Gabriele Manca studied piano under Bruno Canino and composition under Giacomo Manzoni at the Conservatory in Milan. He won the prize "Musica nel nostro tempoCasa RICORDI", the prize "Neue Generation in Europa", WDR (Koln), Biennale Musica (Venice), Festival d'Automne (Paris) for the European Year of Music. In 2000 he obtained the Japan Foundation Uchida Fellowship, thanks to which he was able to work on the music for Noh Theatre at the Toho Gakuen University. His music has been played during the most important concert series and festivals of new music. He has held numerous workshops, masterclasses and conferences at the Irino Foundation, the Senzoku University Tokyo, the Toho Gakuen University, the Tokyo College of Music, the University of Melbourne and the Pontificia Universidad Catolica in Santiago, Chile, where from 2006 to 2013 he was visiting professor; since 2015 he has held several masterclasses at the CENART in Mexico City. He teaches composition at the Conservatory in Milan. Il dodicesimo studio was written in memory of Antonio Sardi de Letto, who, in 2008, had recorded the first eleven piano studies on the CD Studi per il XXI secolo ("Studies for the 21st Century"). Senti! Aspetta! Was composed in two stages: the first part was completed, for solo piano, between 2018 and 2019, to which the instrumental 'coda' was added in 2020, a sort of enormous 'reverberation' of what had been heard before. Offese fantastiche is a series of seven very short pieces for solo piano that each explore an elementary musical idea that is presented radically in it's bare nakedness.
