Alice Zecchinelli is a composer, conductor, and multi-instrumentalist musician. After studying Classical Philology and Philosophy, she specialized in Film Scoring, further refining her craft alongside internationally renowned musicians. In 2021, she was selected for the Pordenone Masterclasses, where she performed a film concert with Daan van den Hurk. Visionary, experimental, and instinctive – but at the same time classical – in her musical approach, Alice composes, orchestrates, and conducts applied music, moving fluidly between cinema, theatre, advertising, and concert music. In 2022, her piece Ripresa premiered at the Civita Festival. In 2023, she composed the original soundtracks for the silent film Nosferatu and Vampyr.

www.alicezecchinelli.com

Gabriel Thibaudeau, born in 1959, 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 Québecoise 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 him work, among them: Le Musée du Louvre in Paris, the Cineteca di Bologna, Le Festival de Cannes, the National Gallery in Washington, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. Gabriel Thibaudeau is represented by Troublemakers Inc.

www.gabrielthibaudeau.com

Paolo Spaccamonti is a Turin-based guitarist and composer. His discography sums up solo albums and collaborative works with both Italian and international musicians, such as Jochen Arbeit (Einstürzende Neubauten), Stefano Pilia, Roberto “Tax” Farano (Negazione). His body of work includes scores of readings, television shows, theatre plays, movies and live scores for silent films produced by the Museo Nazionale del Cinema (Vampyr, Once upon a time, Greed). In 2023 he was engaged in the theatre tour of ‘Lazarus’, a musical written by Enda Walsh and David Bowie and directed in Italy by Valter Malosti.

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Fabiana Sommariva, an oboist (English horn), graduated from the Conservatory of Rovigo. She collaborates with the Conservatory orchestra and she worked on the soundtrack of the film Quel posto nel tempo, a production for which she was recording assistant as well. She has taken part in several activities at Gran Teatro La Fenice, Arena di Verona, Bologna Sound’s Classic and at the Teatro Sociale in Rovigo.

James Shelby, originally from San Francisco and now based in Bologna, has enjoyed a five-decade career as a pianist.  Since 1975, he has brought his improvisational musical skills to a wide range of performances, including silent cinema, improvisational theatre, dance ensembles, and jazz vocals. For over 25 years, he has played for silent films at the Silver Screen Classic Movies festival in Auburn, California.  James spent nearly 40 years teaching and directing musical theatre in Palo Alto, California where he was honored with the prestigious Tall Tree Award.  Most recently James has been accompanying silent films at Cinema Modernissimo in Bologna.

Simone Nicoletta, the Principal Clarinet of the Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna since 2015, cooperates regularly with Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Filarmonica della Scala, Orchestra del Teatro La Fenice di Venezia, Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana, Orchestra del Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala di Milano, Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini, Orchestra del Teatro San Carlo di Napoli, Orchestra del Teatro Regio di Parma. In 2024 he was invited by Maestro Riccardo Muti to perform under his direction W.A. Mozart Clarinet Concerto K622 for the Ravenna Festival. He performed as soloist with Filarmonica A. Toscanini, Musici di Parma, Orchestra Teatro di Busseto. In 2014 he founded Quartetto Falstaff which won the First Prize at International Flute Competition “Severino Gazzelloni” – Chamber Music and he is a member of Wind Nonet of Teatro Comunale di Bologna.

Laura Naukkarinen is a composer, producer and musician from Finland. She plays under the moniker Subatlantti, in IAX, and is a visiting member of The Matti Bye Ensemble. She was also a member of free improv and psychedelic folk bands Kiila, Päivänsäde, the Anaksimandros, Avarus, Maailma, and the trio Hertta Lussu Ässä. Besides composing and producing her own albums, Lau Nau accompanies silent films live and composes music for feature films, theatre plays, dance and sound installations. She composed the soundtrack to the 2019 movie Land Without God, directed by Mannix Flynn.

https://launau.com/

Ramon Moro lives and works in Turin, Italy. He composes music and plays trumpet and flugelhorn. Over the past twenty-five years, he has worked in the fields of experimental jazz, pure improvisation, support for rock bands, interventions on pop and singer-songwriter albums, and has developed various interdisciplinary collaborations between cinema, theatre, dance and contemporary art. For more than fifteen years he has been collaborating with guitarist and composer Paolo Spaccamonti with whom he worked on the soundtrack for the film “Vampyr” (C.T.Dreyer – 1932), produced by the Museo Nazionale del Cinema, featuring drummer Jim White and Canadian cellist Julia Kent. In 2023, he was part of the band in the show “Lazarus”, a musical by David Bowie and Enda Walsh, directed by Valter Malosti.

