Marco Cappelli was born in Naples in 1965 and, after having been a member of several young bands as an adolescent – spacing from rock to blues and to popular Neapolitan music -  he starts regular academic studies, graduating Cum Laude from the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia of Rome in 1989.

In 1991 he wins a scholarship offered by the Swiss Confederation that allows him to attend, at the prestigious Musik-Akademie in Basel, the guitar class known as Konzert-Klasse taught by Oscar Ghiglia and classes of Chamber Music held by Walter Levine, Hatto Bayerle and Jurg Wittenbach, thus receiving the Konzert-Diplom with the highest grades in 1993.

During his stay in Switzerland, Marco collaborates with various groups including Ensemble S and Ensemble Opera Nova from Zurich, IGNM and Ensemble dell’Elektronisches Studio from Basel, where he embraces such a wide repertory that ranges from the fathers of contemporary music (Schonberg, Boulez, Kurtag, Scelsi and more) to the first absolute executions, under the guidance of directors such as Jurg Wittenbach, Thomas Kessler and Jurg Hennenberger.

Back in Italy Marco’s musical interests broaden, ranging from improvisation in collaboration with Enrico Rava in the Progetto Carmen, with whom he plays in international festivals in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver (Canada), Willisau (Switzerland), and Saalfelden (Austria).

Such variety of musical experiences brings collaborations with several musicians, such as Han Bennink, Anthony Coleman, Michel Godard, Claudio Lugo, Franco Piersanti, Jim Pugliese, Enrico Rava, Marc Ribot, Giovanni Sollima, Giorgio Tedde, Bruno Tommaso&and many more.

The protagonist of an extraordinary artistic path, where he smoothly oscillates from music writing to the most rigorous practice of improvisation, Marco
lets the heterogeneous musical experiences that he is making flow together with his solo activity, proposing programs that build a bridge between traditional contemporary repertoire and the most daring form of experimentation.

Marco Cappelli is regularly invited by concert associations of classic music and by festivals of jazz music and improvised music, and he participates to the first executions by composers such as Junghae Lee, Giorgio Tedde, Claudio Lugo or of EGP (Extreme Guitar Project: 10 new compositions written for him by composers of the Downtown scene of New York City).

Among his many commitments, Marco was invited to play solo at the Asian Composer Festival (Seoul, May 2002), to the writing for electric guitar in the opera Ellis Island by Giovanni Sollima (Teatro Massimo di Palermo, October 2002), to the first performance of Tammurriata per chitarra e orchestra by Giorgio Tedde, on commission of the Ente Lirico di Cagliari (Cagliari, February 2003) which was repeated in South Korea with the Madri Chamber Orchestra (Seoul, May 2003) and finally to the first execution of EGP on account of  the Associazione Alessandro Scarlatti (Naples, November, 2003) and of the Issue Project Room (New York, January, 2004).

As the guitarist of the Ensemble Dissonanzen he is the charter member of Dissonanzen, an association that for years has been in charge of the promotion and diffusion of contemporary music in Naples and of the production of artistic projects that the Ensemble exports to the international concert circuit.

Amidst the projects of which he is co-leader the most relevant are A Bao a Qu ( with Marco Sannini and Francesco D’Errico), Dedalo Guitar Project (with Domenico Caliri), Syntax Error (with Roberto Pellegrini and Daniele Ledda) and IDR-Italian Doc Remix (with Jim Pugliese).

Chair of Guitar Studies at the Conservatorio Vincenzo Bellini of Palermo, he has then, in 2004, been appointed “Guest Professor” at New York University and at the Juliard School of Music.

With his students of the Ensemble at the Conservatorio Vincenzo Bellini in Palermo, he has recorded a CD for the label Teatro del Sole, of music composed by Leo Brouwer distributed by the trade magazine Guitart.

For the same label he has recorded YUN MU, a CD dedicated to all contemporary guitar music, that has obtained great success with the national and international trade press and the estimation of composers such as John Zorn and Steve Reich.