Aldo Piga

Aldo Piga (1928–1994) was an Italian-American composer who worked mainly in New York.

Aldo Piga's work was mainly produced in the 1950s and 1960s in Italy. He started as a song composer and later approached the movie soundtrack field. His participation in the pop music Italian market counts with two participations in the famous contest of Sanremo, one of which was overshadowed in the year of the famous Modugno's song "Volare". He recorded about one hundred film soundtracks. One film soundtrack that he contributed to was Il grido, a 1957 Italian drama directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, which included “Non lo saprai mai” (You will never know it) by Piga and Renato Barneschi.[1] His activity as a composer was strongly influenced by classical music and bebop jazz roots of his early years in the New York music scene.

Piga's work was also known to British television audiences in the last late 1950s. "Come to My Arms", which Piga wrote with Maurizio de Angelis and Jack Elliott featured on the British television programme Six-Five Special in 1958, where it was performed by Dickie Valentine.[2]

After a promising career as a music writer, he decided to start working as a film producer in the late 1960s. This change led to an end in both his careers as a writer and producer. In the 1990s Piga left Italy to retire in New York where he spent his last days until 1994.

  1. ^ Calabretto, Roberto (December 30, 2022). "Michelangelo Antonioni's Il grido, Its Music, and the Pain of Living". In Baumgartner, Michael; Boczkowska, Ewelina (eds.). Music, Authorship, Narration, and Art Cinema in Europe: 1940s to 1980s. Routledge. p. 156. doi:10.4324/9781315298337. ISBN 9781315298337.
  2. ^ Wright, Adrian (2023). Melody in the Dark: British Musical Films, 1946-1972. The Boydell press, Woodbridge. p. 174. ISBN 9781783277490.