Ingrid Carbone, pianist, mathematician, and music and culture communicator, performed in Milan at CASVA (Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts) as part of the Piano Lesson “The Female Universe Through the Notes of Schubert, Litzkönig, and Leoncavallo,” an event organized by Piano City Milano. You can read the full interview (in italian) on MyDreams.it>>

Here’s a translated excerpt.

As part of Piano City Milano, she will hold a conversation-concert exploring the connection between music and mathematics. She will present the Piano Lesson “The Feminine Universe Through the Notes of Schubert, Liszt, and Leoncavallo.” Can you give us a preview?
I carefully selected the program to stimulate and encourage reflection on how much women today still have to fight to have their rights recognized. On the one hand, with Leoncavallo’s music, we will reflect on the woman of the people, who transforms Spanish life and traditions into a spectacle. On the other, there is a young nun (Die junge Nonne) who is torn from her life of aristocratic privilege by being locked up in a convent, in Liszt’s masterful transcription of Schubert’s leid of the same name. Therefore, women from different social backgrounds who nevertheless experience the (different) difficulties associated with their status. I will explain the pieces to the audience, their meaning, the effects the composers wanted to convey through the music, and I will let them hear the castanets, the guitar, the gypsy violin, the heel/toe of the ballerina. Flamenco, but also the nun’s transformation, her inner torment, and the transition from suffering to devotion. After recounting them on the piano, I will perform them in full.

You are a researcher and tenured professor at the University of Calabria, where you teach Mathematical Analysis. What rewards do your students give you?

Teaching is difficult these days, even at university. Students are changing year after year, losing their ability to concentrate and work consistently. Unfortunately, rewards also diminish year after year. However, and it has always been this way, my greatest reward is seeing the transformation of those who have trusted me and my advice and succeeded in making a change. This is also how one becomes an informed citizen!