About us

ITER Research Ensemble is a vocal and research group founded in September 2022 within the NPO “Coro Facoltà di Musicologia,” on the initiative of advanced students and alumni of the Department of Musicology and Cultural Heritage at the University of Pavia in Cremona (Italy). It is formed by young musicologists united by a clear goal: to do research on the music they sing, and to sing the music they do research on.

Through various projects conceived and led by its members, ITER Research Ensemble has collaborated with institutions in Italy and abroad, including the Enzo Hruby Foundation, the Confucius Institute of the University of Milan, San Carlo Cremona, Ekomuzej–Ecomuseo Batana, and the Centro Studi Luciano Berio. With the latter, ITER organized in the centenary of the composer’s birth the choral conducting and research workshop “Berio 2025.”

The ensemble has performed alongside various artists and groups, including Andrea Lucchesini, Fabio Cherstich, the vocal quartet Nuove Quattro Colonne, the SAC-KUD “Marco Garbin” Choir, and Ensemble Dong Xun 东巡 / Journey to the East. Its collaboration with guitarist Nicolò Spera resulted in the group’s recording debut (Dynamic, 2024), dedicated to works by Margutti and Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and awarded the Chitarra d’Oro at the 30th International Classical Guitar Conference.

Balancing performance and scholarship, ITER members have participated in several national and international conferences, including the 7th Symposium of the ICTMD Study Group on Multipart Music (Cremona, Italy) and the 2025 PARL Next Generation Symposium “Overcoming Boundaries: A Dialogue Between Artistic and Scholarly Research” (Linz, Austria). In autumn 2024 the ensemble was hosted by the College of Music at the University of Colorado Boulder, where it held concerts, workshops, and colloquia.

Manifesto

1. We cultivate music-making and musicological research as praxis — that is, as activities that bring theory and practice together. Though distinguishable by their methods and outcomes, our aim is to have them coexist within us, as subjects who both practise and/or observe them from the inside.

2. We explore every possible relationship between music-making and research-making, whether as mutually informing methods of inquiry or as experiences within an artistic-intellectual continuum. In particular, we advance the idea that the praxis of research can and should yield an emotional dimension — an emotion of the intellect — to be communicated as part of the musical experience.

3. While acknowledging that music-making can be a form of research, and, conversely, that conducting research can (already) be a way of making music, we do not conform our activities and outputs to pre-established labels such as artistic research, practice [-led, -based, as], or recherche-création.

4. In our performance and research choices, we combine engagement with art music with an interest in peripheral or community-specific repertoires, in functional music, and in (micro)historical phenomena of musical reception.

5. We are attentive to new forms of research dissemination, music outreach, and artistic production — with particular attention to those that move beyond conventional academic outputs or traditional modes of audience engagement.

6. We believe in the importance of nurturing, whether in education, professional life, or amateur practice, a twofold and continuous growth — musical as much as musicological — convinced of the public and ethical value of this endeavour.