Chapter 04
Schools, Archives, Violins and New Music Keep the System Open
7 min
The most important sound in a music school may be an imperfect scale through a closed door. It tells you that technique is being built before there is a concert to advertise. San Marino's modern educational infrastructure grew from Cesare Franchini Tassini's decision in 1975 to organize experimental Corsi di Istruzione Musicale with state support. One hundred and forty students enrolled at the start. The number is striking not as a record but as evidence of demand.
The courses gradually gained independence from the Corale San Marino, became an Ente Morale in 1981 and were constituted as the public Istituto Musicale Sammarinese in 1994. Today its work stretches from early-childhood musical exploration through instrumental study, choirs, ensemble courses and advanced academic pathways.
Each stage teaches a different kind of listening. In Musicagiocando, pulse can be learned through movement before notation. A beginner instrumentalist discovers that pitch is physical: a clarinet note depends on breath support and voicing, a violin note on bow speed and contact point. In choir, the student gives up sole control of tempo and tuning. In orchestra, a player must count rests, watch the conductor and adjust attack to people metres away.
The institution's Orchestra Sinfonica makes education public. Students do not learn only to pass examinations; they learn to enter after another section, support a soloist and release together before an audience. White-voice, youth and adult choirs create parallel entry points. This matters in a republic where the absolute population is small: keeping several ages active protects the ensemble ecology from becoming a narrow professional club.
Schools across the castelli widen the first encounter. A child in Acquaviva or Montegiardino does not need to live beside Teatro Titano to sing, move or meet an instrument. Later, travel to an IMS lesson or a Pesaro conservatory becomes part of the geography. The national system and the regional system overlap without becoming identical.
Franchini Tassini composed as well as organized
Institution builders are often remembered through committees while their sound disappears. Franchini Tassini's scores resist that fate. Born in San Marino in 1925, he studied in Pesaro and at Santa Cecilia in Rome with Goffredo Petrassi, taught in Pesaro and Bologna, and directed Bologna's conservatory. His musical language belongs to post-war composition, not nostalgic pageantry.
Astrophonia places string quartet against percussion. The title may suggest cosmic scale, but the interest is tactile: sustained string bands can meet struck attacks; bowed continuity can be interrupted by decay; a compact five-player group can imply distances larger than the room. Concertino per tromba e dieci strumenti gives the trumpet an individual voice inside a precisely coloured small ensemble, far from its ceremonial signal function.
Episodi II for clarinet and harp brings unlike envelopes together. A clarinet can begin a note almost without edge and swell it; a harp note speaks immediately and dies. Composition happens in the gap between those behaviours. Tropus goes further, combining choir, prepared piano and harmonium with magnetic tape. The same figure who strengthened conventional choral education was thinking about altered instruments and fixed electronic sound.
His work on the national anthem also joined scholarship to practice. By orchestrating and reharmonizing Consolo's anthem, he helped performers handle a state symbol as an actual score. The composer, teacher, conductor and organizer were not separate careers. Each gave the others material.
Archives preserve decisions, not just masterpieces
The Biblioteca di Stato and Archivio di Stato hold different evidence. The Fondo Musicale can preserve printed scores, parts and studies that let a work return to performance. The state archive preserves administrative and private records: who was appointed, what was purchased, which calls were written, how an institution described itself.
Walter Ioni's flag-raising and flag-lowering calls survive in an inventory of private materials. A short military call may contain fewer notes than a symphony, but it coordinates a precise action. Preserving it means preserving an operational sound of the republic. Band regulations, concert programmes and marked parts can reveal tempo choices and personnel changes that a polished historical summary leaves out.
Radio and television create another archive. San Marino RTV's concert exchanges, interviews, contest broadcasts and local-artist sessions preserve voices and performance styles, sometimes when no commercial release exists. Radio San Marino has also been a meeting point for artists from the republic and neighboring territory. Broadcast preservation is fragile in a different way from paper: formats, rights and online systems change. A public archive must decide what can remain accessible.
Capicchioni made instruments with public lives
Marino Capicchioni began with wood before he entered the mythology of fine violins. At Santa Mustiola he learned practical craft in his father's cooper's shop. He played guitar and saxophone, so his hands knew instruments from both sides: the player's demand and the maker's material problem. His later work in Rimini brought him into a broader professional market.
A violin maker controls arching, graduation, joints, varnish and setup, but not the entire future sound. A Capicchioni violin under one player's heavy bow may seem dark and resistant; another player can find brilliance with a faster stroke and a different contact point. Strings, bridge, soundpost and room continue the making. That uncertainty is not a defect. It places luthiery in performance history, where player, setup and room keep national tones from becoming fixed museum properties.
Capicchioni instruments reached eminent players, and a 1961 violin is associated with Yehudi Menuhin. San Marino remembers the maker through a square, a monument and concerts at Santa Mustiola. Programmes that place instruments by Marino and Mario Capicchioni in players' hands do something more valuable than display: they let listeners compare projection, response and colour.
One documented international example is Felix Ayo's recording of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons with I Musici, made in Vienna in 1959 on a Marino Capicchioni violin built in 1956. Do not listen for a mystical national timbre. Listen for the chain of decisions: Ayo's bow speed and articulation, the instrument's response, the ensemble's chamber scale and the recorded room. The maker matters because a verifiable instrument entered a consequential performance, not because wood carries a passport.
Messieri and Selva make electronics answer breath
Massimiliano Messieri was born in Bologna and moved to San Marino as a child. He studied composition, cello and electronic music, returned to teach at IMS, and developed MASKFEST as a festival for new music. His relation is one of residence, teaching and institution building; there is no need to invent a different passport.
With saxophonist and IMS teacher Michele Selva, Messieri recorded Noises X and Masken. In Jack in the box, the saxophone's key clicks, bursts and pitched figures encounter live electronics. The electronic layer does not merely add a soft background. It can catch an attack, extend its spectral tail, throw an answer into another register or make one breath seem to occupy several distances.
Listen for causality. When Selva strikes a hard note, does the electronic response feel triggered by it or independent? When a sustained tone changes colour, is the player altering embouchure, is processing shifting the spectrum, or are both happening? The uncertainty is the piece's active space. It requires the audience to hear technology as performance, not as a hidden correction.
MASKFEST places such work beside international composers and performers. Like the Renata Tebaldi competition, it is a hosting and curatorial institution. Unlike a conventional competition, its purpose is experimental encounter: graphic notation, electroacoustic work, unusual instrument combinations and scholarly discussion. San Marino's small size can help here. Performers, teachers and listeners repeatedly meet, and a festival can connect directly to IMS classrooms.
Preservation remains alive only through use
A score behind glass proves survival. A score on a stand tests whether the notation can still organize breath and hands. A violin in a case proves ownership. A violin in concert reveals response. An RTV file on a server proves capture. A rebroadcast lets a new listener compare eras.
San Marino's strongest preservation stories all contain use. Ciavatta's Marini research became performance and recording. Franchini Tassini's courses became IMS. Capicchioni instruments return in named concerts. Messieri joins teaching to a new-music festival. The archive and school are therefore not preliminary chapters before “real music.” They are where a republic with limited numbers keeps repertoire, technique and curiosity from narrowing.
