Composer Alfonso Peduto on Music as Art and Science
The story of how post-genre pianist and composer Alfonso Peduto has captured the eyes and ears of millions is as layered and structured as the compositions he shares.
Written by Lisa Battles
Born in northern Italy, Peduto began taking lessons at age 4 and began competing in international competitions throughout his youth. In his early college years, his family moved to California, where he ultimately earned bachelor’s degrees in physics and mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, and in classical composition and music technology at Berklee College of Music. He then earned a master’s in classical composition at the New England Conservatory.
With mathematical precision, he composed and recorded as he studied, building a catalog of 20 to 30 pieces by the time he completed his master’s in 2016. Today, he’s composed over 200 pieces for solo piano, multiple pianos, chamber ensembles and orchestra. While he shares examples of all of these works, his most popular recently are his compositions using a Yamaha Disklavier.
“My music also is very structural and very precise; I find beauty in figuring it out in a very elegant way, an idea, with influences from minimalism. I want to do something that I feel is interesting first and foremost, and communicates to as many people as possible,” Peduto says.
From piano to physics
Peduto was raised with what he calls “a typical suburban Italian upbringing, which meant lots of emphasis on studying and extra-curricular activities.”
His father, an engineer by trade, had been playing piano as a pastime since his teens and bought a piano of his own with his first paycheck. When Peduto and his sister were young, they began lessons on how to play it. By age 8, he was competing in Italy’s classical circuit and continued until around age 13, when he had to choose between a specialized performance school and a standard academic track. He chose the latter.
“I decided to keep music as a fun thing I do on the side,” Peduto says. For him, that still meant regular practice and earning a pre-college music school credential alongside his science specialization diploma.
Peduto’s family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area for his father’s work, and he enrolled at UC Berkeley to continue his college studies. While earning dual degrees in mathematics and physics, he saw plenty of post-grad opportunities in the tech industry. He says he also considered pursuing a PhD in physics, as he’d become interested in developing mathematical models for quantum field theory.
From physics to piano
Peduto also took music classes at UC Berkeley, composing his own music and performing locally. As his academic studies wound down, he showed his original music to a faculty member he says was the catalyst for encouraging him to consider music school. “On a whim,” he says, he applied to Berklee and won a scholarship before sharing the idea with his parents.
“The way I presented it to my family was asking, ‘Could I take one or two years to work on my music? I think I have a lot of good music that I want to bring about, and I want to see if it’s possible to make a life of it,’” Peduto says. “And then I told them after that I had a scholarship, so they were supportive on these terms and thinking that I could always go back and work in math or physics after a one- or two-year break.”
At Berklee, Peduto completed a five-year program in two years, following that with a master’s degree in classical composition from the New England Conservatory in 2016.
Over the decade that followed, he ran on what he describes as faith in the work and process. He self-funded project after project, took occasional work for hire and built his social media audience one release at a time.
About three years into slowly building an online audience, streams began to climb around 2019. In 2021, one earlier piece took off, spreading across social platforms and forming the foundation of his current audience of over half a million followers today.
Along the way, his music has been in productions by ballet companies including the Pacific Northwest Ballet, Milwaukee Ballet, Kansas City Ballet, New York City Ballet, and others; commissioned by Warner Chappell Music; and in collaborations with companies such as Salomon and Google.
“It really was just blind faith of, ‘I think I’m doing something that hasn’t been done before, and I will just keep doing it for as long as I can,’” Peduto says.
Pushing minimalism to the max
When it comes to defining what that thing is, the answer also is layered and structured.
“I definitely think I’m post-genre. I have drawn a lot of influence from minimalism, but my music is not quite minimalist because there’s so much going on. Some pieces are quite complex. I was once asked for a story to define my music, and I jokingly said, ‘maximalist minimalism,’ but I think it’s quite true: it’s minimalism with as many notes as possible. So taking it to the maximum,” Peduto says. “Basically, I want to compose music with acoustic instruments. I think there’s beauty in instrumental music and instrumental music for any number of acoustic instruments. And I’ve been informed by my classical training. Some of the things that I do, I don’t think I could have achieved without it.”
