On Friday, April 10th, 2026 the recording of the piano suite Korean Inventions, Op. 2 by Stefano Corvino took place at the milanese studio OFFICINA in Via Tolstoj.
Now a manager at ATOZ Services (Luxembourg), Stefano Corvino belongs to an earlier generation of Bocconi graduates, with a background in both Business Administration (CLELI, Graduation Class of 2002) and a Law (Class of 2005). The performance in Milan is dedicated to the students of his alma mater and involved attendance by the Bocconi Students Opera Society.
The suite, in three movements, was performed by the Spanish pianist Juan Francisco Otón Martínez, invited to record the work for its release on YouTube.
A link to the performance can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6ntwNRRvB0
The musical work presented reflects Corvino’s artistic vision, deeply influenced by professional and life experiences. His career has taken him to live for over a decade in Beijing, followed by a period in intense travelling across North, Central and South America. He is now based in Luxembourg, where a highly multilingual and multicultural environment has shaped both his approach to Music and the way of understanding it.
Corvino’s ideas and reflections are explored in his book The Lost Composer, a personal meditation on Music conceived as a narrative and a social responsibility.
The author sees a turning point in the twentieth century, when movements like serialism and radical atonality began to replace earlier musical languages, declaring tonality “obsolete”. Over time, abstract Music of the last two generations has lost its audience not because of a cultural decline among listeners but due to an excess of self-referentiality. Finally, Corvino goes as far as using a striking expression, describing part of avant-garde production as Music “not suited for human consumption” and unable to build a shared communicative bridge.
At the core of Corvino’s thoughts on Music are two key concepts: emotional rationality and communicational hierarchy.
Music appeals to our emotional world, but that does not imply it being a less rational endeavor than business or law. Is the economic world more rational? Think of speculative bubbles and of the libraries which might be filled with articles on irrational market behaviors. Is the legal world so? Well, there are multiple degrees of appeal right because we doubt, as a society, the capacity of the judiciary to apply law rationally in a sole degree.
If Music is rational (or not more irrational than business or law), then it’s more than legitimate to expect, from a good meeting with Music, what we would expect from a good business meeting. Yes, when meeting Music we don’t talk to a client or co-worker: Music works in our emotional world. Yet, as in a good business meeting, we can expect that Music speaks to us clearly, directly, without wasting our time and energy, and that it leaves us with something to be remembered once we return to our daily activities.
So, Music is communication. This implies hierarchy: what one wants to say (the subject, the content, the intention) comes first; how to say it (form, syntax, grammar) comes after.
Imagine visiting a factory with a respectable visitor and facing the sudden danger of a heavy object falling on his head. It’s the immediacy of the danger (the content) that drives our communicational choice. What would be best, if the danger is imminent: “watch, move away!” or “Sir, for your safety, it is convenient removing yourself from that spot, so to avoid physical injury”?
The same works for Music. Communicational intention and content (what to say, musically) come first; then form and structure are chosen (way of organizing the material, musical syntax, whether tonal, atonal, dodecaphonic etc.).
In Corvino’s view, it’s logically improper (and potentially dishonest) to judge or rank Music based on the form and syntax chosen, as if writing atonally was an index of higher aesthetic value than choosing a tonal syntax. The starting point of judging Music is the coherence between intention, content and form chosen to express that intention and content. Only then, within a certain syntax (chosen coherently), it becomes possible to form an esthetic judgment (“does the counterpoint work? how is the thematic material developed?” etc.).
After all, what do we love a language for? For the life experience we have with it (mother tongue), the beauty of its literature etc., or for its grammatical rules?
Corvino’s key accusation against the last few generations of musical criticism and musical philosophy is to have subverted this natural communicational hierarchy and to have elevated matters of form and musical syntax to primary parameters of aesthetic judgement, with the result of making abstract Music a sterile field of experimentation per se.
Corvino’s view is entirely opposite: creating new musical syntaxes, breaking established rules, creating new musical systems is not the point. The point is: what does one do with that?
This hierarchical subversion between content and form of communication, he continues, has also led to a divide between classical and entertainment Music. For centuries, great composers moved naturally across different domains. Bach wrote both sacred Music and for a coffee house, Beethoven composed a cycle of songs and Brahms published popular dances. Opera was popular entertainment as movie theaters are today. The relationship of the public with what we now consider “serious Music” was much more relaxed and informal. Today, however, much of the avant-garde seems to ignore the world of entertainment altogether, which signals a loss of connection with the social dimension of Music. In this sense, contemporary abstract Music has become increasingly individualistic and introspective, abandoning this sense of collective responsibility.
The suite recorded in Milan represents, in the author’s intentions, a concrete translation of this vision with Music conceived for human use and capable of engaging with the audience without sacrificing musical richness, i.e. presenting ideas which are developed across a wide emotional range.
“It was truly a pleasure to take part in this event and we are always keen to be involved in initiatives like this” – says Lorenzo Monteduro, Head of Media and Partnerships of Bocconi Students Opera Society – “In a university strongly oriented towards economics and finance, opera might seem like a niche interest, but in reality there is a much wider cultural curiosity. We have around 200 members and Bocconi’s international environment also plays a role since many students come to Milan drawn to its cultural scene and to institutions like La Scala”.
