Organisers:
Università di Firenze, Dipartimento SAGAS
Tempo Reale – Centro di ricerca, produzio... more Organisers:
Università di Firenze, Dipartimento SAGAS
Tempo Reale – Centro di ricerca, produzione e didattica musicale
Programme Committe:
Maurizio Agamennone | Antonella Dicuonzo | Francesco Giomi | Daniele Palma | Ludovico Peroni | Giulia Sarno
The conference is part of Come suona la Toscana, a project by Università di Firenze in the framework of the PRIN 2017 initiative “Heritage, Festivals, Archives. Music and performing practices of oral tradition in the XXI Century”.
«Mimesis Journal. Scritture della Performance», vol. X, n. 2, 2021
The current Italian landscape of performing arts shows the almost complete absence of a programma... more The current Italian landscape of performing arts shows the almost complete absence of a programmatically queer music theatre. Nevertheless, within this frame some recent experiences have been thematising LGBTQ+ ideas, characters and figures. In particular, in the present article I investigate La Traviata Norma (Conservatorio di Como, 2018, and Milano, Teatro Elfo Puccini, 2019) and Tredici Secondi, o Un bipede implume ma con unghie piatte (Venezia, Biennale College Musica, 2019). Direct voice is given to the composer Marco Benetti, the librettist Fabrizio Funari, and the transgender baritone Emily De Salve, who contributed to the creation of these two works. As a result, multiple perspectives emerge on how a queer gaze could be articulated in today’s music theater , also in light of the shared issue of constructing one’s own artistic persona within the cultural constraints of the operatic production system.
Maria Borghesi, Daniele Palma, "Un paese di dilettanti? Tracce e pratiche della musica «fai da te... more Maria Borghesi, Daniele Palma, "Un paese di dilettanti? Tracce e pratiche della musica «fai da te»", in "La cultura musicale degli italiani", a cura di Andrea Estero, Guerini e Associati, Milano, 2021, pp. 133-157
Soon after the appointment of Benito Mussolini as Italian prime minister in 1922, the indoctrinat... more Soon after the appointment of Benito Mussolini as Italian prime minister in 1922, the indoctrination of young people became one of the primary business of the fascist agenda. Although several studies have shown how literature, comics, and radio broadcastings broadly contributed to these processes of consensus building, the world of recordings for children has received scant attention, except for works concerning educational activities in connection with the music appreciation movement. This article attempts at casting light on this little-known sector of Italian cultural industry, starting from a general survey of recordings for children in the international market – a context to which Italian experiences must necessarily be referred. Then, products published in the 1920s and 1930s by La Voce del Padrone and Columbia are analysed, focusing in particular on two preeminent releases by the latter: a “speaking book” which narrates the rise of Fascism through texts, paintings, and recordings; and a “sound story” of Micky Mouse as a soldier in the Italo-Ethiopian War (1935-1936). The aim is to contextualise these recordings in the processes of industrialisation of the Italian cultural market, showing their contribution to the militarization of juvenile imaginaries of war.
Rivista Italiana di Musicologia, n. 54, pp. 59-90, 2019
Lotte Lehmann (1888-1976) was one of the most distinguished singers of her generation, specializi... more Lotte Lehmann (1888-1976) was one of the most distinguished singers of her generation, specializing in particular in the Wagnerian and Straussian operatic repertoire. Together with Maria Jeritza, she was an acclaimed prima donna at Wiener Hofoper under the superintendences of Franz Schalk, Richard Strauss and Clemens Krauss, until the Nazi Anschluss of 1938 led her leave for the USA. She established in California, continuing her operatic career until 1946 and co-founding the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, where she taught Vocal Interpretation. Lehmann’s 1924 first appearance as the Marschallin under Bruno Walter at Covent Garden can be considered as a breaking point in her artistic life. This event marked the starting point of an international career throughout which Lehmann never ceased to sing the Straussian role. As a result, a complex relationship was engendered, linking the singer to that role and vice versa. This article aims to reconstruct the main characteristics of Lehmann’s interpretative model for the Marschallin through the analysis of the singer’s writings and of the audio-visual materials related to her performances of the role. Moreover, a comparison between Lehmann’s model and the cultural ‘traditions’ embodied by the character of Marie Thérèse according to von Hofmannsthal and Strauss’s conception will highlight some phenomena related to the US reception of both the singer and the composer. ------------------------------------------- The complete article can be read on: https://www.sidm.it/ojs/index.php/ridm/issue/view/117
Post-ip: Revista do Fórum Internacional de Estudos em Música e Dança, Vol. IV, 2017
The article focuses on the soprano Lotte Lehmann's specific contribution to the performance pract... more The article focuses on the soprano Lotte Lehmann's specific contribution to the performance practice of Lieder repertoire. Lehmann's recordings of and discourses around Schumann's cycle Dichterliebe are analyzed by comparing documentary information with musical data obtained through the software SonicVisualiser. Finally, the article discusses Lehmann's legacy to the US Second PostWar context and young musicians.
The outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic has had a strong impact on the sound of the places we li... more The outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic has had a strong impact on the sound of the places we live in, particularly as a consequence of the measures taken to stem the contagion. First of all, the lockdown and the suspension of most activities marking our everyday lives have produced a crucial drop in noise pollution, due to an almost total reduction of traffic: this has caused silence to emerge powerfully in the aural conscience of individuals. In the meanwhile, the lockdown has produced new sonic environments, putting in the foreground new aural experiences and acoustic elements that are usually covered by “noise”: on one hand, these include the case of musical flash mobs taking off in many countries (especially in Italy), and on the other the emergence of animal sounds in urban settings.
At the same time, many activities being transferred online has significantly changed our lifestyle, giving greater relevance to the Internet as the primary environment for music production and consumption, and more broadly as a receptacle and vector of sonic accounts of the lockdown experience: from live streaming “homemade” concerts, to field recordings collected in a variety of online projects and sound maps.
The conference aims to be a forum for sharing perspectives about sound in the time of pandemic, the modifications of sonic environments and the transformations in sound production/listening behaviors, not only in the musical field, but generally speaking in all human practices which are strongly characterized by sound.
