Francesca Verunelli (b. 1979), who inaugurates a new series of contemporary composer portraits at the Salzburg Festival, has been widely recognized for her adventurous explorations of sound. Her many honours include the Silver Lion of the Venice Biennale Musica (2010) and the Composer’s Prize from the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation (2020). After studying in Florence and Rome as well as at IRCAM in Paris, she held artist residencies in Rome, Madrid and Marseille. Her fascination with how contemporary compositional practice, experimental performance techniques and modern instrument design overlap inspired a research focus that she later pursued to doctoral level at the Université Paris Sciences et Lettres. She now teaches at the Lucerne School of Music.

Francesca Verunelli has received numerous commissions from ensembles and orchestras including the SWR Symphony Orchestra, Klangforum Wien and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France. Her recent composition La nuda voce premiered in two parts in 2025 at the Donaueschingen Festival and Wien Modern. Across other recent works such as Five Songs (Kafka’s Sirens) (2018) and Songs and Voices (2023), Verunelli returns again and again to the human voice – the most primal of instruments – and explores its connection to the body as a resonating chamber, as well as the experience of vocality without the physical voice. In VicentinoOo (2024), Verunelli – long intrigued by alternatives to the conventional equal-tempered tuning system – experiments with microtonality inspired by Renaissance models. Her compositional approach is defined by a profound attention to the unfolding of sound in time and how this temporal dimension can be sculpted. As Verunelli puts it: ‘To compose is to write time. Music is the script of time.’

Translation: Sebastian Smallshaw