Laura Agnusdei is an electroacoustic composer and saxophone player from Bologna (IT). Classically trained, she also holds a Master in electronic music composition by The Institute of Sonology of The Hague (NL). Her compositions feature the saxophone as the main voice within sonic landscapes that shift between melodies and textures, the song form and improvisation, fusing acoustic, digital and analog sound sources. Her first album Laurisilva is composed of six tracks that invite the listeners to explore an imaginary landscape made from sounds growing and layering like biological organisms within a forest. This work, as well as Laura’s debut EP Night/Lights, was released by London-based label The Tapeworm. Since 2016 her music has been presented in many venues and festivals such as Rewire, Dekmantel, EYE Filmmuseum (NL), Café OTO (UK), Node, Macao, MAST (IT) and she has been playing as opening act for artists like Colin Stetson and Moor Mother. Laura is also active as a composer in different projects ranging from live scoring silent movies to radio art.

Agnese Banti is a Tuscan sound designer and musician, based in Bologna. She graduated in sound design at G. B. Martini Music Conservatory with a thesis project that was partially carried out at the Department of Music Studies of the Ionian University of Corfu. Her work with sound spans the fields of music, audio-video, performance, and installation. She is a collaborator of the Florentine centre of musical production, research, and didactics Tempo Reale, and is a co-founder of the Electronic Music Collective of Bologna (Elettronica Collettiva Bologna~). Her works have been performed in Italy, Ireland, Greece, England, Portugal, and the USA. She collaborates with Roberto Laneri in overtone singing projects, and she collects spinning tops while waiting to be able to play them all.

Frank Bockius studied Rhythmik at the conservatory in Trossingen (Germany). Since then he works as a drums and percussion teacher and as a freelancing musician. Many years he worked with his own bands, the jazz quintet Whisper Hot and the percussion band Timpanicks. He also played middle age, flamenco and latin music, worked with dance companies and for theatres. Twenty years ago Günter Buchwald asked him to join his Silent Movie Music Company and since then they have worked together intensively for national and international venues and festivals. Throughout the last years Frank has also collaborated with many other great silent film musicians (e.g. Kyoto, Sodankylä, Pordenone, San Francisco).

www.frankbockius.de

Timothy Brock is an active conductor and composer who specializes in concert works of the early 20th century and live performances of silent film. As a silent-film score preservationist, his leading work in this field include the restoration of Dmitrij Šostakovič’s only silent film score, New Babylon, Manlio Mazza’s Italian epic, Cabiria, Erik Satie’s dadaist score, Entr’acte and the infamous George Antheil score to Ballet mécanique. Since 1999, he has been serving as score preservationist for the Charles Chaplin estate, and has made thirteen live-performance versions of all major Chaplin films. As a composer of original scores for silent film, Brock has written thirty-five full orchestral scores for a number of notable orchestras and institutions. He is a frequent guest conductor of such orchestras as The New York Philharmonic, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre National de Lyon, Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. In 2016, Brock conducted the New York Philharmonic in Shanghai, marking the first-ever live performance of City Lights in China. In 2017 he performed the world Premieres of two newly commissioned scores, Buster Keaton’s College in Lyon with the National Orchestra, and Fritz Lang’s Frau im Mond at the Vienna Konzerthaus with the Tonkünstler-Orchester.

www.timothybrock.com

Serge Bromberg is the founder of Lobster Films but also a musician who has been playing piano on silent films around the world, in more than 30 concerts per year. He is mostly known for his Retour de Flamme shows, where he tells stories and accompanies newly discovered invisible films since 1992. First of all a film restorer and producer, TV host, festival director and president of ECPAD, Serge is also a big Buster Keaton fan.

Cleaning Women is a do-it-yourself group from Planet Clinus, consisting of three ”cleaning robots” named CW01, CW03 and CW04. While on Earth, they are often seen in Helsinki, Finland. Besides unique music, Cleaning Women is known for their alternative ways in choosing their instruments. The origin of their acoustic sound can be traced to self-made and self-customized instruments, which are crafted from mangled household items or material salvaged from trash bins. During their over 20 years of existence, the group has played almost 600 concerts in more than 20 countries. They have released four albums and composed and performed various praised live soundtracks for silent films. Cleaning Women have also composed original music for two of Alice Rohrwacher’s short films. This time in Bologna the group will perform exceptionally as a duo by CW03 (Timo Kinnunen) and CW04 (Tero Vänttinen), since CW01 (Risto Puurunen) was busy with another cleaning mission elsewhere. 

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. He was so fascinated and inspired by this experience that he gave up all other musical activities in order to devote himself exclusively to creating soundtracks for silent cinema. From that time onwards, Antonio Coppola has been the guest of film festivals and retrospectives all over the world, both as a musician and as a member of juries, as well as having been engaged by a number of film archives and universities as a research consultant on the restoration of original soundtrack. He has also taught at workshops and given papers at conferences on techniques of improvisation and the composition of soundtracks for silent cinema.

www.antoniocoppola.eu

Daniele Furlati, pianist and composer, has a degree in composition, piano and arrangement. He earned two diplomas with honors in courses in advanced music for film conducted 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 and Un giorno devi andare. He is working together with Cineteca di Bologna, playing the piano in accompaniment for silent films. In theater, he composed Asteroide Lindgren (everyone has his star) which debuted in 2007 at the Teatro Comunale in Modena and Novelle fatte al piano which had its debut in June of 2010 in Rome at the Conservatorio dell’Accademia di Santa Cecilia.

