Rehearsing Chorale Injured Bird

In these early years his music was involved in the textural music that he heard in Xenakis, Ligeti  Cage  Brown and Nono, composers he heard live in the "Festivals in the Arts Today" held in Buffalo in the sixties.  

Then he  studied at Tanglewood with Bruno Maderna who commissioned him for the B.B.C., and assisted Maderna on the set of the opera Satyricon. In the early seventies Di Pietro carried on a correspondence with Harry Partch and wrote for his instruments which later became Four Ancient American Songs.

He was a regular visitor to Feldman's studio and organized the first recordings of Feldman's piano music with Julius Eastman. Eastman commissioned him and performed Di Pietro's music in New York at the Kitchen and La Mama. Frances Marie Uitti played his cello music in Rome, Naples and Amsterdam. Christiane Edinger played his violin works in New York, Berlin, Madrid and played Aria Grande at the  

Musica Viva in Munich with the Bavarian Radio Orchestra.Yvar Mikhashoff, Jan Williams, Anthony Miranda and the Amherst Saxophone Quartet gave frequent performances in many venues. Lukas Foss conducted his music with the Brooklyn Philharmonic and at the Ojai Festival in California and Russell Link gave many performances of his theatrical and radio works for texts. For years now Di Pietro has worked in prisons as a habilitationist-educator, and has been a regular guest artist at San Quentin prison for California's Arts in Corrections Program. In 1995 his path crossed with Pierre Boulez, the famous composer and conductor.

Recently he has brought to conclusion four years of interviews with Boulez in Chicago. Dialogs with Boulez: Conversations with Rocco Di Pietro, will be published in the summer of 2000 by Scarecrow Press, Lanham Maryland, with a book signing in orchestra hall in Chicago in the fall of 2000. He has recently completed a large theatrical cycle of Prison Dirges, which includes The Normal Exception a quartet with inmate life stories written for the Kronos Quartet. His recent performances include playing accordian in John  Zorn's Cobra, with The Daniel Kelly Ensemble.