www.ramonmoro.com

Giuseppe Franchellucci, cellist, works in the fields of contemporary and experimental music and improvisational practice. He has performed with various ensembles in events such as Nuova Consonanza in Rome, 900 and beyond in Modena with Maestro Enzo Porta, at the Ravenna Festival under Maestro Penderecki, Macerata Opera Festival with Daniel Oren, Umbria Jazz 2017 and 2018, Fondazione Nazionale della Danza / Aterballetto. He has also collaborated with several artists including Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead), Serji Tankian (System of a Down), Adrian Utley (Portishead), Mick Harvey (Nick Cave), Stefano Pilia, Valeria Sturba, Mederic Collignon, Gregory Porter, Gianna Nannini, Teho Teardo and Blixa Bargeld, Pierpaolo Capovilla.

Julie Linquette, known as DJ’itane, is a puppeteer, musician, fortune teller and barker. Of gypsy origin, her parents were street vendors selling chips in village squares in northern France and southern Belgium. From a very young age, she travelled around Europe and lived in Germany, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Italy. It was in Italy, with puppeteer Alessandra Amicarelli, that she founded the StultiferaNavis-Le Bateau des Fous company in 2002. It is within this company that she creates her shadow theatre shows, an artistic language that she teaches at the school for actor-puppeteers in Paris, the Théâtre aux Mains Nues. She also practices puppet theatre, the fundamentals of which she learnt in Naples. Since 2021, she has been performing as barker for the films of Georges Méliès at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, interpreting them live with the energy of the fair origins of the art of filmmaking.

Luca Cavina is a self-taught musician and composer, founding member of Zeus!, Arto and Calibro35. Luca Cavina has also played with Giovanni Truppi, Comaneci, Transgender, Craxi and Incident On South Street. With Zeus! he released three albums, collaborated with Mike Patton on the Cramps tribute compilation “Very Bad Music For Very Bad People” and shared the stage on the European tours of Melt Banana, Dead Cross, Retox and Dillinger Escape Plan. With Arto he released ‘Fantasma’ and the ep “O”, accompanying the Daughters on the promotional tour of ‘You Won’t Get What You Want’ in Europe. With Calibro35 he released several records, participated in various collaborations (Joan As A Policewoman, Venerus, Nic Cester, Matthew Bellamy, Alessandro Cortini) and composed music for films and TV series.

Jacopo Battaglia is a visionary artist dedicated to exploring the boundaries of sound and rhythm. With a deep passion for sound experimentation, he has made research and innovation his main focus, blending acoustic and electronic elements to create unique and immersive soundscapes. In 2011, he left Zu and joined The Bloody Beetroots, where he performed as a drummer and later as a multi-instrumentalist until 2016. In 2020, he began his collaboration with sound designer Heith and in 2025, he launched the project Tera Tera together with guitarist Adriano Viterbini. Currently, Battaglia continues to explore new musical frontiers, combining elements of jazz, rock and electronic music.

Laura Agnusdei is a saxophonist and electronic musician from Bologna. 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 timbre research, remnants of song form and improvisational glimpses, her music amalgamates different sound sources (acoustic, digital and analogue). After her debut with Night/Lights, released in 2017 by the English The Tapeworm, her first album Laurisilva was released under the same label in November 2019. In 2023, she published Goro for Maple Death, a work inspired by the graphic novel Almost Nobody Laughed Out Loud by Pastoraccia. For the same label, her album Flowers Are Blooming in Antarctica was released in January 2025, hovering between post-exotica, spiritual jazz and post-apocalyptic sci-fi scenarios.

http://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. His latest film score is for Simón Mesa Soto’s Un poeta, selected for Un Certain Regard at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.

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

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

Photo © Matilde Piazzi

Stefano Pilia is a guitarist, bass player, producer and composer born in Genoa and now living in Bologna, where he also graduated from the G.B Martini Conservatory. His work takes shape from instrumental performance practice and around the processes of recording and sound production. Through the investigation of the synaesthetic properties of sound, its relations with space, time and memory, he has pursued a research always aimed at sound experience as a possibility for philosophical and creative investigation. For several years he has been involved in live soundtracks of silent films, frequently commissioned by the National Cinema Museum in Turin, Home Movies and the Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna. He has published over 40 record works with numerous Italian and foreign labels (Die-Schachtel, Maple Death, Blue-Chopsticks/Drag City, Black Truffle etc.).

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.

Fabiana Sommariva is an oboist (English horn) graduated from the Conservatory of Rovigo. She collaborates with the Conservatory orchestra and she worked on the soundtrack of the film Quel posto nel tempo, a production for which she was recording assistant as well. She has taken part in several activities at Gran Teatro La Fenice, Arena di Verona, Bologna Sound’s Classic and at the Teatro Sociale in Rovigo.

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