Chris Marianetti

With a strong urge to reconnect with his heritage and learn Italian, Chris Marianetti didn’t hesitate when he saw an opportunity to study abroad in Milan. His life was changed forever as a result. Studying music composition from professors who were themselves students of some of the great European composers of the 20th century had a profound effect on him, and Chris began developing his own voice as a composer for the first time. After graduation, he returned to Milan to work with IES Abroad students and met his Italian wife, a law student and IES Abroad resident assistant at the time. Upon returning to the U.S., Chris co-founded Found Sound Nation, a music collective and network focused on making a social impact, which was a take-off from an elementary school music project he had worked on in Milan. In 2009, he was selected as Artist-in-Residence for Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute, where he worked on a new musical outreach initiative. Then, in 2012, with his Found Sound Nation co-founder, they won a grant from the U.S. State Department to launch OneBeat, an international collaborative and youth engagement-facing music festival and exchange that is now in its fifth year. Read on to learn more about how the IES Abroad Milan experience influenced Chris’ life and his belief in the power of exchange.

IES Abroad: How did you hear about IES Abroad and what motivated you to study in Milan?

Chris Marianetti: As a child, I had a close relationship with my grandfather, Oliver, whom I can sort of describe as American-Italian. Oliver was born a U.S. citizen to recently immigrated Italians settling in Montana, but after the death of his mother was immediately sent back to Italy where he was raised in a Catholic orphanage in Tuscany. Before he was 20 years old, he immigrated back to the United States during one of the major immigration waves in the 1920s. I can remember very early on, even in middle school, wanting to learn Italian in order to be able to communicate with him on that level. He passed away before I finished high school, but my first year of college, I had the chance to take Italian classes and took a bus to a different college at dawn every morning to do so. If you knew how terribly traumatic transitioning to a waking state is for me, you would realize how badly I wanted to learn Italian; I am not a morning person. Nonetheless, I spent two years learning the language, and when I was a junior at Macalester, I saw an IES Abroad opportunity to study in Milan. I didn’t hesitate. 

IES Abroad: What are some of the most influential memories from your time in Milan as an undergraduate student? 

CM: I lived with two Sicilian brothers and another much older American student who had come back to college later in life. To be honest, I might have learned just as much from my fellow American roommate, living outside of his country, as I did from the Sicilians. Milan was one of the first and more potent examples of the power of exchange – how leaving your culture and living someplace outside your context of comfort plunges you deeper into the very culture you’ve left. The separation is illuminating. Like the act of mediation, silencing your own internal communication and leaving your daily thoughts and patterns, you reveal yourself to yourself.

IES Abroad: How did you change the most during your time in Milan? Did the experience shape the way you think in a profound way today?

CM: My studies in Milan, specifically music composition, had a profound effect on me. I grew up in a relative music desert in New Mexico. My college had a potent but small music program, so the chance to connect directly with historic and contemporary Italian music scenes was tremendous. Learning from professors who themselves were students of some of the great European composers of the 20th century was an incredible opportunity. As a composer, this was one of the first moments where I felt I started developing my own voice. Before this, I wrote a lot of pretty derivative works, working mostly from within romantic or jazz traditions, but in Italy I found techniques that helped me to reveal a much more personal musical perspective. 

IES Abroad: After graduating from Macalaster College, you returned to Milan to continue your studies in music at the Civica Scuola Di Musica, and then you worked with music students at the IES Abroad Milan Center. How did your previous study abroad prepare you to live and work there? 

CM: Several weeks after graduating, I packed all the belongings I could fit into a portable piano case, along with a digital piano, gave away everything else, and left for Milan. The very first day back in Italy, while at IES Abroad Milan reconnecting with former professors, I met the woman who would later become my wife, an Italian IES Abroad resident assistant studying law at la Cattolica. (When we married years later in Puglia, our celebration turned into something of an IES Abroad reunion with friends and staff from those years.) I was incredibly fortunate to have studied with Dr. Roberto Andreoni (Roby), and his generosity both as a composition teacher and as Center Director helped set the stage for the career I have today. Dr. Andreoni saw that incoming American IES Abroad students were intimidated by the conservatory system and hesitant about taking advantage of some of the courses being offered at the Civica Scuola di Musica. He gave me a job at the Center where my experience in the program and my language skills could be beneficial to new students. I organized events for incoming students, curated weekly music listings, helped translate the Civica’s website into English, and accompanied students on performances. 

IES Abroad: Upon returning to the U.S., you co-founded Found Sound Nation, a music collective and network focused on making a social impact. What inspired you to establish this organization and what is its goal? 

CM: Our organization is a collective of artists who leverage the unique power of creative sound-making to build bridges that connect people across political, cultural, and economic divides. We believe that engaging in music creation is an important way to unlock the creative potential of youth, to give voice to underrepresented communities, and for creative leaders in civil societies to develop inspiring ideas for building more peaceful and harmonious societies. Not only were the artistic seeds of the organization developed during my studies in Milan, but my relationship with New York new music organization Bang on a Can, who have been our great mentors and partners for the last seven years, began there as well. 

While I was working with Roby in Milan, he connected me to an elementary school in need of music programming, and I began a project working with Italian elementary students. At the time, I was studying composition and electronic music at the Civica Scuola di Musica. But I wanted to find a way to somehow connect more advanced musical concepts from these studies with much younger students – to encourage young people to reach for something just outside their grasp rather than pandering to musical sensibilities. I had students record ‘found sounds’ and objects within the school that had specific timbres (a sonic scavenger hunt), then categorized these sounds and created a library of the recordings. We projected visualizations (waveforms) of these sounds on a large classroom wall and collectively composed short pieces one sound at a time by having students listen, locate sounds on the wall-projections, and place them within a timeline. As we repeatedly played these sonic-amalgamations back, short little cohesive compositions started emerging. I remember Dr. Andreoni being surprised by what we were able to make together. Several years later, while living in New York, I used this model and these experiences to begin Found Sound Nation with a friend and colleague, Jeremy Thal. There are some very clear threads between our current work and that very first project at the Italian elementary school: the power of collaborative creative composition, the importance of musical exchange, and the art of listening. The art of listening extends far beyond the practice of making music – it is one of the major ways we can become aware of the beauty, tragedy, and hidden potential present in our neighborhoods, institutions, and families. 

