I asked Stefano to compose the music for Skin and Grace. I wasn’t just approaching an extraordinary composer, but one of my closest friends from youth. We met at twelve or thirteen, in piano lessons, and shared many of those years when you grow up together. After high school came our first musical experiments with a band: Stefano on piano and keyboards, me singing.
At one point Stefano told us he’d sent Ennio Morricone a cassette with some of his compositions. We friends, a little mischievous, encouraged him, but of course we also teased him about it. Some time later the phone rang. Someone on the other end said he was Ennio Morricone. Stefano, convinced I was pulling a prank on him, said: “Go to hell, Igor.”
But this time we troublemaking friends had nothing to do with it. It really was Maestro Morricone, who, struck by the young musician’s compositions, was inviting him to spend a week at his home in Rome, with his family.
And Stefano went.
May 2026
At first Stefano had agreed to score only the first two minutes of Skin and Grace — the documentary’s introduction. He sent me a first taste, 57 seconds. I listened to it, then listened again, and again.
Those intervals gave me a feeling of anxiety. It wasn’t sad music, but it wasn’t peaceful either: suspended. Full, beautiful sonorities that nonetheless carried unease. I wrote to him, then we spoke on the phone. He simply told me to wait: he’d work it out further along. I confess I worried a little.
June
The rest arrived, completing the first two minutes. And there the music opens up. It seems to touch the skin, the way the dancers do in the images. It dances and breathes. Tears came to my eyes. In the film, two characters open their eyes at the end of a series of movements, and in that same instant the music also shifts key and opens. That initial unease finally finds its space: one moment languid, the next it wraps around you.
He was right. I had to wait.
July
William and I went to Turin for the book’s printing. During those days we had lunch with Stefano and then listened to the music in his studio, through a sound system capable of revealing details mine had never let me hear. It was beautiful to discover, inside that music, sounds and shades that had escaped me until then.
August
Stefano sent me the second movement, the one that accompanies the dancers inside an unused classroom at the Escuela Nacional de Ballet.
It’s intense, rich with suspensions and key changes that seem to ask a question and immediately search for its answer.
We met as boys, in front of a piano. More than forty years have passed, our lives have taken different paths, but some things have never needed explaining.
Today his music enters my images, and inside it there is, inevitably, also something of us: of what we were and what we continue to be to one another.
I can’t wait to share it.
