Italian composer and theorist Francesco Balilla Pratella grew up listening to Romagnese folk tunes, and he spent his latter years collecting and cataloging them (and also tunes from elsewhere around Italy). This musicological work should rightly be considered Pratella's best and most important legacy, but a brief stint with the Italian Futurist movement around the time of World War I tends to dominate biographical accounts. Pratella was born in Lugo di Romagna on the first day of February in 1880; he studied music at the Liceo Rossini in Pesaro, and then, after teaching for two years (1908 -- 1909) in the city of Cesana, took up the directorship of the Istituto Musicale of Lugo. Coincident with his appointment at the Istituto was a new interest in the then-blossoming Futurist movement, as represented by the music of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti; between 1910 and 1912 Pratella wrote three radical manifestos -- pushing for atonality and for the acceptance of new systems of tuning and rhythm, all of which were tame compared to some of the demands made by others in the Futurist movement. Pratella's first Futurist creation was the orchestral work Musica futurista, Op. 30 (1912; also known as Inna alla vita), which created quite a stir at its Rome premiere. One opera was composed during Pratella's Futurist days (he wrote a half-dozen operas altogether), the three-act L'aviatore Dro, composed 1911 to 1914 and premiered in Lugo in 1920. Futurism as a whole didn't last much past World War I, and Pratella himself seems to have lost interest in it altogether. He continued to compose, however, and during the 1920s and '30s produced a handful of chamber pieces and four further theater works. His final extant original composition is the incidental music Nostra medar Rumagna (1954). Pratella was not really a radical by nature; he seems rather to have been drawn into an exciting new movement that held great promise in a time of musical uncertainty. His own music, Futurist years aside, delves deeply into the folk tradition that he spent so much time researching -- melody and gesture are distinctly un-Classical in that regard, but frequently well-balanced nonetheless. Not surprisingly (given his interest in folk song), Pratella composed many songs. But, although they are almost never heard today, the chamber pieces, including the Sonata seconda for violin and piano (1920) and the Sonata terza for piano quintet (1937), probably offer his best music. From 1927 until the end of World War II, Pratella served as the head of the Liceo Musicale Giuseppe Verdi in Ravenna, and in this capacity he authored several theoretical treatises.