IES Abroad: In 2009, you were appointed Artist-in-Residence for Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute. How did this come about and what was your role? 

CM: In 2009, Carneige Hall’s Weill Music Institute was beginning a new musical outreach initiative under the leadership of Manuel Bagorro, who, in addition to being a gifted pianist, had managed for the last ten years to run one of southern Africa’s largest music festivals under the eye of Zimbabwean despot Robert Mugabe, which, all considering, was no small feat, indeed. Manuel’s vision was to create a music exchange program in New York where composers and musicians worked in places throughout the boroughs that had hitherto been bereft of substantive musical programming: hospitals, community centers, youth detention centers, and homeless shelters. Working with Manuel and Carnegie, we created audio production and composition labs with people young and old, but worked mostly with incarcerated youth in Brooklyn and the Bronx. During these composition and production laboratories, we also brought in jazz and contemporary musicians from a number of exceptional New York-based groups, to perform and create songs with these young people. These workshops – and the resulting concerts held inside these detention centers where staff, other young detainees, parents, and family members gathered to celebrate the creative spirit and awesome potential of these young men and women – were some of the more powerful examples of music’s ability to transcend situation, place, bonds of culture and race and to speak somehow directly to the soul, revealing to us of the humanity, the utter complexity of it all, that we share living together on this planet.  

IES Abroad: One of the projects you are currently working on is OneBeat, an initiative of the U.S. State Department. How did you and Found Sound Nation get involved? 

CM: OneBeat began with a missed email. Luckily for me, ‘the purge’, while indeed horrifying, involves the digital cleanses I force upon myself and sometimes reveals a buried, hidden gem or two. Here in my backed-up inbox, as layers upon layers of junk and unanswered emails were finally clicked and sorted, I saw a message announcing that the U.S. State Department had a ‘call for proposals’ out that involved the creation of a new international music exchange program. I remember I called up my partner, Jeremy, and told him to come over straight away. The deadline must have been fairly imminent because he slept on my couch over the next week, and we devised a proposal. Truth be told, the call gave me an incredible feeling of synergy because we had, for the last year, been dreaming up a vision for a new kind of collaborative and youth engagement-facing music festival and exchange. Our program involved bringing young musicians (ages 19-35) from around the world to the U.S. for one month each fall to collaboratively write, produce, and perform original music and develop strategies for arts-based social engagement. We sought to employ collaborative, original music-making as a potent new form of cultural diplomacy. Several months later, we were told of the award but couldn’t believe it. 

In the past four years, OneBeat has performed in over 20 cities and towns across the U.S., collaborated with thousands of students, teachers, organizers, and leaders in U.S. schools and community organizations, and upon returning home, OneBeat Fellows have independently raised over $250,000 for post-OneBeat projects using musical collaboration to encourage meaningful cross-cultural dialogue and build peaceful, harmonious societies. As one of the co-directors and creators of OneBeat, I’m truly proud of our network of musical and social innovators, and I feel incredibly fortunate to get to continue to work on this initiative with amazing musicians the world over and with our very adept partners at the State Department. 

IES Abroad: For more than ten years, you have traveled all over the world making music composition, production, and education your career. What drives you, and what are some accomplishments you most proud of? 

CM: My work emphasizes a mobile, accessible, and collaborative way of composing and producing music. I feel as though the field I’m working in, while steeped in tradition, is actually still being created and defined, and I don’t know quite what to call it – sonic-production-composition-education-exchange – perhaps the German language has already some hybrid word for this. Regardless, I feel as though there are new techniques we are developing all the time, often by jumbling up and combining art music traditions, musique concréte, hip hop, audio-journalism, and contemporary composition. I like adapting to different environments, finding the unique sounds and resonances of each space, drawing upon talents of musicians of a particular local scene, and examining issues most relevant to specific communities.

IES Abroad: What words of wisdom do you have for today’s aspiring musicians and the impact of gaining an international experience?  

CM: I’m not ready to answer that! But I will say that I believe firmly in the power of exchange, and I’d encourage it in whatever form possible, be it super local, international, scientific, or linguistic, and for people of all disciplines. Take these opportunities of exchange whenever and wherever they come, and seek to actively create them in your life. I’d also share a few words that have always rung true to me. John Cage reminded us that we have to “create the space” within which our own music can exist and thrive; Joe Campbell challenged people young and old to “follow their bliss”; Anne Bogart emphasizes the importance of sheer action in a “heady” unpredictable world of art. Also there’s a particular passage from Hermann Hesse’s advice to a young poet that I’ve just read and love, and I think, while specific to poetry, applies to many other disciplines: “To follow the way of the poet, not simply to practice the use of language but to learn to know oneself more profoundly and more accurately, to advance one’s individual development farther and higher than the average of mankind succeeds in doing, through setting down unique and wholly personal psychic experiences, to see better one’s own powers and dangers, to define them better – that is what writing poetry means for the young poet, long before the question may be raised as to whether his poems perhaps have some value for the world at large.” I believe this revelation of self to one’s self, is a wonderful outcome of cultural exchange as well. This drives much of the work we do at Found Sound Nation and OneBeat.