The conference is part of Come suona la Toscana, a project by Università di Firenze in the framework of the PRIN 2017 initiative “Heritage, Festivals, Archives. Music and performing practices of oral tradition in the XXI Century”.
Organisers:
Università di Firenze, Dipartimento SAGAS Tempo Reale – Centro di ricerca, produzione e didattica musicale
Programme Committe:
Maurizio Agamennone | Antonella Dicuonzo | Francesco Giomi | Daniele Palma | Ludovico Peroni | Giulia Sarno
Programme of the international conference Bach e l'Italia, held digitally from 22 to 28 November ... more Programme of the international conference Bach e l'Italia, held digitally from 22 to 28 November 2020. Chair: Chiara Bertoglio and Maria Borghesi Organisers: JSBach.it ; Conservatorio di Musica "G. Verdi" di Torino ; Istituto per i Beni Musicali in Piemonte
This presentation concerns the musical practices in the Provincial Psychiatric Hospital (OPP) of ... more This presentation concerns the musical practices in the Provincial Psychiatric Hospital (OPP) of Maggiano, in Lucca, and their outcome in a very popular "Festival della Canzone" organized annually by patients, socio-therapists, nurses, and doctors between 1964 and 1969. These experiences preceded and prepared the “revolution” by Franco Basaglia, the introduction of the idea of "democratic psychiatry" and the (slow) process of dismantling the Giolitti Law n. 36 of 1904. The historical reconstruction is based on articles from "La Pantera" – a periodical edited and printed by OPP patients starting from 1963 – and published or unpublished scholarly contributions or congressional communications by doctors and nurses. By adopting the theoretical frame of community music studies, I aim at narrating little known events, especially in the field of musicology, and at identifying some general trends, which concern the role played by making music in the relationship between “inside” and “outside.” In this, I believe, the Festival della Canzone of Maggiano dialogues with our current, pandemic condition. In addition, it permits to reflect on musical performativity as a means for the (re)construction of the self, in line with the Goffmanian tradition and its applications in the fields of performance studies and sociology of music.
The talk was given at 'Early Recordings: Diversity in Practice' (May 5th, 2021), online internati... more The talk was given at 'Early Recordings: Diversity in Practice' (May 5th, 2021), online international conference organised by Eva Moreda Rodríguez and Inja Stanović in the frame of "Rethinking Early Recordings".
In the final chapter of her PhD dissertation, Rebecca Plack (2008) analyses several recordings of... more In the final chapter of her PhD dissertation, Rebecca Plack (2008) analyses several recordings of Schubert's song Die Forelle made both by male and female singers. In the frame of an “emic” perspective for which style is seen as the result of technical habits developed by singers in their everyday practice, the individuation of gender-related expressive gestures leads Plack to hypothesise an impact of gender on style. In this paper, I seek to explore the potential of inverting Plack's terms, investigating how stylistic choices impacted the representation(s) of the male in tenors' early recordings. Though maintaining the same perspective on vocal style, which has been further deepened in works by Sarah Potter (2014) and Barbara Gentili (2018), my specific focus is on timbre. Indeed, in the age of mediatised performance, timbre has been increasingly seen by singers as a value “per se” and, consequently, as the goal of their technical strategies. In this light, I analyse some exemplary recordings of Verdi's Otello (from Francesco Tamagno to Mario Del Monaco), trying to give glimpses of a process of “darkening” that transformed the tenor voice during the early 20th century. Then, I show how timbre evolutions could be tied to broader cultural phenomena regarding both phonographic consciousness and imaginaries of the male performer. Finally, I briefly discuss the topic of recovering past vocal practices from early recordings, highlighting both limits and possibilities of embodied based approaches.
Locatio: "Early Recordings: Past Performing Practices in Contemporary Research" (London: Pushkin House, June 21-22 2019)
Soon after the appointment of Benito Mussolini as Italian prime minister in 1922, the indoctrinat... more Soon after the appointment of Benito Mussolini as Italian prime minister in 1922, the indoctrination of young people became one of the primary business of the fascist agenda. The government undertook a substantial reformation of the Italian school (“Riforma Gentile”, 1923) and founded an organization named Opera Nazionale Balilla in 1926, aiming to transmit fascist ideals of moral and physical rebirth to new generations. Although several studies have shown how media broadly contributed to the processes of consensus building (Monticone 1978; Isola 1990, 1998; Lussana 2019), mediatized propaganda for children remains mostly unexplored. Few scholars have dealt with radio broadcasting for youths (Mencarelli 1993; Zambotti 2007; Ghizzoni 2018), while the context of phonography has received scant attention, except for work by Benedetta Zucconi (2018) on Gavino Gabriel's pedagogical program. In this paper, I deal with fascist propaganda for children in the Italian discographic market. Firstly, I give a brief overview of products commercialized from the 1920s. Then, I focus on two preeminent releases by Columbia label: a “speaking book” composed by texts, paintings, and recordings, narrating the rise of Fascism; and a “sound story” of Micky Mouse as a soldier in the Italo-Ethiopian War (1935-1936). The analysis concentrates on the interaction between music and written/visual components, and on possible contexts of production and fruition. I aim to show how these recordings mirrored Giuseppe Lombardo Radice’s coeval reflections on the importance of children's imagination in pedagogical strategies, functionalizing them to the purposes of propaganda.
