Letter from the Artistic & Executive Director
RHYTHMS OF THE TERROIR: music, stories, practices
Given North Fork’s rich maritime and agricultural traditions with its multiple cultures and practices, the Rites of Spring Music Festival is proud to highlight this distinctive terroir through the music and rhythms of this unique community.
In 2025, Rites of Spring Music Festival celebrates its tenth anniversary and pays homage to the North Fork by showcasing its artistic expressions and working practices in its many extraordinary venues.
There are similarities between music practitioners and land and maritime workers.
Body rhythms in these two practices are highly dependent upon the human senses of tasting, smelling, seeing, touching, hearing, talking, and doing. The body is fully involved in sensory practices as well as in effective, aesthetic, cultural and social ways to generate an enterprise.
Practices of the land and maritime workers must synchronize to daily life rhythms of seasonality and climate that cannot be hurried or controlled, as well as the music practitioners need to regulate their body rhythm with the flow of the music making.
The terroir of the North Fork not only describes the geography, soil and climate of this place, but expresses the meaningful cohesion of expressions, stories and practices of this community that is distributed across various practitioners.
In working together, artists and land and maritime workers search for ways to orchestrate their own available resources in a harmonized collective celebration of life on the North Fork.
In this relational sense, the rhythmic patterns that govern ways of working remind us how interdependent, creative, and emergent our actions become when we set the rhythms of the body in space-time to music and the multiple artistic representation.
A NEW SEASON OF LIVE CONCERTS IN UNCONVENTIONAL AND EXTRAORDINARY PLACES. A NORTH FORK BLEND OF MUSIC, NATURE, AND CULTURE.
ENJOY THE MUSIC!
Paolo Bartolani
Paolo Bartolani
pianist, Founder, Artistic & Executive Director
pianist, Founder, Artistic & Executive Director
Paolo Bartolani is a pianist, musicologist and music manager, working in both classical and contemporary music. He graduated in 1989 from the Santa Cecilia Music Conservatory in Rome (Italy). He studied with Eduardo Hubert, and after graduation, with Charles Rosen, György Sándor and Andor Foldes. He also studied French piano repertoire with Germaine Mounier at the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris. In 1994, he received his Master in Musicology of the 20th century degree under the direction of Hugues Dufourt at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in collaboration with IRCAM / Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Paolo performs as a soloist and also as a member of chamber ensembles in Europe and United States. In 2024, Paolo earned an MBA in Arts Innovation from the Global Leaders Institute based in Washington DC, after a year of great achievements and building a global network of professionals in the arts.
He writes articles for the musicology journals Sonus-Materials for Contemporary Music and Music/Reality. In 2006, he created a Master Degree Program in Cultural Enterprise Administration at the University of Perugia, where he also teaches.
At the Venice Biennale, from 2008 to 2012, Paolo was the General Coordinator of ENPARTS - European Network of Performing Arts, which promotes the creation of new works in dance, music and theater by young artists. From 2009 to 2014 he was the Director of the Résonnance Italy, a nonprofit organization based in Switzerland, where he was responsible for its artistic and humanitarian program, "bringing music to places where it is not heard." The members of the organization – singers, instrumentalists, conductors – have performed more than two hundred concerts in hospitals, nursing homes and prisons in order to promote musical sensibilities and share the joy of music.
He has been the General Coordinator of Music Up Close Network at Santa Cecilia National Academy in Rome. The Network includes seven European orchestras who promote new orchestral works and support a new generation of musicians to connect with young audiences.
He founded the Rites of Spring Music Fest in 2016 to promote classical and contemporary music on the North Fork of Long Island, and to combine music, history and the natural environment. The festival currently is a non-profit organization 501c3 and he is the Artistic Director and Responsible for developing the festival’s program.
He writes articles for the musicology journals Sonus-Materials for Contemporary Music and Music/Reality. In 2006, he created a Master Degree Program in Cultural Enterprise Administration at the University of Perugia, where he also teaches.
At the Venice Biennale, from 2008 to 2012, Paolo was the General Coordinator of ENPARTS - European Network of Performing Arts, which promotes the creation of new works in dance, music and theater by young artists. From 2009 to 2014 he was the Director of the Résonnance Italy, a nonprofit organization based in Switzerland, where he was responsible for its artistic and humanitarian program, "bringing music to places where it is not heard." The members of the organization – singers, instrumentalists, conductors – have performed more than two hundred concerts in hospitals, nursing homes and prisons in order to promote musical sensibilities and share the joy of music.
He has been the General Coordinator of Music Up Close Network at Santa Cecilia National Academy in Rome. The Network includes seven European orchestras who promote new orchestral works and support a new generation of musicians to connect with young audiences.
He founded the Rites of Spring Music Fest in 2016 to promote classical and contemporary music on the North Fork of Long Island, and to combine music, history and the natural environment. The festival currently is a non-profit organization 501c3 and he is the Artistic Director and Responsible for developing the festival’s program.
We invite you to join our Circle of Friends by making a fully tax-deductible donation today.
A gift of any amount will allow us to continue adding more performances and venues to our calendar, to branch out into new and adventurous projects, and to provide our audiences access to world class talents at affordable prices. In addition to the opportunity to hear young and talented artists on the rise, RoSMF offers residents, music lovers and visitors a chance to explore every corner of the beautiful North Fork. We hope you’ll join us on this exciting journey!
