The Workshop serves as a research space centered on improvisational practice, both in traditional settings and in experimental or cross-genre contexts. Its methodology is grounded in direct musical experience, linked to instrumental action, compositional techniques, and creative processes, offering an alternative to conventional curricula that emphasize representation, imitation, and repetition of models or styles. This performative method supports musicians seeking an autonomous, pressure-free environment for continuous individual and group exploration, leading to a more complex, nuanced, and aware musical maturity.
Workshop objectives include:
- Learning to listen and recognize musical material – the four parameters
- Learning to build and manage the creative process without pre-established models
- Deepening the relationship between conscious listening and response
- Defining levels of self-resonance and musical perception
- Developing complementary instincts among musicians in ensemble performance
- Increasing speed in establishing internal musical balances within the group
- Acquiring skills to identify, develop, and interrelate thematic figures, guiding narrative subjects semantically within morphological structures – the three narrative parameters
Once the learning phase is complete, the process of building musical identity begins through experimental engagement—a deep and often postponed endeavor. The research integrates compositional awareness with expansion of technical instrumental skills, exploring the most vital and forward-looking possibilities of music through four complementary paths: two traditional, reflecting an in-depth engagement with the past, and two focused on present and future through original and instant composition, experimenting with new approaches to improvisational performance.
Traditions
Book of Songs
1) Songs from the Middle Ages to today, from various cultures
2) Alec Wilder (1907–1980), featuring over sixty arrangements by Stefano Battaglia of his Art Songs and Popular Songs
3) Ritual, folk, and classical music linked to text or dance, from Hildegard of Bingen to Bartók
Book of Jazz
20th-century American jazz repertoire, divided into six sections:
1) Swing (1925–1945): Armstrong, Bechet, Beiderbecke, Ellington, Garner, Hines, Waller, etc.
2) Bebop (1945–1955): Brown, Johnson, Gillespie, Lewis, Mingus, Monk, Parker, Powell, Rollins, Shearing, Tristano, etc.
3) Expansion and transition (1955–1965): Coltrane, Davis, Coleman, Brubeck, Dolphy, Evans, Jones, Giuffre, Hubbard, Lacy, Silver, Waldron, Jobim, etc.
4) Post-1965: Jazz idiom persists but incorporates diverse extra-jazz references, covering historical avant-garde and new music, reflecting progressive distancing from idiomatic conventions.
Groups may also focus on a single tradition figure for in-depth monographic research.
New Music
Original Composition
1) Interpreting original works (from Battaglia’s repertoire)
2) Composition: participants present original or new material for development and arrangement during the workshop
Tabula Rasa Improvisation – Instant Composition
The “tabula rasa” (wax tablet) allowed ancient masters to write exercises and erase them daily—a metaphor for intellectual and creative rebirth. Applied to music, it encourages the abandonment of previously learned models and styles, fostering renewed creative purity and a conscious, instinctive approach.
Focused, isolated study of musical parameters and applied narrative knowledge cultivates compositional sensitivity through direct instrumental experience, aiming to create a free yet disciplined poetic universe. Tabula rasa practice helps musicians connect with their deepest, individual essence, unbound from prior models, fostering a personal truth essential in today’s and tomorrow’s music, across any chosen language.
Workshops always aim toward performance, creating scores that facilitate free improvisation via semantic-structural pathways rather than traditional notation, allowing the expressive potential of tabula rasa while maintaining structural and dramaturgical integrity. This practice encourages self-resonance, fostering individual identity and perceptual development, independent of imitation or pre-existing styles. It emphasizes disciplined improvisational methodology as a practice, not just a liberating act, ultimately bridging instrumental and compositional techniques through instant composition for unified, conscious musical maturation.