Location: "Sounds of Mass Media: Music in Journalism and Propaganda" - 11th Meeting of the IMS Study Group Music and Media (Växjö, Sweden, June 7-9 2019)
The role of Pollione in Bellini's Norma was created in 1831 by Domenico Donzelli, who occupied an... more The role of Pollione in Bellini's Norma was created in 1831 by Domenico Donzelli, who occupied an intermediate position between the last generation of opera seria tenors such as Andrea Nozzari and “romantic” singers like Giovan Battisa Rubini and Napoleone Moriani. In particular, following Alberto Mazzucato's report on the «Gazzetta Musicale di Milano» in 1842, Donzelli adopted a series of technical features later to be called voix sombrée by Manuel Garcia II. Pollione, then, stand in the path between the first experiments of vowel darkening and larynx lowering by Italian tenors and the renown Parisian eclat of Gilbert Duprez. This path represented a first step in the birth of the “modern” tenor, which has involved time by time questions of vocal registration and the way to solve the passaggio to the high part of tessitura (CELLETTI 1989, POTTER 2009). This paper will consider recordings of Pollione's I Act aria «Meco all'altar di Venere» in a span of time which goes from the 1902 Italian HMV edition by Carlo Caffetto to Norma 1955 integral recording with Mario del Monaco. Firstly, information about the most significant singers' careers, repertoire choices and reception by critics will allow to understand their relationship with Pollione. Secondly, the analysis of recordings through SonicVisualiser will give datas on their interpretations, considering both general parameters individuated by Philip and Cook (tempo, dynamics and phrase arching, portamenti) and specific ones (quality of legato, vocal colour and technique, text declamation). The aim is to individuate constants and variations in Pollione's performance history during the first half of the 20th century, by highlighting how the interrelation between different techniques spread from Verismo era to post-World War II (like Arturo Melocchi's affondo) and discourses on how to sing the Bellinian role contributed to the evolution of its interpretative models.
Location: Perspectives on Historically Informed Practices in Music, Faculty of Music, University of Oxford , Oxford, UK (10-12 September 2018)
Bruno Walter (1876-1962) has been one of the leading conductors of the first half of the 20th cen... more Bruno Walter (1876-1962) has been one of the leading conductors of the first half of the 20th century. He co-founded the Salzburg Festival and contributed to cultural discourses on music with a series of publications culminating in the book Von der Musik und vom Musizieren (1957). Here Walter discusses the conductor's role in the construction of the musical performance, building a theory of interpretation which has not received a complete musicological consideration yet. In this paper I aim at reconstructing the fundamentals of Walter's theory, highlighting their proximity to ideas elaborated by Rudolf Kolisch and René Leibowitz, both representatives of that New Music which the conductor deprecated as non-ethical. Moreover, the specific aspect of tempo will be discussed as mirroring the antithetical exegeses elicited by Wagner's polysemous concept of melos, drawing examples from Walter's recordings of Schumann's Frauenliebe und -leben with Lotte Lehmann (1941) and Kathleen Ferrier (1949).
Location: 1st International Conference on Music, Communication, and Performance (Montecassiano, 23-24 June 2018)
Lotte Lehmann (1888-1976) fu tra le maggiori interpreti wagneriane e straussiane del primo '900, ... more Lotte Lehmann (1888-1976) fu tra le maggiori interpreti wagneriane e straussiane del primo '900, imponendosi dapprima sulla scena viennese durante le sovrintendenze di Franz Schalk e dello stesso Strauss, quindi, dopo l'Anschluss, terminando la sua carriera oltre oceano e partecipando alla fondazione della Music Academy of the West di Santa Barbara, dove operò come docente di “interpretazione vocale”. Nella vita artistica della Lehmann si può individuare uno snodo fondamentale: l'interpretazione della Marschallin nel Rosenkavalier al Covent Garden, nel 1924, sotto la direzione di Bruno Walter. L'occasione diede effettivo inizio alla carriera internazionale della cantante e portò a battesimo un ruolo che ella avrebbe successivamente ripreso in oltre 150 recite attestate, divenendo, negli anni di Santa Barbara, uno dei canali preferenziali tramite cui la Lehmann trasmise alle nuove generazioni un'idea di teatro e di far musica precedente alle trasformazioni in atto nel periodo tra le due guerre, e ormai per lo più acquisite alla fine degli anni '50. Tra la Lehmann e la Marschallin si stabilì dunque un rapporto che operava in due direzioni differenti e contemporanee, legando tanto la cantante al ruolo quanto il ruolo alla sua interprete.
Se i lavori sulla Lehmann si sono concentrati per lo più sugli aspetti biografici (Jefferson 1988; Glass 1988; Kater 2008; Brown 2012), poco spazio è stato dedicato ad uno studio sistematico delle sue qualità vocali, musicali e attoriali. Esse sono l'obiettivo di questo intervento: attraverso l'analisi del monologo “Da geht er hin” nelle registrazioni del 1933 (Wiener Staatsoper, Robert Heger) e del 1938 e 1939 (Met, Artur Bodanzky), oltre che di un video del 1961 in cui la cantante “dimostra” come il monologo vada recitato, si può ricostruire quali furono le caratteristiche di una Principessa di Werdemberg che fece la storia del personaggio – o, perlomeno, una sua parte imprescindibile. Di converso, il confronto tra i valori e le “tradizioni” culturali inglobati da von Hofmannsthal-Strauss in Marie Théreèse e il modello stabilito dalla Lehmann aiutano a far luce sulla fortuna e sulla recezione della cantante sulle scene europee e statunitensi.
Organisers:
Università di Firenze, Dipartimento SAGAS
Tempo Reale – Centro di ricerca, produzio... more Organisers:
Università di Firenze, Dipartimento SAGAS
Tempo Reale – Centro di ricerca, produzione e didattica musicale
Programme Committe:
Maurizio Agamennone | Antonella Dicuonzo | Francesco Giomi | Daniele Palma | Ludovico Peroni | Giulia Sarno
The conference is part of Come suona la Toscana, a project by Università di Firenze in the framework of the PRIN 2017 initiative “Heritage, Festivals, Archives. Music and performing practices of oral tradition in the XXI Century”.
«Mimesis Journal. Scritture della Performance», vol. X, n. 2, 2021
The current Italian landscape of performing arts shows the almost complete absence of a programma... more The current Italian landscape of performing arts shows the almost complete absence of a programmatically queer music theatre. Nevertheless, within this frame some recent experiences have been thematising LGBTQ+ ideas, characters and figures. In particular, in the present article I investigate La Traviata Norma (Conservatorio di Como, 2018, and Milano, Teatro Elfo Puccini, 2019) and Tredici Secondi, o Un bipede implume ma con unghie piatte (Venezia, Biennale College Musica, 2019). Direct voice is given to the composer Marco Benetti, the librettist Fabrizio Funari, and the transgender baritone Emily De Salve, who contributed to the creation of these two works. As a result, multiple perspectives emerge on how a queer gaze could be articulated in today’s music theater , also in light of the shared issue of constructing one’s own artistic persona within the cultural constraints of the operatic production system.
