Boris Porena

Boris Porena (Roma, 27 September 1927) is an italian thinker, music composer and didactical expert. He is married to Paola Bučan, a famous croatian cellist and teacher, who is a tenured professor at the Perugia Conservatory.

He was a disciple of Goffredo Petrassi -together with Ennio Morricone, Aldo Clementi, Sergio Cafaro, etc.-. Although he was initially influenced by neoclassical poetics, he has later evolved towards the armonic language of the late Renaissance period, which he has used with originality in order to build his own musical research.

He started composing at a very young age (12 years old). Within his career, there is a first period (till 1967) during which he obtains a wide national and international success. Starting from 1968, as consequence of the evolution of both his thought and his social involvement, he has abstained from composing during twenty years, devoting himself to a grassroots cultural practice. During this period he sets up the Metacultural Centre, located at Cantalupo in Sabina (Rieti, Italy). In 1988 he comes back to composition with a renewed enthusiasm, giving birth to a fully new phase of his artistic work.

As a musical critic he has produced relevant essays about his master, Goffredo Petrassi. Beyond that, he has written several renowned texts about music; among them "Musica e società" (Einaudi, 1975) stands out, goping beyond purely musical issues and entering with authority in the field of social and political analysis.

His writing works covers also other fields, specially pedagogy and grassroots didactics, but also philosophical reflections as those expressed in "Metacultural Hypothesis: an hypothesis for survival" (1999).

He has taught new didactics of composition at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome and he has been director of the Research and Experimental Centre "Musica in Sabina". Among his many disciples there are Jesús Villa-Rojo, Luca Lombardi, Celestino Dionisi, Giuliano d'Angiolini, Derek Healey, James Clifford Brown, Claudio Pietro, Jorge (Manuel Rosado Marques) Peixinho http://www.geocities.com/jorgepeixinho/, Oliver Wehlmann, Alessandro De Rosa, ecc.

His interests in natural sciences have led him to acquire a high specialisation in entomology and very specially in coleopterology.

Furthermore, he has authored a rich collection of poetry, specially in German, his mother tongue.