Paolo Ferrari (1943), a biography through concepts

Musician (in-Absence) with degree in medicine, artist-scientist, poet and writer.

He learns the fundamentals of piano from Lisetta Carmi, a pupil of Maestro They in Genoa. For a long time he doesn’t concern himself with music and meanwhile he carries out his studies in medicine as well as scientific and clinical research into a particular activity of the nervous system discovered by him and later called in-Absence or asystem in-Absence. He has published several scientific and experimental works and a few writings: a novel Paolo e il suo compagno senza morte, a poem Europa o l’Assenza and a play Astratta Commedia permeated by music and silences of new kind.

In 1989 he goes back to music, not only as interpreter but also as composer, creator of the Musica dell’Assenza (Music of Absence).

It is at the same time an advanced expression of the ordinary musical language and emergence of a complex activity of thinking which is substantiated in-music through a different compositive paradigm and gesture. Within this context of radical change, albeit not outside old and recent memory traces – these being dissolved and transformed –  Paolo Ferrari is also creator of artistic-scientific-musical figures which, by interweaving with the musical compositions, work both as signs highlighting a semantic area under way and as catalysts of an in-depth changing musical meaning.

He is working now on this new musical system (asystem) with musicians of classical background, among them Vittorio Zago, co-author of this piece, as well as of “In-abstracto complexu: (the) activity of music” which has won the International Composition Prize “Città di Pavia”.

Paolo Ferrari is at the moment also contributing with the composition of a musical piece to the creation of the choreographic set for a modern ballet of new conception.

Founder of Centro Studi Assenza in Milan, he is President of the Association bearing the same name.(www.centrostudiassenza.it