Maria Borghesi, Daniele Palma, "Un paese di dilettanti? Tracce e pratiche della musica «fai da te... more Maria Borghesi, Daniele Palma, "Un paese di dilettanti? Tracce e pratiche della musica «fai da te»", in "La cultura musicale degli italiani", a cura di Andrea Estero, Guerini e Associati, Milano, 2021, pp. 133-157
Soon after the appointment of Benito Mussolini as Italian prime minister in 1922, the indoctrinat... more Soon after the appointment of Benito Mussolini as Italian prime minister in 1922, the indoctrination of young people became one of the primary business of the fascist agenda. Although several studies have shown how literature, comics, and radio broadcastings broadly contributed to these processes of consensus building, the world of recordings for children has received scant attention, except for works concerning educational activities in connection with the music appreciation movement. This article attempts at casting light on this little-known sector of Italian cultural industry, starting from a general survey of recordings for children in the international market – a context to which Italian experiences must necessarily be referred. Then, products published in the 1920s and 1930s by La Voce del Padrone and Columbia are analysed, focusing in particular on two preeminent releases by the latter: a “speaking book” which narrates the rise of Fascism through texts, paintings, and recordings; and a “sound story” of Micky Mouse as a soldier in the Italo-Ethiopian War (1935-1936). The aim is to contextualise these recordings in the processes of industrialisation of the Italian cultural market, showing their contribution to the militarization of juvenile imaginaries of war.
Rivista Italiana di Musicologia, n. 54, pp. 59-90, 2019
Lotte Lehmann (1888-1976) was one of the most distinguished singers of her generation, specializi... more Lotte Lehmann (1888-1976) was one of the most distinguished singers of her generation, specializing in particular in the Wagnerian and Straussian operatic repertoire. Together with Maria Jeritza, she was an acclaimed prima donna at Wiener Hofoper under the superintendences of Franz Schalk, Richard Strauss and Clemens Krauss, until the Nazi Anschluss of 1938 led her leave for the USA. She established in California, continuing her operatic career until 1946 and co-founding the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, where she taught Vocal Interpretation. Lehmann’s 1924 first appearance as the Marschallin under Bruno Walter at Covent Garden can be considered as a breaking point in her artistic life. This event marked the starting point of an international career throughout which Lehmann never ceased to sing the Straussian role. As a result, a complex relationship was engendered, linking the singer to that role and vice versa. This article aims to reconstruct the main characteristics of Lehmann’s interpretative model for the Marschallin through the analysis of the singer’s writings and of the audio-visual materials related to her performances of the role. Moreover, a comparison between Lehmann’s model and the cultural ‘traditions’ embodied by the character of Marie Thérèse according to von Hofmannsthal and Strauss’s conception will highlight some phenomena related to the US reception of both the singer and the composer. ------------------------------------------- The complete article can be read on: https://www.sidm.it/ojs/index.php/ridm/issue/view/117
Post-ip: Revista do Fórum Internacional de Estudos em Música e Dança, Vol. IV, 2017
The article focuses on the soprano Lotte Lehmann's specific contribution to the performance pract... more The article focuses on the soprano Lotte Lehmann's specific contribution to the performance practice of Lieder repertoire. Lehmann's recordings of and discourses around Schumann's cycle Dichterliebe are analyzed by comparing documentary information with musical data obtained through the software SonicVisualiser. Finally, the article discusses Lehmann's legacy to the US Second PostWar context and young musicians.
The outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic has had a strong impact on the sound of the places we li... more The outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic has had a strong impact on the sound of the places we live in, particularly as a consequence of the measures taken to stem the contagion. First of all, the lockdown and the suspension of most activities marking our everyday lives have produced a crucial drop in noise pollution, due to an almost total reduction of traffic: this has caused silence to emerge powerfully in the aural conscience of individuals. In the meanwhile, the lockdown has produced new sonic environments, putting in the foreground new aural experiences and acoustic elements that are usually covered by “noise”: on one hand, these include the case of musical flash mobs taking off in many countries (especially in Italy), and on the other the emergence of animal sounds in urban settings.
At the same time, many activities being transferred online has significantly changed our lifestyle, giving greater relevance to the Internet as the primary environment for music production and consumption, and more broadly as a receptacle and vector of sonic accounts of the lockdown experience: from live streaming “homemade” concerts, to field recordings collected in a variety of online projects and sound maps.
The conference aims to be a forum for sharing perspectives about sound in the time of pandemic, the modifications of sonic environments and the transformations in sound production/listening behaviors, not only in the musical field, but generally speaking in all human practices which are strongly characterized by sound.
The conference is part of Come suona la Toscana, a project by Università di Firenze in the framework of the PRIN 2017 initiative “Heritage, Festivals, Archives. Music and performing practices of oral tradition in the XXI Century”.
Organisers:
Università di Firenze, Dipartimento SAGAS Tempo Reale – Centro di ricerca, produzione e didattica musicale
Programme Committe:
Maurizio Agamennone | Antonella Dicuonzo | Francesco Giomi | Daniele Palma | Ludovico Peroni | Giulia Sarno
Programme of the international conference Bach e l'Italia, held digitally from 22 to 28 November ... more Programme of the international conference Bach e l'Italia, held digitally from 22 to 28 November 2020. Chair: Chiara Bertoglio and Maria Borghesi Organisers: JSBach.it ; Conservatorio di Musica "G. Verdi" di Torino ; Istituto per i Beni Musicali in Piemonte
This presentation concerns the musical practices in the Provincial Psychiatric Hospital (OPP) of ... more This presentation concerns the musical practices in the Provincial Psychiatric Hospital (OPP) of Maggiano, in Lucca, and their outcome in a very popular "Festival della Canzone" organized annually by patients, socio-therapists, nurses, and doctors between 1964 and 1969. These experiences preceded and prepared the “revolution” by Franco Basaglia, the introduction of the idea of "democratic psychiatry" and the (slow) process of dismantling the Giolitti Law n. 36 of 1904. The historical reconstruction is based on articles from "La Pantera" – a periodical edited and printed by OPP patients starting from 1963 – and published or unpublished scholarly contributions or congressional communications by doctors and nurses. By adopting the theoretical frame of community music studies, I aim at narrating little known events, especially in the field of musicology, and at identifying some general trends, which concern the role played by making music in the relationship between “inside” and “outside.” In this, I believe, the Festival della Canzone of Maggiano dialogues with our current, pandemic condition. In addition, it permits to reflect on musical performativity as a means for the (re)construction of the self, in line with the Goffmanian tradition and its applications in the fields of performance studies and sociology of music.
