Giuseppe Chiari was born in Florence in 1926. He studied engineering and mathematics at the University of Florence, in parallel with music and composition. In 1947, he established the first Jazz Club organizing jam sessions inside the University.
Attracted by John Cage’s experiments in avant-garde music, in 1961, he founded the Vita Musicale Contemporanea an association for musical research, alongside Pietro Grossi. Strongly influential for the development of his inquiry was Silvano Busotti and the fruitful contacts with Gruppo 70 movement, and the strong relationships built with the Fluxus movement based in New York. In 1962, the latter invited him to participate in the Fluxus Internationale Festspiele in Wiesbaden, where Frederic Rzewski executed publicly his ‘Gestures on the piano’ performance.
He was also invited to Documenta V, Kassel (1972), and to Venice Biennale (1972, 1976, 1978), and Sidney Biennale (1990) He composed “action music” based on the mixture of traditional music components with casual and indeterminate elements such as water, leaves, and stones, that become founding elements of actions based on improvisation and casual encounters, enhancing the power of freedom and indetermination within the artistic practice (Gesti sul piano, 1962; La Strada, 1965; Suonare la Città, 1965).
