Marco Pagliettini interviewed Ingrid Carbone for the website Spettakolo!. You can read the full interview (in Italian) here >>

Here’s a translated excerpt.

You are a renowned concert pianist, researcher, and tenured professor at the University of Calabria. Do these two activities influence each other, or do they remain separate worlds?
For a long time, I believed they were two separate worlds. Always drawn to music, I mistakenly believed that mathematics was an impediment to my artistic career and professional growth. However, this is not the case. We often rationalize something that has been within us for a long time and that we were unable to see. In 2018, at the beginning of my recording projects, I realized how much my mathematical mind, my logical-deductive method, and my university research were influencing my way of seeing music, of reading the score, of literally conducting musical research. I finally realized that my approach to the score is exquisitely scientific in the preliminary study phase. And even the interpretation, which certainly has various degrees of freedom, thus becomes more conscious and even more faithful to the composer’s intentions because it is channeled in the right direction. But it’s not just research that influences my music.

Did your love for music or mathematics come first?
My love for music definitely came first, even though I thoroughly enjoyed doing those famous “little calculations” in elementary school. But the arrival of a piano at home when I was 8 years old turned my life upside down. Since then, it has become my inseparable companion. Then came my studies at a scientific high school, and then the decision to study mathematics at university. Without taking anything away from mathematics and science in general, being a musician is completely different from being a scientist, even though we have many similarities, such as creativity. Making music is a necessity, and musicality cannot be learned (it’s either there or it’s not). I see the piano as an “extension of my soul,” and playing it allows me to explore other dimensions. For these reasons, I feel privileged.