About the Website

The digital age has brought innumerable advantages. However, many important things are at risk of being lost in the transition - things that make us human and remind us of who we are and where we come from. This risk is as true for Western Classical Music as it is for any other art form. 

The Mind To Music Project grew from the recognition that more and more classical music artists around the world will be working with computers, ultimately transforming hand annotated sheet music into relics of another age. This site seeks to provoke an awareness of and inspiration from such handmade markings ahead of the homogenizing effect digital use will inevitably have.

About the Author

“I am the daughter of violin soloist, the late Iso Briselli, for whom Samuel Barber composed his only violin concerto. Though my father had retired from the concert stage before I was born, he never let a day go by without playing his ‘fiddle,’ and friends, mostly members of the Philadelphia Orchestra, often gathered in our home for chamber music. My first aural memory is of my father practicing Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto and even now, when I hear it, it’s a quick trip back in time.”

After a long and successful career working in fine and commercial art, (www.susannabriselli.com -under construction), Susanna chose to re-direct her energies away from museums and galleries and focus instead on aspects of classical music.  Though not a musician herself, she descends from a family of musicians, providing not only a grounding in and love for the art form but also an understanding of the life professional musicians live.

In 2010, after over 9 years of research, Susanna  and her collaborator, Marc Mostovoy, Founder of The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia (1964), published a scholarly website (www.isobriselli.com) focusing not only on her father’s personal and professional life but, most importantly, the fraught events surrounding the commission and premier of Samuel Barber’s only Violin Concerto, Opus 14. The primary source material they uncovered substantially changed the understanding of the history behind this intensely beautiful work. 

For 2 years working closely with Dr. Barbara Heyman, the acknowledged authority on American composer, Samuel Barber, Susanna applied her expertise in photography to the over 140 historic images and musical examples appearing in Dr. Heyman’s second edition of Barber’s biography (Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music, Oxford University Press, 2019).

The inspiration for her current pursuit began with an article appearing in The New York Times written by Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim entitled, “Classical Musicians Go Digital” (see: “Essays and Articles”).  The writer focused on the increasing use of computers for annotations and performances in the world of classical music.  With her personal knowledge of how the digital tidal wave affected photography, Susanna set out to explore the changes this technology will most certainly bring to the centuries’ old tradition of making musical annotations by hand. From historical examples to the most contemporary, her The Mind To Music Project is both an effort at preservation and an act of appreciation.