JOSEPH
GIOVINAZZO
COMPOSER
Photograph by Marcus
Thomson
Joseph
Giovinazzo is an Australian composer, with performances
in Australia, America, and Europe. He is active in the promotion of
contemporary Australian art music. He is a founding member, inaugural
secretary, and past president of the Melbourne Composers’ League.
He hosted and co-produced New Music Now, a series of programmes
for community television focusing on a range of contemporary Melbourne
composers. He helped create and establish MikroPolyphonie,
an Internet journal dealing with contemporary music.
His composition studies began with Dr Tony Gould, with whom he studied
modern harmony and composition, emphasizing jazz styles and the practices
of early Twentieth Century composers. He is a graduate of the Music
Department at La Trobe University, Melbourne (at the time, Australia’s
leading institution for the study of musical composition and contemporary
music), completing his Doctorate of Philosophy in the areas of music
composition, analysis and theory. He has taught music for Monash University,
Latrobe University, and The University of New England, and is a co-recipient
of two Australia Council grants and an Arts Victoria grant.
Professor Samuel Adler, the distinguished American composer and music
educator (Julliard School of Music, Eastman School of Music), has said
of Joseph, that he "exemplifies a person of great taste, and one
with the ability to write a work worthy of performance. I believe he
is a fine composer with a bright future in the world of composition".
Drawing on the classical aesthetic of clarity, directness of communication,
and balance in proportion, his current music may be regarded as expressing
an eclectic classicism, typical of a multifarious world. Of his work,
he says: "As a composer, my aspiration is a music that speaks to
the common humanity residing in all of us; a music that is intimate
in its touch, but universal in its communication.”