The talk was given at 'Early Recordings: Diversity in Practice' (May 5th, 2021), online internati... more The talk was given at 'Early Recordings: Diversity in Practice' (May 5th, 2021), online international conference organised by Eva Moreda Rodríguez and Inja Stanović in the frame of "Rethinking Early Recordings".
In the final chapter of her PhD dissertation, Rebecca Plack (2008) analyses several recordings of... more In the final chapter of her PhD dissertation, Rebecca Plack (2008) analyses several recordings of Schubert's song Die Forelle made both by male and female singers. In the frame of an “emic” perspective for which style is seen as the result of technical habits developed by singers in their everyday practice, the individuation of gender-related expressive gestures leads Plack to hypothesise an impact of gender on style. In this paper, I seek to explore the potential of inverting Plack's terms, investigating how stylistic choices impacted the representation(s) of the male in tenors' early recordings. Though maintaining the same perspective on vocal style, which has been further deepened in works by Sarah Potter (2014) and Barbara Gentili (2018), my specific focus is on timbre. Indeed, in the age of mediatised performance, timbre has been increasingly seen by singers as a value “per se” and, consequently, as the goal of their technical strategies. In this light, I analyse some exemplary recordings of Verdi's Otello (from Francesco Tamagno to Mario Del Monaco), trying to give glimpses of a process of “darkening” that transformed the tenor voice during the early 20th century. Then, I show how timbre evolutions could be tied to broader cultural phenomena regarding both phonographic consciousness and imaginaries of the male performer. Finally, I briefly discuss the topic of recovering past vocal practices from early recordings, highlighting both limits and possibilities of embodied based approaches.
Locatio: "Early Recordings: Past Performing Practices in Contemporary Research" (London: Pushkin House, June 21-22 2019)
Soon after the appointment of Benito Mussolini as Italian prime minister in 1922, the indoctrinat... more Soon after the appointment of Benito Mussolini as Italian prime minister in 1922, the indoctrination of young people became one of the primary business of the fascist agenda. The government undertook a substantial reformation of the Italian school (“Riforma Gentile”, 1923) and founded an organization named Opera Nazionale Balilla in 1926, aiming to transmit fascist ideals of moral and physical rebirth to new generations. Although several studies have shown how media broadly contributed to the processes of consensus building (Monticone 1978; Isola 1990, 1998; Lussana 2019), mediatized propaganda for children remains mostly unexplored. Few scholars have dealt with radio broadcasting for youths (Mencarelli 1993; Zambotti 2007; Ghizzoni 2018), while the context of phonography has received scant attention, except for work by Benedetta Zucconi (2018) on Gavino Gabriel's pedagogical program. In this paper, I deal with fascist propaganda for children in the Italian discographic market. Firstly, I give a brief overview of products commercialized from the 1920s. Then, I focus on two preeminent releases by Columbia label: a “speaking book” composed by texts, paintings, and recordings, narrating the rise of Fascism; and a “sound story” of Micky Mouse as a soldier in the Italo-Ethiopian War (1935-1936). The analysis concentrates on the interaction between music and written/visual components, and on possible contexts of production and fruition. I aim to show how these recordings mirrored Giuseppe Lombardo Radice’s coeval reflections on the importance of children's imagination in pedagogical strategies, functionalizing them to the purposes of propaganda.
Location: "Sounds of Mass Media: Music in Journalism and Propaganda" - 11th Meeting of the IMS Study Group Music and Media (Växjö, Sweden, June 7-9 2019)
The role of Pollione in Bellini's Norma was created in 1831 by Domenico Donzelli, who occupied an... more The role of Pollione in Bellini's Norma was created in 1831 by Domenico Donzelli, who occupied an intermediate position between the last generation of opera seria tenors such as Andrea Nozzari and “romantic” singers like Giovan Battisa Rubini and Napoleone Moriani. In particular, following Alberto Mazzucato's report on the «Gazzetta Musicale di Milano» in 1842, Donzelli adopted a series of technical features later to be called voix sombrée by Manuel Garcia II. Pollione, then, stand in the path between the first experiments of vowel darkening and larynx lowering by Italian tenors and the renown Parisian eclat of Gilbert Duprez. This path represented a first step in the birth of the “modern” tenor, which has involved time by time questions of vocal registration and the way to solve the passaggio to the high part of tessitura (CELLETTI 1989, POTTER 2009). This paper will consider recordings of Pollione's I Act aria «Meco all'altar di Venere» in a span of time which goes from the 1902 Italian HMV edition by Carlo Caffetto to Norma 1955 integral recording with Mario del Monaco. Firstly, information about the most significant singers' careers, repertoire choices and reception by critics will allow to understand their relationship with Pollione. Secondly, the analysis of recordings through SonicVisualiser will give datas on their interpretations, considering both general parameters individuated by Philip and Cook (tempo, dynamics and phrase arching, portamenti) and specific ones (quality of legato, vocal colour and technique, text declamation). The aim is to individuate constants and variations in Pollione's performance history during the first half of the 20th century, by highlighting how the interrelation between different techniques spread from Verismo era to post-World War II (like Arturo Melocchi's affondo) and discourses on how to sing the Bellinian role contributed to the evolution of its interpretative models.
