note #01

and finally

here we are

Hi, I’m Alice! Thanks for stepping here.
I am a composer whose greatest dream – in life and in music – is to connect different worlds playing with the unknown.

What does this mean? Truthfully, I don’t fully know. I sense it, but it resists definition. There’s something – a mystery, a search, a deep need – that draws me in. I don’t want to explain it with words, not ever. I chose music because it knows exactly which emotional strings to touch in the corridors of the inexpressible.

And yet, there is another part of me pressing to emerge, claiming a space somewhere: the one that digs through the terrain of imagination with another hemisphere, the one that needs to communicate its inner world through words as well, even if they often feel superfluous. Still, they have their place. So let’s stop hiding.

Here you can find some glimpses of my story, but – above all – traces of what I am understanding along the path. Fragments, intuitions, attempts of grasping something. A kind of wandering flight that takes off from one point and lands somewhere else entirely, with no practical aim other than to bring some order to lived emotion and share it.

not knowing in advance

embrace wonder

This is my space, yes – and yet I have always held myself back from exposing myself. Why? The answer is simple: because I already knew what I wanted to say. “Oh, I could tell this story, or that time when”. An excellent premise for failure.

Art, as I experience it, works like this: if you already know where you’re heading, then it’s fairly certain you won’t make anything worth making. It is somehow inversely proportional to your own self-awareness.

To lay yourself bare means not knowing how it will end. Otherwise, it’s not exposure: it’s craft, it’s technique, it’s let’s get the job done and move on. And that doesn’t work, at least not for me. Without this act of trust in the process, intuitions don’t surface. As I write now, I have no idea how this text will end, and I feel that as the greatest blessing. Every time I’ve begun something already knowing what I would find, I have inevitably failed.

Whenever I compose, play, write, or even draw, I never know what will happen next. I begin, and I trust. The moment I reduce it to producing content, something in the mechanism breaks. I take power away from my imagination – which is like deciding in advance whether a relationship will succeed or fail, that obsession with controlling the outcome, mapping every possible path. It has nothing to do with creation. It is a fear of the deep breath — the one that lets you actually feel.

If I were to create already knowing what I’ll find (except for what happens in the kitchen), I would lose the most important thing: the ability to be surprised. To let the hands move on their own – hands that, like life, carry a wisdom far older and deeper than we are, hands that, on an instrument, search for the combination that best expresses what lives inside you, without you doing anything except becoming a channel for something that passes through you.

cartography of soul

exposure matters

This is why I struggle with social media. My relationship with it became so saturated with the need for approval that I stopped using it actively, and then abandoned it altogether. It couldn’t be otherwise. A sense of obligation suffocated my creativity, my genuine desire to share. And somewhere deeper, it had silenced that life-intelligence that knows exactly where-how-when something wants to emerge. That instinct to create and share without thinking about metrics.

It was more painful than I expected. The absence of shared expression is corrosive – subtle, coercive at a level you don’t immediately feel. It pushed me into an emotional bunker, not unlike the studio I now live in: beautiful, filled with wood, instruments, books, boards, colours, but without a view. In front of my only window, a noble red building does me the kindness of reflecting light back, a very natural light, even though I face north. But I can’t see beyond it. I can’t let my gaze stretch to the horizon (a privilege I had in my previous home, facing south, where the seasons were clear, the winter sun lower, the moon rising in the east). Exposure matters.

Now I see a fragment of blue sky, I hear distant birds, I enjoy the wind when the traffic pauses, but I don’t see neither sunrises nor sunsets. My eyes can’t rest on distance. No green of trees. No vastness of sky, only a neatly framed portion, as if I were among skyscrapers.
So I am forced inward.

But after contraction, expansion inevitably follows. Now I need air. I need to share, to cast lines outward, to give. To surrender to myself, to what I am, without hiding anymore.

 

To expand online what I already live offline: trust in human beings, the power of encounter, that poetic and muddy carnality that knows how essential it is to relate to the things of the world. To tell about the eyes of the children I teach, the questions of the older ones, the sailboat – where I reconnect with my most essential nature, stripped of everything unnecessary, made of full presence and breath (and where horizons open endlessly, since at home that is not possible) – a second work that nourishes my imagination. To tell the inner and the outer. 

I want to feel, and I want to communicate what I feel. That’s it. Each of us has a unique way of being in the world: creating a space where people can bring themselves – their fragility, their vulnerability, their unspoken – is already a great step. I don’t know if it can happen here. But I do know that I want to tear down walls. At least mine. What I think I’m supposed to be, those limitations that exist only to make us acceptable but take no account of complexity. The mystery will remain, but in the meantime, clarity has become erotic. 

an ancient task

translating

Am I sure about writing in English? Of course not. I’ve thought about it long enough. It’s not my mother tongue, and I imagine it shows. Maybe that’s right. Maybe it should be felt that the thought is born in Italian, with a different syntax. Maybe a trace of foreignness is necessary. Maybe, in English, I can still keep a small veil, which would go against that very nakedness I seek. 

Or maybe, simply, one of my tasks is to translate. I’ve been doing it my whole life. As a child, among family misunderstandings, separated parents, families in different cities, and me in between, constantly trying to explain each one to the other. Holding space for their point of view, especially when absent. A baby Libra.

I translate constantly. I do it by allowing myself to move between people of different genders, of very different ages, of wildly different worlds. And for some strange reason I find myself living in many different domains at once, having to explain each one to those who aren’t living it with me. Incredibly difficult, at times. Not so much the telling, but the true understanding. Because I myself take on different forms depending on the situation. My inability to explain the nature of certain relationships has caused no small number of misunderstandings. How do you tell someone what you feel? It’s always an approximation – and it depends, too, on the other person’s capacity to enter entirely different categories. 

Still, I’ve trained. For example, when I read classical pieces, I write the harmony underneath using jazz notation. It’s an approximation, but it gets very close to the essence – it makes the underlying structure visible, it opens the way to reinterpretation. Translation, after all, is a noble form of communication. It must render deep meaning. It must cut when necessary, or reassemble within a different system of thought. That’s what film music does. It speaks to emotion, communicates with the director, gives voice to the unspoken, lets image and sound interact. It is a relationship. And right now, that is the only thing that truly matters to me.