Palermo, 23 ottobre 2025 – The music of Southern Italian cinema lands in Los Angeles, transformed into a sensory, interactive and high-technology experience. On Tuesday, 29 October, the Theater Stage Auditorium will host “From Morricone to Bacalov: the Music and Screen of Southern Italian Cinema”, a prestigious international leg of the project MUSIC4D, led by the Conservatorio A. Scarlatti di Palermo, which fuses musical training, innovation and artificial intelligence.
This is not just a concert: it is a fully immersive show, in which the most celebrated film scores from the South of Italy — from The Leopard to Cinema Paradiso, from The Godfather to Il Postino and Baarìa — are re-imagined by an ensemble of musicians rooted in classical tradition yet driven by a contemporary spirit. It is a journey into the cinematic memory of the Mediterranean, paying tribute to masters such as Ennio Morricone, Nino Rota and Luis Bacalov, blending the evocative power of images with the most advanced digital experimentation.
Under the direction of Michelangelo Galeati, the performance features Giuseppe Vasapolli at the piano, Fabio Crescente on double bass and an ensemble of talented young musicians selected from the project’s partner conservatories. What makes the evening even more spectacular is the live interaction among music, video and dance: a dancer-digital performer will be tracked by motion sensors, each gesture transformed in real time into sounds and musical gestures via a system of algorithms and next-generation software developed within MUSIC4D.
“This is not an act of nostalgia,” explains Crescente, scientific coordinator of the project. “We are not simply re-performing immortals themes; we are bringing them into a living dialogue with a future that is already present. Thanks to technology, the gesture of a dancer can become a new note in a Nino Rota score. That is the spirit of MUSIC4D: honour our past by making it vibrantly part of our future, proving that art knows no boundaries, neither geographic nor technological.”
MUSIC4D, financed by Italy’s Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza (PNRR), is the fruit of a network involving the conservatories of Sicily and Sardinia alongside partner universities such as the Università della Calabria. Its aim is to redefine how music is taught, composed and performed — from AI and virtual reality to spatial audio and robotics.
The Los Angeles appointment therefore marks a new international milestone for MUSIC4D, after its premiere events in Italy and appearances at festivals in Europe and Asia. It is also a symbolic bridge between the Mediterranean and Hollywood, where the legacy of auteur cinema from Southern Italy — from the baroque landscapes of Sicily to the coasts of Procida — finds a new visual and sonic language. A language that merges a Mediterranean root with digital aesthetics, turning a film’s emotional power into a shared, interactive and global experience. Because, as MUSIC4D shows, the music of the South is never just a memory: it is a vision that continues to rewrite the future.