Location: Perspectives on Historically Informed Practices in Music, Faculty of Music, University of Oxford , Oxford, UK (10-12 September 2018)
Bruno Walter (1876-1962) has been one of the leading conductors of the first half of the 20th cen... more Bruno Walter (1876-1962) has been one of the leading conductors of the first half of the 20th century. He co-founded the Salzburg Festival and contributed to cultural discourses on music with a series of publications culminating in the book Von der Musik und vom Musizieren (1957). Here Walter discusses the conductor's role in the construction of the musical performance, building a theory of interpretation which has not received a complete musicological consideration yet. In this paper I aim at reconstructing the fundamentals of Walter's theory, highlighting their proximity to ideas elaborated by Rudolf Kolisch and René Leibowitz, both representatives of that New Music which the conductor deprecated as non-ethical. Moreover, the specific aspect of tempo will be discussed as mirroring the antithetical exegeses elicited by Wagner's polysemous concept of melos, drawing examples from Walter's recordings of Schumann's Frauenliebe und -leben with Lotte Lehmann (1941) and Kathleen Ferrier (1949).
Location: 1st International Conference on Music, Communication, and Performance (Montecassiano, 23-24 June 2018)
Lotte Lehmann (1888-1976) fu tra le maggiori interpreti wagneriane e straussiane del primo '900, ... more Lotte Lehmann (1888-1976) fu tra le maggiori interpreti wagneriane e straussiane del primo '900, imponendosi dapprima sulla scena viennese durante le sovrintendenze di Franz Schalk e dello stesso Strauss, quindi, dopo l'Anschluss, terminando la sua carriera oltre oceano e partecipando alla fondazione della Music Academy of the West di Santa Barbara, dove operò come docente di “interpretazione vocale”. Nella vita artistica della Lehmann si può individuare uno snodo fondamentale: l'interpretazione della Marschallin nel Rosenkavalier al Covent Garden, nel 1924, sotto la direzione di Bruno Walter. L'occasione diede effettivo inizio alla carriera internazionale della cantante e portò a battesimo un ruolo che ella avrebbe successivamente ripreso in oltre 150 recite attestate, divenendo, negli anni di Santa Barbara, uno dei canali preferenziali tramite cui la Lehmann trasmise alle nuove generazioni un'idea di teatro e di far musica precedente alle trasformazioni in atto nel periodo tra le due guerre, e ormai per lo più acquisite alla fine degli anni '50. Tra la Lehmann e la Marschallin si stabilì dunque un rapporto che operava in due direzioni differenti e contemporanee, legando tanto la cantante al ruolo quanto il ruolo alla sua interprete.
Se i lavori sulla Lehmann si sono concentrati per lo più sugli aspetti biografici (Jefferson 1988; Glass 1988; Kater 2008; Brown 2012), poco spazio è stato dedicato ad uno studio sistematico delle sue qualità vocali, musicali e attoriali. Esse sono l'obiettivo di questo intervento: attraverso l'analisi del monologo “Da geht er hin” nelle registrazioni del 1933 (Wiener Staatsoper, Robert Heger) e del 1938 e 1939 (Met, Artur Bodanzky), oltre che di un video del 1961 in cui la cantante “dimostra” come il monologo vada recitato, si può ricostruire quali furono le caratteristiche di una Principessa di Werdemberg che fece la storia del personaggio – o, perlomeno, una sua parte imprescindibile. Di converso, il confronto tra i valori e le “tradizioni” culturali inglobati da von Hofmannsthal-Strauss in Marie Théreèse e il modello stabilito dalla Lehmann aiutano a far luce sulla fortuna e sulla recezione della cantante sulle scene europee e statunitensi.
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Università di Firenze, Dipartimento SAGAS
Tempo Reale – Centro di ricerca, produzione e didattica musicale
Programme Committe:
Maurizio Agamennone | Antonella Dicuonzo | Francesco Giomi | Daniele Palma | Ludovico Peroni | Giulia Sarno
The conference is part of Come suona la Toscana, a project by Università di Firenze in the framework of the PRIN 2017 initiative “Heritage, Festivals, Archives. Music and performing practices of oral tradition in the XXI Century”.
Website: www.soundsofthepandemic.wordpress.com
Youtube: https://bit.ly/3cFv0T5
Facebook: @comesuonalatoscana
This article aims to reconstruct the main characteristics of Lehmann’s interpretative model for the Marschallin through the analysis of the singer’s writings and of the audio-visual materials related to her performances of the role. Moreover, a comparison between Lehmann’s model and the cultural ‘traditions’ embodied by the character of Marie Thérèse according to von Hofmannsthal and Strauss’s conception will highlight some phenomena related to the US reception of both the singer and the composer.
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The complete article can be read on:
https://www.sidm.it/ojs/index.php/ridm/issue/view/117
At the same time, many activities being transferred online has significantly changed our lifestyle, giving greater relevance to the Internet as the primary environment for music production and consumption, and more broadly as a receptacle and vector of sonic accounts of the lockdown experience: from live streaming “homemade” concerts, to field recordings collected in a variety of online projects and sound maps.
The conference aims to be a forum for sharing perspectives about sound in the time of pandemic, the modifications of sonic environments and the transformations in sound production/listening behaviors, not only in the musical field, but generally speaking in all human practices which are strongly characterized by sound.
The conference is part of Come suona la Toscana, a project by Università di Firenze in the framework of the PRIN 2017 initiative “Heritage, Festivals, Archives. Music and performing practices of oral tradition in the XXI Century”.
Organisers:
Università di Firenze, Dipartimento SAGAS Tempo Reale – Centro di ricerca, produzione e didattica musicale
Programme Committe:
Maurizio Agamennone | Antonella Dicuonzo | Francesco Giomi | Daniele Palma | Ludovico Peroni | Giulia Sarno
Website: https://soundsofthepandemic.wordpress.com
YouTube: https://bit.ly/3cFv0T5
Facebook: @comesuonalatoscana
Chair: Chiara Bertoglio and Maria Borghesi
Organisers: JSBach.it ; Conservatorio di Musica "G. Verdi" di Torino ; Istituto per i Beni Musicali in Piemonte
In this, I believe, the Festival della Canzone of Maggiano dialogues with our current, pandemic condition. In addition, it permits to reflect on musical performativity as a means for the (re)construction of the self, in line with the Goffmanian tradition and its applications in the fields of performance studies and sociology of music.
