Composer Sara Zamboni: ‘The Royal Conservatoire felt like a playground’
Composer and pianist Sara Zamboni often works interdisciplinary and designs choreographies for her musicians. On 7 June, the New European Ensemble will premiere a new piece in The Hague, inspired by star author Ali Smith’s novel Summer.
Sara Zamboni (c) Alex Schröder
In 2014, Sara Zamboni (1990) moved from Italy to the Netherlands to pursue composition studies at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. Ten years later, she has won a natural place in the modern music scene. In 2022 Dark Vocalise was premiered in Korzo Theatre The Hague and on June 7 the first performance of Hymn to timeless melancholy. Hymn to an English Summer will sound in Festival Dag in de Branding. Those holidaying in the Czech Republic this summer can hear a new composition Zamboni composed for the Berg Orchestra on 16 August in Pěčice.
Home filled with music
Sara Zamboni grew up in Darfo Boario Terme, a town in the northern Italian province of Brescia. Her father was an electrical technician specialising in medical instruments; her mother was a housewife. Zamboni: ‘My father was passionate about technology and immersed himself in it one hundred per cent; he was always fixing appliances for everyone. My mother rather more responded to what happened to come her way; if she wanted to work outside the home, she would go babysitting or pick blueberries, for instance; she also sometimes worked as a labourer in a garment factory.’
Zamboni grew up in a house full of music: ‘My mother always had RAI Radio 3 on, the Italian culture channel for classical music, literature, theatre and film. Or she played cassette tapes, LPs and CDs with a huge range of different musical styles. This ranged from classical symphonic music to progressive rock, Brazilian musicians like Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil and Italian singer-songwriters like Franco Battiato and Angelo Branduardi. We also listened to Cape Verdean Cesária Evora and the folk singers of Sardinia. A favourite of mine and my one-year younger brother Daniele was the song Pata Pata by South African singer Miriam Makeba.’
Basic skills
As children, they took an introductory music course together at the Luca Marenzo Conservatory branch in their hometown of Darfo Boario Terme. ‘We learned basic skills like singing in a choir, playing small percussion instruments and listening to our teacher, who was conducting. After that year, we were allowed to choose an instrument for a trial year. I chose the piano, Daniele the clarinet. He also entered music and we performed as a duo for many years.’
Her parents gave her a Casio CTK80: ‘That little keyboard can produce the sounds of all instruments and also has rhythmic loops of rock, Latin, pop and jazz. I started experimenting and improvising with it, but I wouldn’t call it composing yet. It was just playing with sounds and rhythms, incredibly fun to do. – That Casio still lingers somewhere in my parents’ attic.’
Music education in Italy is strict and focused on tradition, Zamboni recalls: ‘The piano major concentrated on the classical and romantic repertoire, there was hardly any freedom of choice. I myself also played music by composers such as Debussy, Ravel and Dallapiccola, but that was already exceptional – the repertoire for exams was determined by a government body.’
‘Later, I also started studying composition, but it was only during my master’s degree in piano that I really began to delve into 20th-century repertoire. A key role in this was played by my teacher Andrea Rebaudengo, with whom we analysed and performed pieces such as In C by Terry Riley, Workers Union by Louis Andriessen and Living Room Music by John Cage. Thanks to Andrea, I started specialising in contemporary music.’
Royal Conservatoire The Hague
At 24, she completes her master’s and moves to The Hague to continue her studies at the Royal Conservatoire. ‘Already earlier on I had decided to leave Italy because there are hardly any female composers, and music is considered a hobby there – nobody wants to pay for it. There are talent shows on TV, but they cannot be taken seriously; I simply had no choice but to leave.’
In The Hague, she was able to enter the second year bachelor right away: ‘I got exemptions for subjects I had already completed in Brescia; my theoretical basis was very strong. For instance, I had devoted my thesis to Bartók’s piano music and his research on folk music in his region. I had also exhaustively analysed two operas by Alban Berg and knew the repertoire of the Second Viennese School well. In the Netherlands, I sought the freedom to further develop my own creativity.’
She is not disappointed: ‘The Royal Conservatoire felt like a playground, where I could do anything I wanted. I got a lot of support from my composition teachers Calliope Tsoupaki and Martijn Padding, but also from Gerard Bouwhuis, with whom I took the minor piano – I always called him ‘Uncle Gerard’. Of course, every teacher has his own approach and vision, but I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to achieve and our collaboration was open, critical, but respectful. Whereas teachers in Italy want to force you in a certain direction, they set themselves up as guides and advisers. ‘It’s your composition in the end,’ they often said.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lNKEOtBJUo&ab_channel=SaraZamboniMusic-Topic
Experimenting
Just as she used to experiment enthusiastically on her casio, she also eagerly takes advantage of study opportunities at the Royal Conservatoire: ‘I took electronic and electroacoustic music lessons from Kees Tazelaar, head of the Sonology Department. Kees taught me to first have a sound or process in my head and then to develop the technique to realise it. That requires a lot of brainpower and if something was executed sloppily, he spotted it immediately.’
‘For two years I also took Paul Jeukendrup’s course Audio Engineering in Electronic Music. That roots in my admiration for theatre sound and lighting technicians, stage managers and the like, who, behind the scenes, make a performance possible. Here, I learned a lot about the workflow of audio in live performances.’
‘I helped realise performances from the Sonology department that brought together multichannel sound systems, acoustic instruments and live electronics. We prepared those concerts during classes and so I learnt to set clear guidelines for the technicians, tailored to the venue, equipment and time schedule. Looking back, these have been for me the most important practical lessons I have ever had!’
