Yours in Beethoven

Rocco Di Pietro is a composer and the author of the books Dialogues with Boulez, Rajas for John Cage, and The Normal Exception: Life Stories from Prison. Drawing on his studies with composers Lukas Foss and Bruno Maderna, Di Pietro focuses on the reasons why people are not able to get along with one another. While he admits that investigating people who have widely differing ideas often leads to "dissonance across boundaries," this dissonance has informed his own compositions and writings, both of which attempt to acknowledge and accept a range of widely-divergent ideas. His work prioritizes dialogue over conflict, acceptance over ideology