(https://early-recordings.com/2021-conference/)
In this paper, I seek to explore the potential of inverting Plack's terms, investigating how stylistic choices impacted the representation(s) of the male in tenors' early recordings. Though maintaining the same perspective on vocal style, which has been further deepened in works by Sarah Potter (2014) and Barbara Gentili (2018), my specific focus is on timbre. Indeed, in the age of mediatised performance, timbre has been increasingly seen by singers as a value “per se” and, consequently, as the goal of their technical strategies. In this light, I analyse some exemplary recordings of Verdi's Otello (from Francesco Tamagno to Mario Del Monaco), trying to give glimpses of a process of “darkening” that transformed the tenor voice during the early 20th century. Then, I show how timbre evolutions could be tied to broader cultural phenomena regarding both phonographic consciousness and imaginaries of the male performer. Finally, I briefly discuss the topic of recovering past vocal practices from early recordings, highlighting both limits and possibilities of embodied based approaches.
Locatio: "Early Recordings: Past Performing Practices in Contemporary Research" (London: Pushkin House, June 21-22 2019)
In this paper, I deal with fascist propaganda for children in the Italian discographic market. Firstly, I give a brief overview of products commercialized from the 1920s. Then, I focus on two preeminent releases by Columbia label: a “speaking book” composed by texts, paintings, and recordings, narrating the rise of Fascism; and a “sound story” of Micky Mouse as a soldier in the Italo-Ethiopian War (1935-1936). The analysis concentrates on the interaction between music and written/visual components, and on possible contexts of production and fruition. I aim to show how these recordings mirrored Giuseppe Lombardo Radice’s coeval reflections on the importance of children's imagination in pedagogical strategies, functionalizing them to the purposes of propaganda.
Location: "Sounds of Mass Media: Music in Journalism and Propaganda" - 11th Meeting of the IMS Study Group Music and Media (Växjö, Sweden, June 7-9 2019)
This paper will consider recordings of Pollione's I Act aria «Meco all'altar di Venere» in a span of time which goes from the 1902 Italian HMV edition by Carlo Caffetto to Norma 1955 integral recording with Mario del Monaco. Firstly, information about the most significant singers' careers, repertoire choices and reception by critics will allow to understand their relationship with Pollione. Secondly, the analysis of recordings through SonicVisualiser will give datas on their interpretations, considering both general parameters individuated by Philip and Cook (tempo, dynamics and phrase arching, portamenti) and specific ones (quality of legato, vocal colour and technique, text declamation). The aim is to individuate constants and variations in Pollione's performance history during the first half of the 20th century, by highlighting how the interrelation between different techniques spread from Verismo era to post-World War II (like Arturo Melocchi's affondo) and discourses on how to sing the Bellinian role contributed to the evolution of its interpretative models.
Location: Perspectives on Historically Informed Practices in Music, Faculty of Music, University of Oxford , Oxford, UK (10-12 September 2018)
In this paper I aim at reconstructing the fundamentals of Walter's theory, highlighting their proximity to ideas elaborated by Rudolf Kolisch and René Leibowitz, both representatives of that New Music which the conductor deprecated as non-ethical. Moreover, the specific aspect of tempo will be discussed as mirroring the antithetical exegeses elicited by Wagner's polysemous concept of melos, drawing examples from Walter's recordings of Schumann's Frauenliebe und -leben with Lotte Lehmann (1941) and Kathleen Ferrier (1949).
Location: 1st International Conference on Music, Communication, and Performance (Montecassiano, 23-24 June 2018)
Se i lavori sulla Lehmann si sono concentrati per lo più sugli aspetti biografici (Jefferson 1988; Glass 1988; Kater 2008; Brown 2012), poco spazio è stato dedicato ad uno studio sistematico delle sue qualità vocali, musicali e attoriali. Esse sono l'obiettivo di questo intervento: attraverso l'analisi del monologo “Da geht er hin” nelle registrazioni del 1933 (Wiener Staatsoper, Robert Heger) e del 1938 e 1939 (Met, Artur Bodanzky), oltre che di un video del 1961 in cui la cantante “dimostra” come il monologo vada recitato, si può ricostruire quali furono le caratteristiche di una Principessa di Werdemberg che fece la storia del personaggio – o, perlomeno, una sua parte imprescindibile. Di converso, il confronto tra i valori e le “tradizioni” culturali inglobati da von Hofmannsthal-Strauss in Marie Théreèse e il modello stabilito dalla Lehmann aiutano a far luce sulla fortuna e sulla recezione della cantante sulle scene europee e statunitensi.
Università di Firenze, Dipartimento SAGAS
Tempo Reale – Centro di ricerca, produzione e didattica musicale
Programme Committe:
Maurizio Agamennone | Antonella Dicuonzo | Francesco Giomi | Daniele Palma | Ludovico Peroni | Giulia Sarno
The conference is part of Come suona la Toscana, a project by Università di Firenze in the framework of the PRIN 2017 initiative “Heritage, Festivals, Archives. Music and performing practices of oral tradition in the XXI Century”.
Website: www.soundsofthepandemic.wordpress.com
Youtube: https://bit.ly/3cFv0T5
Facebook: @comesuonalatoscana
This article aims to reconstruct the main characteristics of Lehmann’s interpretative model for the Marschallin through the analysis of the singer’s writings and of the audio-visual materials related to her performances of the role. Moreover, a comparison between Lehmann’s model and the cultural ‘traditions’ embodied by the character of Marie Thérèse according to von Hofmannsthal and Strauss’s conception will highlight some phenomena related to the US reception of both the singer and the composer.
