Giorgio Monari, musician, scholar, and music organizer, is the director of MuSa Blues and has collaborated with Sapienza University of Rome since 1990, first as director of the Diego Carpitella Choir, with which he has won awards, produced CDs, and staged the first Roman performances of Gosepl. He has also held music workshops and taught music history at the Faculty of Arts of the same university. Since 2007, he has collaborated with Musica Sapienza, for which he has conceived and implemented numerous projects such as Mandela Day (annually since 2014) and Songs for Peace in Times of War (since 2023). His musical interests range from traditional European classical music to African American, African, and Latin American music. At the Brazilian Embassy in Rome, he curated the intercultural music workshop Aquarela for twenty years, with which he launched the Carnevale per MuSa concerts at La Sapienza in 2009. He has also taught at the Pontifical Gregorian University and, as a scholar, lecturer, author, and organizer, he deals with various periods of music history and Euro-American musical relations. He directed the Francesco Maria Ruspoli International Music Competition for ten years, until 2019. He is a member of the Núcleo Caravelas study group at the Universidade Nova in Lisbon. He graduated cum laude in Modern Foreign Languages and Literature (1992) and received his doctorate in Music History (2001) from Sapienza University of Rome. He graduated in Choral Music and Conducting (1994) from the Conservatory of Bari and, in addition to his studies in piano and composition, he furthered his knowledge of conducting with Robert Ray, Gary Graden, Martin Schmidt, and Karl Høgset, as well as vocal technique with Elisa Turlà and the Voicecraft method. He has also conducted research on phonetics and prosody in singing in various languages in Italy and abroad.
Giorgio Monari
