries. He has also been engaged by a number of film archives and universities as a research consultant on the restoration of original soundtracks. He has also taught at workshops and given papers at conferences on techniques of improvisation and the composition of soundtracks for silent cinema.

André Desponds is a pianist, composer, arranger and lecturer in improvisation at the Zurich University of the Arts. He has been working as a composer for theatre, ballet, advertising and radio, and he has accompanied silent films since 1978. He worked on silent film soundtracks for Swiss television and DVD editions, including those composed for the Cinémathèque suisse and Cineteca di Bologna. Together with dancer Andrea Herdeg and a group of actors, he collaborated on the project Herdeg&desponds, which blends dance, theatre and virtuoso piano-playing into poetic and dramatic performances. He also founded the Gershwin Piano Quartet, a formation with four pianists performing their own arrangements of classics from numerous musical traditions on four grand pianos.

Daniele Furlati, pianist and composer, has a degree in composition, piano and arrangement. He earned two diplomas with honours in courses in advanced music for film, taught by Ennio Morricone and Sergio Miceli at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena. He has composed music for television commercials, short films and documentaries. His work on features includes creating the score for the film Viva San Isidro by Alessandro Cappelletti. He co-wrote, with Marco Biscarini, the music for the feature films by Giorgio Diritti Il vento fa il suo giro, L’uomo che verrà, Un giorno devi andare and Volevo nascondermi. He works with Cineteca di Bologna, playing piano accompaniment for silent films. He adapted and orchestrated the original music by Teo Usuelli for Riprese di Mario Fantin per Italia K2. He teaches Composition for Music Applied to Images at the Conservatory of Rovigo. The Fondazione Teatro Comunale di Modena ensemble participates for the first time, under the direction of Maestro Daniele Furlati, with the performance of the new score for the film My Cousin: Isotta Violanti, Michaela Bilikova, Veronica Medina, Erica Alberti, Antonio Salvati, Salvatore Lamantia, Pierluca Cilli and tenor Vincenzo Tremante.

Stephen Horne, based at London’s BFI Southbank, has recorded music for DVD releases, TV screenings and online presentations of silent films. Although principally a pianist, he often incorporates flute, accordion and percussion into his performances, sometimes simultaneously. He regularly performs internationally, and his accompaniments have met with acclaim at film festivals in Pordenone, Telluride, San Francisco, Cannes, Hong Kong and Berlin. In 2022 he was commissioned to write orchestral scores for The Manxman and MoMA’s restoration of Stella Dallas.

www.stephenhorne.co.uk

Valentina Magaletti is a drummer-composer and multi-instrumentalist known for her innovative approach to drums and percussion. Her technique incorporates everything from vibrations and marimba to microphones and found objects. She has performed with artists such as Jandek, Pat Thomas, Deb Googe, Malcolm Mooney, Thurston Moore, Steve Beresford, Steve Shelley, Lafawndah, MicaLevi, Sampha, and Nicolas Jaar. As a composer, she has collaborated with Tom Relleen, Al Wootton, Pino Montecalvo, and João Pais Filipe. Vanishing Twin is perhaps her most accessible project, exploring the spaces between jazz and psychedelia.

Silvia Mandolini was born in Montreal in 1970. After graduating as a violinist at the Conservatory of her hometown, she continued her studies firstly at McGill University and then at the G. Verdi  Conservatory in Milan, from which she graduated in 1996. She performed with important chamber music ensembles, prestigious Italian orchestras (Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della Rai in Turin and Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, among others) and at several festivals as Milano Musica, Angelica, Verona Contemporanea, Montreal’s Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, and at the Venice Biennale. She has played live for different radio stations, including CBC, Radio-Canada and RAI. Mandolini co-founded the Zipangu Ensemble, formed by 13 string musicians from Teatro Comunale in Bologna. She played the violin for the soundtrack of Pane e Tulipani and Le Acrobate. Since 2008, she is a resident violinist of Teatro Comunale in Bologna.

Meg Morley, Australian-born London-based pianist, composer and improviser, creates music within diverse artistic genres (silent film, contemporary dance and ballet, solo piano, contemporary jazz ensembles and electronic music). Classically trained from the age of two, she has worked extensively with various dance companies (English National Ballet, Rambert Company, Matthew Bourne, Pina Bausch) and performs and composes for international silent film festivals and institutions (BFI, Flatpack Festival, Nederlands Silent Film Festival).

Maud Nelissen is a Dutch composer and pianist who has particularly dedicated herself to the creation of musical accompaniment for silent films. She worked in Italy with Charlie Chaplin’s last music arranger Eric James. Since then she has been performing at festivals and special events in Europe, America and Asia. She founded her own ensemble, The Sprockets, and performs with them or with various other ensembles and orchestras in Holland and abroad. Among her most notable orchestral scores is that for Erich von Stroheim’s 1925 classic The Merry Widow, interpolating themes from the Franz Lehár operetta, and King Vidor’s The Patsy with Marion Davies.

www.maudnelissen.com

Stefano Pilia is a guitar player and electro-acoustic composer, founder member with Valerio Tricoli and Claudio Rocchetti of the 3/4HadBeenEliminated group. He is also part of the psychedelic rock band In Zaire, of the BGP trio with David Grubbs and Andrea Belfi, of Il Sogno del Marinaio with Mike Watt and Paolo Mongardi, guitar player for the Malian star Rokia Traoré and the Italian rock band Afterhours.

Eduardo Raon, Portuguese composer and musician, is the author of numerous projects for cinema, animation, theatre, dance and the arts. In particular, he composed the music for several silent films, including Ernst Lubitsch’s The Doll, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm – The Symphony of Donbass. He has also performed world premieres of solo and chamber pieces by Eurico Carrapatoso, Clotilde Rosa, Ivan Moody, João Lucas, Joana Sá, Daniel Schvetz, Eli Camargo, Sebastian Duh and Fernando Lobo.

www.eduardoraon.com

John Sweeney has played for silent film since 1990, starting at Riverside Studios in London and subsequently playing at many venues in Britain including the National Film Theatre, the Barbican Cinema, Broadway in Nottingham, the Imperial War Museum, and Watershed in Bristol. He has played for the British Silent Cinema Festival since its inception and has since 2000 been a regular pianist at the Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone. He is a regular performer at the Slapstick Festival of silent comedy in Bristol. He has performed at numerous festivals in different countries such as China, Germany, Kazakhstan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Russia and Turkey. He has recorded DVDs for the BFI, Cineteca di Bologna and Edition Filmmuseum as well as a soundtrack for broadcast on Sky TV. In 2018 he composed and performed a score for the London Film Festival Archive Gala, which he subsequently performed at MoMA in New York. He is one of the founders of the Kennington Bioscope, hosting regular screenings of neglected silent films at The Cinema Museum with live music.

Gabriel Thibaudeau, Canadian composer, pianist and conductor, studied piano in Montreal at the Vincent D’Indy music school and composition at l’Université de Montreal. He started work at the age of 15 as a pianist for ballets. Since then, he has been a pianist for Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, appointed pianist at La Cinémathèque québécoise for the last 25 years and the composer in residence with L’Octuor de France for more than 15 years. Thibaudeau’s work includes music for ballets, the opera, chamber music and several orchestral compositions for silent films. Several international institutions have commissioned work from him, among them: the Louvre in Paris, the Cineteca di Bologna, Festival de Cannes, the National Gallery in Washington, and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra.

www.gabrielthibaudeau.com