-------------------------------------------
The complete article can be read on:
https://www.sidm.it/ojs/index.php/ridm/issue/view/117
At the same time, many activities being transferred online has significantly changed our lifestyle, giving greater relevance to the Internet as the primary environment for music production and consumption, and more broadly as a receptacle and vector of sonic accounts of the lockdown experience: from live streaming “homemade” concerts, to field recordings collected in a variety of online projects and sound maps.
The conference aims to be a forum for sharing perspectives about sound in the time of pandemic, the modifications of sonic environments and the transformations in sound production/listening behaviors, not only in the musical field, but generally speaking in all human practices which are strongly characterized by sound.
The conference is part of Come suona la Toscana, a project by Università di Firenze in the framework of the PRIN 2017 initiative “Heritage, Festivals, Archives. Music and performing practices of oral tradition in the XXI Century”.
Organisers:
Università di Firenze, Dipartimento SAGAS Tempo Reale – Centro di ricerca, produzione e didattica musicale
Programme Committe:
Maurizio Agamennone | Antonella Dicuonzo | Francesco Giomi | Daniele Palma | Ludovico Peroni | Giulia Sarno
Website: https://soundsofthepandemic.wordpress.com
YouTube: https://bit.ly/3cFv0T5
Facebook: @comesuonalatoscana
Chair: Chiara Bertoglio and Maria Borghesi
Organisers: JSBach.it ; Conservatorio di Musica "G. Verdi" di Torino ; Istituto per i Beni Musicali in Piemonte
In this, I believe, the Festival della Canzone of Maggiano dialogues with our current, pandemic condition. In addition, it permits to reflect on musical performativity as a means for the (re)construction of the self, in line with the Goffmanian tradition and its applications in the fields of performance studies and sociology of music.
(https://early-recordings.com/2021-conference/)
In this paper, I seek to explore the potential of inverting Plack's terms, investigating how stylistic choices impacted the representation(s) of the male in tenors' early recordings. Though maintaining the same perspective on vocal style, which has been further deepened in works by Sarah Potter (2014) and Barbara Gentili (2018), my specific focus is on timbre. Indeed, in the age of mediatised performance, timbre has been increasingly seen by singers as a value “per se” and, consequently, as the goal of their technical strategies. In this light, I analyse some exemplary recordings of Verdi's Otello (from Francesco Tamagno to Mario Del Monaco), trying to give glimpses of a process of “darkening” that transformed the tenor voice during the early 20th century. Then, I show how timbre evolutions could be tied to broader cultural phenomena regarding both phonographic consciousness and imaginaries of the male performer. Finally, I briefly discuss the topic of recovering past vocal practices from early recordings, highlighting both limits and possibilities of embodied based approaches.
Locatio: "Early Recordings: Past Performing Practices in Contemporary Research" (London: Pushkin House, June 21-22 2019)
In this paper, I deal with fascist propaganda for children in the Italian discographic market. Firstly, I give a brief overview of products commercialized from the 1920s. Then, I focus on two preeminent releases by Columbia label: a “speaking book” composed by texts, paintings, and recordings, narrating the rise of Fascism; and a “sound story” of Micky Mouse as a soldier in the Italo-Ethiopian War (1935-1936). The analysis concentrates on the interaction between music and written/visual components, and on possible contexts of production and fruition. I aim to show how these recordings mirrored Giuseppe Lombardo Radice’s coeval reflections on the importance of children's imagination in pedagogical strategies, functionalizing them to the purposes of propaganda.
Location: "Sounds of Mass Media: Music in Journalism and Propaganda" - 11th Meeting of the IMS Study Group Music and Media (Växjö, Sweden, June 7-9 2019)
This paper will consider recordings of Pollione's I Act aria «Meco all'altar di Venere» in a span of time which goes from the 1902 Italian HMV edition by Carlo Caffetto to Norma 1955 integral recording with Mario del Monaco. Firstly, information about the most significant singers' careers, repertoire choices and reception by critics will allow to understand their relationship with Pollione. Secondly, the analysis of recordings through SonicVisualiser will give datas on their interpretations, considering both general parameters individuated by Philip and Cook (tempo, dynamics and phrase arching, portamenti) and specific ones (quality of legato, vocal colour and technique, text declamation). The aim is to individuate constants and variations in Pollione's performance history during the first half of the 20th century, by highlighting how the interrelation between different techniques spread from Verismo era to post-World War II (like Arturo Melocchi's affondo) and discourses on how to sing the Bellinian role contributed to the evolution of its interpretative models.
Location: Perspectives on Historically Informed Practices in Music, Faculty of Music, University of Oxford , Oxford, UK (10-12 September 2018)
In this paper I aim at reconstructing the fundamentals of Walter's theory, highlighting their proximity to ideas elaborated by Rudolf Kolisch and René Leibowitz, both representatives of that New Music which the conductor deprecated as non-ethical. Moreover, the specific aspect of tempo will be discussed as mirroring the antithetical exegeses elicited by Wagner's polysemous concept of melos, drawing examples from Walter's recordings of Schumann's Frauenliebe und -leben with Lotte Lehmann (1941) and Kathleen Ferrier (1949).
Location: 1st International Conference on Music, Communication, and Performance (Montecassiano, 23-24 June 2018)
Se i lavori sulla Lehmann si sono concentrati per lo più sugli aspetti biografici (Jefferson 1988; Glass 1988; Kater 2008; Brown 2012), poco spazio è stato dedicato ad uno studio sistematico delle sue qualità vocali, musicali e attoriali. Esse sono l'obiettivo di questo intervento: attraverso l'analisi del monologo “Da geht er hin” nelle registrazioni del 1933 (Wiener Staatsoper, Robert Heger) e del 1938 e 1939 (Met, Artur Bodanzky), oltre che di un video del 1961 in cui la cantante “dimostra” come il monologo vada recitato, si può ricostruire quali furono le caratteristiche di una Principessa di Werdemberg che fece la storia del personaggio – o, perlomeno, una sua parte imprescindibile. Di converso, il confronto tra i valori e le “tradizioni” culturali inglobati da von Hofmannsthal-Strauss in Marie Théreèse e il modello stabilito dalla Lehmann aiutano a far luce sulla fortuna e sulla recezione della cantante sulle scene europee e statunitensi.