Bruno Bettinelli (4 June 1913 – 8 November 2004) was an Italian composer and teacher.
Bruno Bettinelli was born in Milan where he studied at the Conservatorio "G. Verdi" in Milan, under the tutelage of Giulio Cesare Paribeni and Renzo Bossi. He held the title of professor of composition at that same institute and he trained many notable contemporary Italian musicians, including Claudio Abbado, Emiliano Bucci, Elisabetta Brusa, Gilberto Serembe, Danilo Lorenzini, Roberto Cacciapaglia, Bruno Canino, Aldo Ceccato, Riccardo Chailly, Azio Corghi, Armando Gentilucci, Riccardo Muti, Maurizio Pollini, Uto Ughi, Angelo Paccagnini, Bruno Zanolini, Silvia Bianchera, Umberto Benedetti Michelangeli, Francesco Degrada, Massimo Di Gesu, Carlo Alessandro Landini, Massimo Anfossi, Caterina Calderoni, Barbara Rettagliati, Massimo Berzolla and many others. He also taught the Italian singer-songwriter Gianna Nannini.
He received many international awards for composition, including a prize from Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome in the 1940s. He has also worked in musicology and music criticism.
His compositions are currently performed all over the world. Bettinelli's music is published primarily by Ricordi, Suvini Zerboni and Sonzogno.
He was elected Academic of Accademia National di Santa Cecilia (Rome), as well as a member of the Luigi Cherubini National Academy in Florence.
Bruno Bettinelli died in Milan in 2004 at the age of 91.
As a memoriam to Bruno Bettinelli, Milan's Edizioni Musicali European (EME), in collaborations with the magazines "Cartellina" and "Chorus," established a national competition for choral composition in his name.
Bettinelli is an author of symphonic, choral, opera, and chamber music.
His younger works incorporated a contrapuntal neoclassicism, influenced by Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith and Béla Bartók and by the Italian composers Alfredo Casella, Goffredo Petrassi and Gian Francesco Malipiero.
His later music evolved constantly and incorporated new elements: atonality, dodecaphony (which however Bettinelli used in a very personal and never orthodox way) as well as the new instrumental techniques (multiphonic, harmonic, and other similar instrumental effects). His music flows into a free and personal chromatic language, always full of refined timbres and effectively eloquent gestures, endowed with formal structures of remarkable expressive rigour.
His numerous symphonic compositions makes him the most important Italian composers of symphonies in the second half of Twentieth century.
