The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2021 Fall Music Grant to Ludovica Burtone to help complete her album, Migration Tales. This project is centered around stories of migration and it intends to raise awareness of the struggles and resilience that immigrant women face, with the direct aim to create empathy and be an inspiration for all. Migration can have very different connotations, there is the migrant who assimilates and achieves the so-called dream, the migrant who goes and comes back to their home country, the migrant that is escaping, the one that cannot go back, the one that was forced to migrate. 

Starting from her personal experience as an immigrant on a visa and the implication of it during the Covid pandemic, Ludovica would like to amplify the voices of different women immigrants, after conducting some interviews in NYC. It will be a storytelling journey in music where each tune will be introduced or accompanied by a short story, poetry, words taken from the interviews. The original music composed by Ludovica Burtone will be infused with improvisations and influences of jazz, world, and classical music, played and recorded by an ensemble of mostly women immigrants themselves. The final product will consist in an album that will be released in spring 2023. 

Italian violinist, improviser, composer, and educator Ludovica Burtone has performed worldwide as both a soloist and chamber musician. Based in New York City, she finds herself in a multitude of musical settings. From premiering new works for chamber ensembles to collaborating with theaters, to performing her own composition, playing in a jazz quartet or big band, Ludovica’s ability to adapt to various creative musical scenery has led her to an eclectic and successful career. 

Classically trained with a master of arts in violin performance from “Conservatorio Tomadini” in Italy, and a postgrad from Barcelona’s “Liceu”, Ludovica has worked with several European orchestras for over 9 years, including the Orchestra Mitteleuropa and the Orchestra Teatro Lirico di Trieste, before moving to the United States. In addition to her classical training, Ludovica grew up playing and improvising in different musical contexts and has immersed herself in all aspects of jazz studies completing a diploma in jazz composition at Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA. Since then, she had the opportunity to perform and work with musicians like Dave Douglas, Kneebody, Susana Baca, Jon Batiste, Camila Meza, A. R. Rahman, Arijit Singh, Dream Theater, and Alejandro Sanz. She has performed at Carnegie Hall, Boston Symphony Hall, Boston Opera House, The Jazz Standard, Mezzrow Jazz Club, Café Carlyle, and National Sawdust, to mention a few. 

Ludovica has extensive experience in teaching and studio recording in orchestral, chamber music, improvisational, television and film scoring sessions, doubling also on viola. She regularly performs with her ensembles “Ludovica Burtone Sparks”, which consists in a string quartet and rhythm section with piano, for which she writes original music; and her string quartet O Kwarteto, of which she is a founding member and arranger, an ensemble devoted to the performance of Brazilian music not originally written for the instrumentation. As a collaborator, she is a member of the Michael Leonhart Jazz Orchestra, performing every month at the Jazz Standard; she is a member of the spaghetti western band Tredici Bacci; she performs with Vanisha Gould and the Storyteller; she collaborated with Camila Meza and the Nectar Orchestra for the recording of NPR: Jazz Night in America, and more recently she has been working with Oscar and Grammy winner Jon Batiste in his string quartet, from live performances to recordings. 

Ludovica recorded her first album consisting of five original compositions and one arrangement for her string quartet and rhythm section ensemble "Sparks", and she is now working on releasing it in spring 2022. "Sparks" is the translation of "falisčhe" from the friulano language of the northeast of Italy, and it's the nickname given to her family in the village where her mother grew up. Ludovica's music is the encounter between her past experiences as a classical musician and her most recent ones in jazz, Brazilian, and improvisational music. 

Please visit Ludovica’s Instagram, Facebook and her website for more information.