Manifesto on Marco Stroppa's Miniature Estrose

Marco Stroppa of Italy is a pre-eminently active and innovative composer in Europe. In his piano works Traiettoria for piano and computer-synthesized sounds (written from 1982 to 1984) and Miniature Estrose Vol. 1 - seven pieces for solo piano (written from 1991 to 2002), Stroppa has discovered many new and important nuances of the sound from the piano. His insightful studies, therefore, not only opened up new ways of thinking, but also enriched previous understanding of the sound world of the piano. A versatile music scholar and practitioner, Stroppa is at once a composer, a pianist, a musicologist, an electronic music engineer, a science researcher. In addition, Stroppa has studied media technology (covering cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence and computer music) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Stroppa specializes in creating musical sounds that are rich with expressive quality, emotion, and poetic imagery, using an approach that is tied to the presentation of sheer quality of timbre, character, and articulation, giving a prominent and perceptual importance to the extreme details of the sound. He is also known to use cognitive psychology in composition.