Discipline: Music Composition

Elisabetta Brusa

Discipline: Music Composition
Region: Milano, ITALY
MacDowell Fellowships: 1988, 1989, 1990

Elisabetta Olga Laura Brusa is an Italian composer and naturalized British citizen. Brusa was born in Milan, and as a child wrote 32 piano pieces. At the Milan Conservatory she formally studied composition with Bruno Bettinelli, (who also taught conductors like Claudio Abbado and Riccardo Muti) and Azio Corghi, graduating in 1980. She then taught composition at the Conservatorios of Vicenza, Mantova, and Brescia before arriving at the Conservatorio of Milan in 1985. She also received instruction from Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and Hans Keller. She first appeared on the Young Italian Composers RAI 3 television program in 1983. After winning first prize at the Washington International Competition for Composition for String Quartet in 1982, she was awarded the Fromm Music Foundation Fellowship and a Fellowship of the U.S.-Italy Fulbright Commission the next year to follow the composition classes at the Tanglewood Music Center and three Fellowships from MacDowell. In 1997 she married the conductor Gilberto Serembe. Currently she is best known for her orchestral works recorded in three volumes on the Naxos Records label.

Studios

Chapman

Elisabetta Brusa worked in the Chapman studio.

Chapman Studio was funded by Mrs. Alice Woodrough Chapman in memory of her husband, composer George Alexander Chapman. Symmetrically massed, the building is stuccoed on the exterior with a natural, unpainted cement. Its unusual half-timbered ornament consists of slender, knotty spruce poles painted a dark green color. A central, peak-roofed entrance porch appears on the north side…

Learn more