About
Immediacy of listening, complexity of writing
Michele Tadini is a composer working across concert music, theatre, dance, moving image, radio and interactive installations. His music is performed worldwide. He is professor of composition — Musique Mixte — at the Conservatoire National de Musique et Danse de Lyon.
Practice
Writing, playing, inventing.
- Composition
- Performance
- Transcription & arrangement
- Live electronics
- Electronic realisation
- Programming
- Sound direction
- Sound environment
- Conception
- Musical direction
- Research
Michele Tadini composes for instruments, voices, bodies, stages, screens and public spaces — work that makes new relationships audible. His practice extends across concert music, theatre, dance, moving image, radio and interactive installations, bringing musical writing into dialogue with performance, technology and the experience of listening.
His approach brings together the emotion of making music and the depth of compositional thought. Written music, rock, jazz, early music, fusion and electronics are all part of his musical roots. He explores the relationship between the immediacy of listening and the complexity of writing — music shaped by moods, images and storytelling, continually composed and renewed.
“A constant search for the relationship between the immediacy of listening and the complex artifice of writing.”
Works
- International work
- Commissions
- Recognition
His music has been presented at La Biennale di Venezia, Milano Musica, Ravenna Festival and the Maison de Radio France in Paris, with performances across Europe, the United States, Latin America, Canada and Japan. His commissions include works for the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome, RAI and Art Zoyd.
His work also includes electronic realization and sound direction, notably for the 2019 Paris revival of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, based on Luciano Berio’s project. He received the Prix Italia in 2008 for the radio opera La Musica Nascosta and the A.R.T.S. Award in 2011 for La Terza Luce.
His music is published by SZ Sugar.
Background
- Formation
- Institutions
- Teaching
Born in Milan, Tadini studied guitar with Ruggero Chiesa, composition with Sandro Gorli and Giacomo Manzoni, and electronic music with Riccardo Sinigaglia at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory. He continued his studies with Franco Donatoni at the Scuola Civica in Milan and the Accademia Chigiana in Siena, receiving the Diploma di Merito in 1989. In 1998, he attended the autumn course at IRCAM in Paris.
He is professor of composition — Musique Mixte — at the Conservatoire National de Musique et Danse de Lyon. Alongside his artistic and teaching activities, he co-directed AGON with Luca Francesconi and Centro Tempo Reale in Florence, and directed the IRMus contemporary music section at the Civica Scuola di Musica Claudio Abbado in Milan.
Projects
- Creation
- Performance
- Collaboration
Recent projects include Found in Translation, an electronic album conceived as a manifesto for his way of making music; Arcipelago Battiato, created with Leonardo Marino and Thierry Coduys for La Biennale di Venezia; and La Ballata delle Donne, on a text by Edoardo Sanguineti, premiered by the Vikra Chamber Choir at Ravenna Festival in 2026.