Music history
- Contact the teacher: ZATTRA LAURA
Laura Zattra is a scholar in the field of 20th- and 21st-century music and sound-based-works, with a focus on the history and connections between art, science and technology, electroacoustic music, sound art, sound design and collaborative practices. She holds a diploma in flute, a Master’s degree with honours in Literature from the University of Padua, and has been a PhD (2003) with special mention in Music Sciences (University of Trento) and 20th-century Musicology (Sorbonne-Paris IV). In 2028, she obtained the National Scientific Qualification to serve as a Second Level University Professor in Sector 10/C1 (Theatre, Music, Cinema, Television and Audiovisual Media). She was an associate researcher at the University of Padua from 2004 to 2012. Since 2012, she has been an associate researcher at IRCAM in Paris.
She has been a full professor of Musicology and Music History (AFAM040) at the Conservatory of Udine since 2024, and has been an adjunct professor of History of Electroacoustic Music, History of Sound Design in Cinema, History of Film Music, and Fundamentals and Teaching of Music in various undergraduate and master's degree programmes in Italy (2013-2024).
She is the founder, together with Giacomo Albert, of the Risme Digitali research group (within the Italian Society of Musicology), founder, together with Sylviane Sapir and Anna Terzaroli, of the MEDEG (Electronic Music, Women and Gender) group within the AIMI (Italian Association of Music Informatics), and founder and author of the website www.teresarampazzi.it. She is regularly invited as a speaker and keynote speaker at national and international conferences. She is a member of the editorial board of several journals (Musica/Tecnologia, Organised Sound, projet Analyses Ircam..), reviewer for scientific journals and conferences in Italy and abroad (EMS, SMC, CIM, Mundo Sonoro, NOVA, Ubimus...), and evaluator of projects (among others European Community ERC-2016-ADG, MIUR, Swiss National Science Foundation).
Her research method incorporates philology, oral history and ethnography. With this method Laura has conducted research on works (by John Chowning, Luigi Nono, Agostino Di Scipio, Salvatore Sciarrino, Jean Claude Risset, Jonathan Harvey, Fausto Razzi), reconstructed the biography of authors (in particular Teresa Rampazzi and Angelo Paccagnini), the history of centres (the CSC in Padua and the IRCAM in Paris), and investigated the dynamics of collaborative practices in music (such as that between Luigi Nono's collaborators, musical assistants, film music composers, sound designers) or the birth of instruments and software (such as the Nagra recorder, or the MUSIC programmes... ). She is currently involved in the RAMHO research project with IRCAM in Paris, with François Xavier Féron, Nicolas Donin and Vincent Tiffon, a project that aims to reconstruct the history of acoustics and electronic music in France and Europe, based on oral history (over 100 interviews in progress), analysis and archival research.
She is the author, among others, of Studiare la Computer Music (2011) and co-author of several volumes including Inventare gli arnesi della propria espressione, Musica/Tecnologia, XV, 2021, La notazione della musica elettroacustica. Scrutare il passato per contemplare il futuro, Musica/Tecnologia XIII, 2019, and Live-Electronic Music (con Friedemann Sallis, Bertolani, Burle 2018), and over a hundred scholarly publications in national and international journals.