Combining scientific rigor and artistic sensitivity, Ingrid Carbone’s career represents one of the most fascinating and original synthesises in contemporary culture. A concert pianist and university professor of mathematical analysis, Ingrid Carbone has developed a language capable of uniting two seemingly distant worlds, transforming numbers, structures, and relationships into living tools at the service of musical interpretation. You can read the full interview (in italian) here>>

Here’s a translated excerpt.

Her return to Italy in April will be marked by two highly interesting events: on April 10th in Serra San Bruno (Vibo Valentia), as part of the Mathesis National Congress, with the conference “Invisible Architectures of the Musical Text: The Mathematical Method in Interpretative Choices,” and on April 17th in Cremona, at the Musica e Intelligence Conference, with “Music and Mathematics: The Rigor That Unveils the Mysteries of Interpretation.” These two precious opportunities, combining dissemination and performance, delve into the heart of an approach capable of making music even more conscious, profound, and surprising.

In this context, we met with her to delve deeper into her method, understand how this dialogue between disciplines arises, and discover what truly lies behind those “invisible architectures” that guide every performance.

Ingrid Carbone is a pianist and a mathematician: two worlds that many perceive as distant. When did she realize that, instead, they could dialogue so naturally?
I realized it quite recently, and I can say so. It was in 2018, when I began my first recording, the production of my first album, that I realized that the study I had done up to that point, although very thorough, was not enough, and I began to look at the score, to read and go beyond the score, and to scan the score with a completely scientific way of viewing the structure. It was there that I understood how much mathematics was influencing my music, and later, a few months later, in the spring of 2019, when I was in China preparing lessons for piano teachers, I discovered, through a request for a PowerPoint presentation, that communicating music, explaining it with what I later began to call concert conversations, could bring any type of audience closer to classical music, to the understanding of profound music. There too, the influence of the university was absolutely evident to me.