Electronics
Electronics play an important role in her work, whether combined with acoustic instruments or not. On her label Cytokine Records, set up in 2020, she publishes a new piece every month, including an inventive cover. For instance, the cover of Suite in a Mental Space was inspired by an etching by M.C. Escher.
In this fascinating soundscape, she puts her own voice and sounds of various clarinets (Daniele Zamboni) through an electronic wringer. The slowly slipping, plopping, buzzing, metallic, sometimes sweet sounds transport us to a mysterious world, as if we have arrived on a planet of aliens. Zamboni: ‘For me, it is a journey through a macrocosm to a microcosm, in which gigantic creatures communicate with infinitesimal ones. But everyone gets to use their own imagination.’
Besides electronics, musicians’ gestures also play an important role in her work. Zamboni: ‘What has always bothered me is that they are only allowed to make functional movements; after all, the body responds spontaneously to feelings of ease or discomfort. Musicians are far too little trained in how their bodies work. It is wrong to force children to sit still for hours, endlessly practising the same musical passage. I myself used to play outside, climbing trees, doing somersaults in the grass and so on. Nowadays I practice pilates and modern dance and do figure skating. All this resonates in my compositions.’
“Composer Sara Zamboni: It is wrong to force children to sit still for hours, endlessly practising the same musical passage.”
Music theatre
Even while studying in Italy, she wondered how to make musical theatre without disturbing musicians’ natural way of playing: ‘To enable artistic performances, I started experimenting with their motor skills and incorporating movements from everyday life into my compositions. I performed these with friends at the conservatoire. There I also met singer and performer Elena Lorenzi, still my best friend.’
All this comes together in Dark Vocalise for soprano and five-channel electronics, chosen for the Playground Festival at Korzo in 2022. ‘In it, together with Elena, I explore the deepest aspects of the female voice. To this end, I have included warm-up exercises from her singing practice. Thus, we hear her voice in a vulnerable state: not yet ready to perform, but full of variations, instabilities and colour nuances. I manipulated those sounds and they are reproduced through five speakers set up around Elena. Live, she engages in a dialogue with her own voice, with her facial expressions and body movements designed to go perfectly with good, lyrical vocal technique.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGuNaD9KFAc
The recording of Dark Vocalise on YouTube has an overwhelming eloquence, even though it lacks any text. Elena Lorenzi stands solitary on a sparsely lit stage, clad in a black strapless top with white tulle strip skirt, her arms raised. The speakers emanate mysterious hissing sounds, which sometimes develop into a polyphonic chorus, but more often string together into a forest of ominously dark sounds.
Live, the singer answers these with hissing sounds, deep sighs, intense breaths or short melodic motifs, while contorting her body and fingers in all sorts of twists and turns. She widely opens her mouth and heavily kohl-rimmed eyes, her terrifying gaze recalling actresses in silent horror films. At the end, as a ‘conductor’, she silences her own speaker choir.
Hymn to Timeless Melancholy
In her new composition, Hymn to timeless melancholy. Hymn to an English Summer, for the New European Ensemble, Zamboni does not use electronics; nor did she design choreography for the musicians. ‘It is inspired by the novel Summer by Scottish author Ali Smith and is purely acoustic, set for flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, piano and string quartet. It concerns my musical reflection on memories, transient moments and the way the past continues to live on in our present. Smith masterfully captures the beauty of fleeting encounters: chance, long conversations with strangers in which we share stories, thoughts, intellectual brilliance, anecdotes and puns for a moment, before going our separate ways again. A moment frozen in time.’
‘The book made me think about how we try to understand our grief and seek solace in the past, while at the same time living in a present full of discomfort, complicated family ties and catastrophic events. I was particularly struck by a passage on pages 290-307 in the 2021 Penguin edition.’
‘This recounts how Grace takes a walk and thinks back to a simple but meaningful afternoon three decades earlier, when she was in her twenties. It is one of those moments that stays with us long after the fact and presents itself unexpectedly, perhaps to ease our present grief. Before the performance, Ali Smith reads the relevant excerpt.’ In addition toHymn to timeless melancholy. Hymn to an English Summer, three works by other composers inspired by of Smith’s so-called seasonal quartet will be premiered on 7 June.
Bohemian countryside
In August, the Czech Berg Orchestra will play a new work Zamboni composed in 2024 during a Studio Hrdinů residency programme in Prague. ‘I lived for three weeks in Pěčice in the Bohemian countryside, in a house that once belonged to Bedřich Smetana’s brother. My assignment was to write a piece inspired by that environment, which would also be accessible to locals, who might be less familiar with modern music.’
She doesn’t have a title yet: ‘I haven’t quite finished the piece, but it will be musical theatre for woodwinds, brass and percussion. The Berg Orchestra conductor will take the audience through various locations around the house and in the surrounding forests. Besides acoustic parts, they will also get to hear multi-channel electronic recordings, through speakers placed in nature.’
‘The musicians not only play, but also make gestures that I am yet to define with them. Unfortunately, I couldn’t use a piano in this setting, but I did listen to Smetana’s piano music extensively.’ Smiling: ‘Maybe an idea for a next project.’
This article appeared in the May-June issue of the Dutch music magazine De Nieuwe Muze.
The concert will be repeated in Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ, 25 September 2025
#AndreaRebaudengo #CalliopeTsoupaki #DanieleZamboni #JohnCage #LouisAndriessen #MartijnPadding #SaraZamboni #TerryRiley
Contemporary Classical - Thea Derks