Stephen Horne, based at London’s BFI Southbank but playing at all the major UK venues, has recorded music for Dvd releases and Tv screenings of silent films. Although principally a pianist, he often incorporates flute, accordion and keyboards into his performances, sometimes simultaneously. In recent years his accompaniments have met with acclaim at film festivals in Pordenone, Telluride, San Francisco, Cannes, Hong Kong and Berlin. In 2011 and 2012, he was commissioned to compose ensemble scores for the London Film Festival Archive Galas of The First Born and The Manxman. He collaborates with a small group, which recreates magic lantern shows. He is also a specialist in dance accompaniment and plays regu-larly at the London dance academies.

www.stephenhorne.co.uk

Valentina Magaletti is a drummer, composer and percussionist whose goal is to strategically enrich a folkloristic and eclectic palette through endless listening and experimentation with new materials and sounds. She has performed and co-written with many artists including Nicolas Jaar, Jandek, Helm, Raime, Malcom Catto, Charles Hayward, Graham Lewis (Wire, Dome), Tighpaulsandra (Coil, Spiritualized, Julian Cope), Thurston Moore, Bat for Lashes, Gruff Rhys (Super Furry Animals), and many more. In her current project, Vanishing Twin (Fire Records) she has a more conventional jazz approach that finds its escape in the drone/field recordings of the percussive approach in her other main experimental/avant-garde duo Tomaga. Valentina was born in Bari, Italy, and is based in London.

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, for silent film accompaniment, 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 Franz Léhar’s operetta with the permission of the composer’s estate and The Patsy with Marion Davies.

www.maudnelissen.com

Stefano Pilia is a guitar player and composer. He explores the sculptural properties of sound through instrumental practice and investigations into the recording and production process. Beside playing as a soloist, Pilia is one of the founding members of the seminal group 3/4HadBeenEliminated. Since 2010 he has been a member of psychedelic quartet In Zaire and has been a focal contributor to the BGP trio, alongside David Grubbs and Andrea Belfi. Since 2009 Pilia has been a member of Il Sogno del Marinaio, a trio made up of bassist Mike Watt (Minutemen) and drummer Paolo Mongardi. He plays in a duo with guitarist Alessandra Novaga, in duo with John Duncan, in a trio with Anthony Pateras and Riccardo La Foresta and with the violinist Silvia Tarozzi quintet. Pilia is the lead guitarist for Malian singer Rokia Traorè (since 2012) and for the Italian band Afterhours (since 2015).

Besides Portugal Raon has performed in Germany, Austria, France, Slovenia, Serbia, Spain, Russia, Holland, Belgium and Macau (China). As an interpreter he has premiered both solo and chamber works by Eurico Carrapatoso, Clotilde Rosa, Ivan Moody, João Lucas, Joana Sá, Daniel Schvetz, Eli Camargo, Sebastian Duh and Fernando Lobo. Raon regularly composes for Cinema, Animation, Theater, Dance e Fine Arts projects. In particular, he composed music for several silent films, including: “Die Puppe” by Ernst Lubitsch; “Metropolis” by Fritz Lang; “Enthusiasm – Symphony of the Donbass” by Dziga Vertov.

https://eduardoraon.com/

Donald Sosin, composer, keyboards, arranger and conductor, grew up in New York and Munich. He has performed at Il Cinema Ritrovato each year since 1999, often joined by his wife, singer Joanna Seaton. They also appear at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Lincoln Center, MoMA, MOMI, the National Gallery, and film festivals on three continents including Telluride, Jecheon (South Korea), Seattle, San Francisco, Moscow, and college campuses like Yale, Harvard, Brown and Emory. The couple leads music workshops around the US. Sosin received the Career Achievement Award in 2016 from the Denver Silent Film Festival and he scored Chaplin’s The Pawnshop for the touring edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato at Brown University in March. Sosin’s orchestral score for Sherlock Holmes premiered in the 2016 summer at the Odessa International Film Festival. Dvd releases of his soundtracks scores include Keaton films for Lobster and Ten Nights in a Bar Room for KinoLorber’s African-American set. Other commissions: Chicago Symphony Chorus, Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, MoMA, and Metropolitan Museum of Art.

www.oldmoviemusic.com

Cecilia Stacchiotti is a musician, multi-instrumentalist and composer of electronic music. She has played in various musical groups as a keyboardist and guitarist, and most recently as a DJ and in live electronic sets. She has worked on soundscapes for shorts and medium-length films and in the arrangement and composition of soundtracks and music for experimental videos. She collaborates with the sound designer Marianna Murgia at the post-production TriBit Studio. She periodically works as a composer and sound designer for spoken word and dance performances. She has collaborated with artists from a wide variety of disciplines such as Andrea Tardi and Flavia Zaganelli, Silvia Tarozzi, Stefano Pilia, Edoardo Marraffa, Valeria Sturba, David Sarnelli, Daniele Faraotti and Domenico Caliri.

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, Nottingham Broadway, The Imperial War Museum, and Bristol Watershed. He has played for the British Silent Cinema Festival since it’s inception, and has since 2000 been a regular pianist at the Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone, Italy. He is a regular performer at the Slapstick Festival of silent comedy in Bristol, and has also played at other festivals in Austria, Germany, Italy and Slovenia. He has recorded DVDs for the British Film Institute (Wonderful London, parts of Pioneers and Primitives) and also Cineteca di Bologna (Albert Capellani) and Edition Filmmuseum (Crazy Cinématographe), as well as recording a soundtrack for Hitchcock’s Downhill for broadcast on Sky Tv. He is one of the founders of the Kennington Bioscope, doing regular screenings of neglected silent films at the Cinema Museum London with live music.

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 Montréal. 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. His works are performed in the Americas, as well as in Europe, Asia and Africa. 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