Carmine-Emanuele Cella is a composer. His music is about writing the sound itself: each note and each musical figure are the components of a global sonic image, unified and physical, that reveals the tragic story of sounds.
His works have been commissioned and premiered by leading institutions and performers in Europe. IRCAM commissioned Già s'ottenebra il giorno, premiered at the Centre Pompidou by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France under Leo Hussain (ManiFeste, 2012), and, with Radio France, Reflets de l'ombre for large orchestra and live electronics, premiered at the Salle Pleyel under Jukka-Pekka Saraste (2013). I am in blood, for fifteen instruments, augmented instruments and three-dimensional sound, co-commissioned by IRCAM–Centre Pompidou and L'Itinéraire, was premiered at IRCAM's Espace de projection in 2023 and is the title work of a monographic CD to be released by Kairos in late 2026. His concerto for augmented vibraphone and large orchestra, When the moon of mourning is set, co-commissioned by IRCAM and Milano Musica, was premiered in May 2026 by the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI under Michele Gamba, with Minh-Tâm Nguyen as soloist, in Turin and at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan.
A long collaboration with Les Percussions de Strasbourg produced the cycle Les espaces physiques (2017–2022: Inside-out, Kore, Dendrum, Kobi), in which the electronics are produced inside the instruments themselves, placed around the audience — the practical form of what he calls musica hic et nunc, music bound to a place and a moment. Other works include the opera Pane, sale, sabbia (Kyiv National Opera, 2017), Random forests for the Orchestra del Teatro La Fenice, La mémoire de l'eau, commissioned by the Casa de Velázquez, and Atlas, performed simultaneously at the Centre Pompidou, the Onassis Foundation in Athens and ZKM Karlsruhe.
He studied piano, computer music and composition at the Conservatorio Rossini in Pesaro and composition with Azio Corghi at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, where he took his doctorate; he holds a second doctorate, in applied mathematics, from the University of Bologna. He was composer in research at IRCAM (2013), a member of the Académie de France à Madrid at the Casa de Velázquez (2013–14) and Italian Fellow at the American Academy in Rome (2016). He received the Petrassi prize for composition from the President of the Italian Republic (2008), the Teatro La Fenice's Una vita nella musica – Giovani prize, and the Traiettorie prize (2022); he was a finalist of the Isang Yun competition (2011) and of the Basel Composition Competition (2019, jury chaired by Helmut Lachenmann), and was nominated for the Pierre de Monaco prize (2018) and the Franco Abbiati prize of the Italian music critics (2019). Earlier in his career he worked for several years as a répétiteur in European theatres and festivals, including the Rossini Opera Festival and the Wexford Festival Opera.
He is Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley, where he co-directs the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) and held the Jerry and Evelyn Hemmings Chambers Distinguished Professorship in Music (2023–26). At IRCAM he was director of artistic research (2025–26), where he founded the institute's hybrid art/science research programme. His research on orchestration, timbre and machine learning has produced the computer-assisted orchestration system Orchidea, used by composers and conservatoires internationally, and some fifty peer-reviewed publications; in 2025 he lectured at the Collège de France.
His works have been published by Casa Ricordi since 2024.
www.carminecella.com