Growing up between Italy and the U.S. shaped that outlook, he says.
“In Italy, there’s a lot of respect given to beauty and history. And so I think there’s a big appreciation for beauty for the sake of beauty and not beauty for the sake of commerce, for example. A perfect balance of the two is important. Seeing too much in a vacuum, just art for the sake of art, regardless of who listens, could be dangerous because it is not a very fulfilling pro-social experience of art,” Peduto says. “But also the opposite can be quite dangerous. It could lead to not really being true to what you think is beautiful and just to follow trends and everything else.”
Peduto applies the same lens to science and technology, which many people do not immediately associate with the creative arts, he adds.
“There’s a very deep beauty in science, as well. When you read a beautiful proof, a beautifully, perfectly spelled out, elegant proof, there is a sense that there’s an inherent beauty in it, and that is really hard to grasp if you’re not in it. It feels just as pure as making art. I do feel that scientists and artists share many, many common aspects because they obsess over this thing that they think is beautiful,” he says.
Structuring the creative process
It’s not surprising that Peduto also relies on structure in his calendar and daily routines, usually moving several projects through distinct phases.
“Every project has a composition phase in which I make the music, a production phase and then the phase in which I share with the world,” he says.
He typically splits his days into two blocks of four or five hours, most weeks running seven days straight, with breaks limited to walks or an occasional weekend away with his partner. Even then, he often takes his work with him.
“There are really no other voices,” he says, noting the exception of conversations with his partner about projects in progress. For example, she once recommended he pursue an idea he had underrated, and the piece that followed, “Binary Data IX,” drew 10 million views on his own channels.
Peduto’s tech side comes out when he describes his attention to detail as “a feature and a bug at the same time,” a trait he sees in talented friends across other fields, valuable for quality and difficult to turn off. To check his habits of endless takes and revisions at the piano or in video edits, he purposefully builds time limits into every project.
Knowing and building an audience
That same instinct shapes how he thinks about his audience, which he no longer treats as one group.
“I have so many different projects with different concepts. I was initially focusing on piano and looping, and then I’ve always composed solo piano music. And then the whole piano plus delays, which has been resonating the most on socials. I do think I have different pockets of people who appreciate each of them, and my case is unusual in that way. With many artists, the audience is equally excited about the one thing they’re doing,” Peduto says.
His record Meditations returns to the solo, minimalist piano pieces he wrote before the technical side of his work took over. Although he expects a smaller portion of his audience will respond to this material, he is releasing it regardless.
“I know that is not a growth-hack strategy. I’m releasing this album for a different set of people who follow my work, and that is okay. I hope my whole catalog will get listened to, but I only have power to bring out what I believe is good work and to bring it out in the best way I can,” Peduto says. “Every project is just me nerding out on a specific idea and concept and just trying to execute it at the highest level and put it into the world.”
He says his next Disklavier series focuses on his recent experimentation with pattern delays versus a fixed delay.
“So it’s going to repeat the note, but the note has an intrinsic rhythmic pattern, which creates a much, much more intricate sound world and much more intricate counterpoint than just a single delay, because all of a sudden you have a rhythm that each note follows,” Peduto says. “I do experiments all the time. It’s just a matter of which programming will yield exciting music and not just exploring an algorithm just for the sake of an algorithm.”
Ahead, he wants a wider audience, more concerts, and more chances to bring the Disklavier in front of people directly, where he says the reaction runs deeper than anything a video conveys.
“I would love to bring this more often to people in concerts. I have seen from the few I’ve had, and when people come to visit me in the studio, when people see it with their eyes, it’s quite more shocking than in video. So I do feel that there’s a more visceral reaction and quite a beautiful experience to have,” Peduto says. “I want to see how far I can take these interactions with the piano. I don’t want to have interactions just to be flashy and not carry a musical dialogue or a musical experience for the end user. I really want to make beautiful music with this new technology.”
