Biography
Lorenzo Romano (1985, Florence) composes music where borrowed forms become something else entirely: familiar works are dismantled, reassembled, and made to speak in unexpected voices. His practice, which spans instrumental writing, electronic music, music theatre, and ballet, is built on a fascination with arrangement and remix as compositional thinking — a way of revealing what hides inside what we already know.
His music has been performed by leading ensembles and institutions across Europe: the Staatsoper Hamburg, the Neue Vocalsolisten, Ensemble Recherche, Quartetto Prometeo, and the Schallfeld Ensemble have all brought his work to the stage. Festivals and venues in Germany (Hamburgische Staatsoper, Bundesakademie Rheinsberg, Darmstädter Ferienkurse, ), Italy (Venice Biennale, Nuova Consonanza), France (Royaumont), Austria (Graz Oper, impuls, Klangspuren, Wien Modern), Estonia, and Croatia have welcomed his music into their programmes.
His work has received support from the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung, the Austrian Federal Chancellery, and the European programme Youth in Action, and has been recognised at international competitions with prizes including the Köster Preis and the Premio Franco Evangelisti.
Romano studied first at the Università degli Studi di Firenze, where he took a bachelor’s degree in Modern History, before turning to composition — a trajectory that quietly shapes the archaeological imagination of his music. He went on to study composition in Florence and instrumental composition with Beat Furrer, as well as computer music, at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Graz. In 2013, in Graz, he founded the Schallfeld Ensemble. In 2018 he was awarded the composition and doctoral fellowship jointly offered by the Claussen-Simon-Stiftung, the Hamburgische Staatsoper, and the Institut für kulturelle Innovationsforschung at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg. He teaches composition at the Conservatorio di Udine and the Conservatorio di Parma.
He lives and works in Berlin.
Awards and scholarships (Selection)
Deutsch ︎
His music has been performed by leading ensembles and institutions across Europe: the Staatsoper Hamburg, the Neue Vocalsolisten, Ensemble Recherche, Quartetto Prometeo, and the Schallfeld Ensemble have all brought his work to the stage. Festivals and venues in Germany (Hamburgische Staatsoper, Bundesakademie Rheinsberg, Darmstädter Ferienkurse, ), Italy (Venice Biennale, Nuova Consonanza), France (Royaumont), Austria (Graz Oper, impuls, Klangspuren, Wien Modern), Estonia, and Croatia have welcomed his music into their programmes.
His work has received support from the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung, the Austrian Federal Chancellery, and the European programme Youth in Action, and has been recognised at international competitions with prizes including the Köster Preis and the Premio Franco Evangelisti.
Romano studied first at the Università degli Studi di Firenze, where he took a bachelor’s degree in Modern History, before turning to composition — a trajectory that quietly shapes the archaeological imagination of his music. He went on to study composition in Florence and instrumental composition with Beat Furrer, as well as computer music, at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Graz. In 2013, in Graz, he founded the Schallfeld Ensemble. In 2018 he was awarded the composition and doctoral fellowship jointly offered by the Claussen-Simon-Stiftung, the Hamburgische Staatsoper, and the Institut für kulturelle Innovationsforschung at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg. He teaches composition at the Conservatorio di Udine and the Conservatorio di Parma.
He lives and works in Berlin.
Awards and scholarships (Selection)
- 2025 Köster Preis
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2023 Neu Start Kultur Stipendium, Musikfonds
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2022 Neu Start Kultur Stipendium, Deutsch Musikrat
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2018 PhD and Composition Scholarship, Claussen Simon Stiftung
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2018 Working grant, Bundeskanzleramt, Austria
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2018 Artistiv Residence, Cocoondance Bonn (New Composition for Dance)
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2014 Scholarship for Voix Nouvelles - Royaumont
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2011 Winner of the contest Oper der Zukunft, Opera Graz
Deutsch ︎
My Music
My compositional style appropriates, transforms and combines pre-existent sonic materials for
creating new aesthetic and political discourses. In my work, therefore, the musical invention is the
result of the encounter between the sonic world around me and my personal way to listen to it. I’m
convinced that the way I hear is a creative act in itself. Through the years, I developed a musical
style, which directly derives from this concept. In my music, I imitate, deform, deconstruct and
recombine familiar sonic objects in order to produce new critical perspectives.
This artistic method is contextualized in the theoretical frameworks of the Remix Theory. Eduardo
Navas, the founder of the theory, defined remix as the use of all media for communication by way
of appropriation, repurposing, copying and mimicking. The digital revolution at the end of the XX
century, in particular, democratized the concept of sampling and remix, spreading widely these
creative practices thanks to new technological tools which relied on the operations of cut, copy &
paste.
In my work I bring this creative method into contemporary classical music, not only because I
extensively mix digital samples together with new composed music for classical instrument but also
because, through a personal adaptation of the concepts of cut copy & paste, I question the romantic
ideas of originality and authorship. The creative process for me is not anymore, a matter of creation
from nothing but it becomes an operation of engineering and editing. I see this idea in close
relationship with the original meaning of the word ‘composition’. The term ‘composition’, in fact,
comes from the Latin word componere that means ‘put in relation’, ‘put together’. This paradigm
becomes an intellectual instrument to bring back my activity as composer to its etymological
meaning: ‘to put together heterogeneous material, to form an organic structure.
Lorenzo Romano Composer
lorromano@yahoo.it
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