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01/05/2016 11:00 AM

Clinton Native Wins Global Music Award


Clinton native Susan DiBona and Salvatore Sangiovanni recently won the Global Music Awards Silver Medal for the musical score of "The Transparent Woman".

Film composer team Susan DiBona, a native of Clinton, and Italian-born Salvatore Sangiovanni have been awarded the Global Music Awards (USA) Silver Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the categories of Composition/Composer and Soundtrack Film & Television for the original score of the foreign film The Transparent Woman.

Global Music Awards is a showcase for original new music, unique voices, and emerging artists.

“We’re happy that years of preparation, hard work, and sacrifice are finally coming to fruition,” DiBona said. “It’s a wonderful thing that our very first collaboration as a composer team has won an international award, and it shows that involving top talent in our productions—artists we personally believe in, regardless of whether or not they’re big names—is the right way to go.

“We have a strong international team. Our copyist and orchestrator lives in San Francisco. We work with experienced Italian opera singers and violinists; our head sound engineer is from Germany; and our creative and production consultant, who helps us organize our projects between Berlin, Italy, and the U.S., is fluent in three languages.”

The Transparent Woman is a 2015 horror film about a couple forced by financial troubles to sell their apartment and move into an old house in a remote location. Anna, the wife—who is blind—is unhappy in their new home and begins to experience unexplained events and strange noises. The film, whose lead is played by an Italian adult film star, is described as having a “cult classic” feel.

“We discussed a general style and mood with the director, then we composed the orchestral pieces with pencil and paper,” said DiBona.

Their production specialists created “a real vintage feel to the sound,” she said, “an homage to the great Italian scores of the ’60s and ’70s, with a modern twist. It goes from soft easy-listening vocalizations to discordant Bernard Hermannesque strings to strange Morricone-type clavichord vintage sounds. We contrasted sickly sweetness and horror; it’s pretty effective. No one writes that kind of score anymore, so we’re proud of it. We worked on instinct—observing the pacing of the editing, the colors, the actors’ expressions—and pretty much the first versions are the ones you hear on the soundtrack.”

DiBona and Sangiovanni performed at a charity piano concert in September 2015 at The Morgan School to raise money for the Bob DiBona Scholarship Fund. They own Villa Studios, a film music production company based in Praia a Mare, Italy, which collaborates with a network of studio musicians, technicians, and creatives throughout Europe and the United States.

Projects in the works for the two include two feature-length films with an American director based in London, three independent shorts, a German film, and an American-style musical.