The ‘Theatralised Canon’. Aldo Clementi’s Musical Dramaturgy (original) (raw)
Related papers
Eighteenth-century Music, 2009
Music Theatre as Space–Time Reversal: Aldo Clementi from 1961 to 1979
Contemporary Music Review, 2011
Though principally noted as a composer of works on a small scale, Aldo Clementi also worked for the stage on several occasions. The following article is a thorough investigation of the earliest of these projects, what the composer described as his 'five little steps', and their context.
From " Esposizione " to " Laborintus II " : transitions and mutations of «a desire for theatre»
In a letter of November 1970, while a theatrical project entitled Amores was still in its embryonic stages, Edoardo Sanguineti asked Luciano Berio for suggestions on how to organize «in forma come che sia 'operistica'» this «specie di piccola enciclopedia dell'erotismo»: «ho bisogno di sapere -he asked him -se brami orientarti verso un Passaggio, un'Esposizione o un Laborintus, se cioè hai in animo un'azione unitaria, sia pur episodicamente frantumata [Passaggio]; un'evidenza coreutica [Esposizione] o una gestualità caotica [Laborintus] 1 ». These three concepts -«unitary action», «choreutic directness» and «chaotic gestuality» -illustrate in a way both concise and characteristic the peculiarities of the works and theatrical projects scattered between Passaggio and Opera, at a time in which the «desiderio di teatro 2 » of the composer took inspiration from different To Ute, with sincere friendship, in memory of shared enthusiasms.
Orgoglio nazionale e modernità nei trattati d’orchestrazione italiani del primo Novecento
Music, Individuals and Contexts. Dialectical Interaction, edited by Nadia Amendola, Alessandro Cosentino, Giacomo Sciommeri, Università degli Studi di Roma “Tor Vergata”, 27-28 aprile 2017, Roma, UniversItalia, 2019, pp. 309-318. , 2019
Staging Crisis: Opera aperta and the 1959 Venice Biennale Commissions
The Opera Quarterly, 2014
"This article looks at the 1959 Venice Festival internazionale di musica contemporanea’s commissioning of three one-act music theatre pieces to demonstrate the vitality of theatrical activity taking place in Italy. The occasion was the festival’s official response to more general calls of opera crisis in public discourse, intended to suggest a myriad of possible artistic directions. The resultant works were Luciano Berio’s Allez-hop, Alberto Bruni Tedeschi’s Diagramma circolare and Gino Negri’s Il circo Max. Whether through subversion or direct engagement, all three were concerned with a similar theme—namely, the devastating aftermath of war. Bruni Tedeschi sought to thrust his ideology onto the audience in typical modernist fashion, while Berio and Negri instead wanted their works to be considered more open, capable of being read in different ways. The reception of the performance was similarly divided, marking a shift in contemporary music criticism. While normally keen to promote firebrand political modernism, leftist Italian critics—seeming to have grown tired of this—criticised Bruni Tedeschi for making his musical conception too subservient to the political message. Instead they praised Berio for the ‘openness’ of Allez-hop. 1959 was in fact the same year that Umberto Eco began to publish essays (in a musical context) on his idea of opera aperta—an embryonic term premised on notions of indeterminacy and openness; ‘Opera aperta’ was also the working title of Berio’s theatre piece. Although at the time the movement was called a neoavanguardia, it crystallised around critical and literary ideals later to be seen as synonymous with postmodernism. In this article, I examine how emergent Italian literary postmodernism was intimately connected to a previously neglected musical moment, one earlier than any accounted for by standard histories of musical postmodernism. Furthermore, I read this as a particularly Italian postmodernism, one that stemmed from the rhetoric and preoccupation with crisis that were a feature of 1950s’ musical debate. "
The Voice of the Composer: Theory and Practice in the Works of Pietro Pontio
1989
The life, music, and theoretical writings of Pietro Pontio (1532-1596) yield considerable insight into questions of theory and practice in the late sixteenth century. The dissertation places Pontio within his musical and cultural milieu, and assesses his role as both theorist and composer. The first two chapters present an expanded biography based on new archival evidence. The course of Pontio's career is detailed, and corrections such as his exact date of death and his location and employment for the years 1569-1574 are presented. The documents also uniquely detail the working conditions and pedagogical methods and concerns of the sixteenth-century maestro di cappella. Chapter Three surveys Pontio's two treatises, the Ragionamento (1588) and the Dialogo (1595), outlining important issues addressed by Pontio. Chapter Four presents a brief survey of Pontio's music, hitherto unstudied, showing his work to be of consistent quality and inventiveness. Chapter Five discusses issues from the Ragionamento. Pontio's important discussion of the use of mode and psalm tone in polyphony suggests a hierarchical approach to cadential structure based on pitch, text relationship, and cadential type, and the author presents a system of cadential classification based on these constructs. The result is a clearer understanding of modal structure and distinctions of genre. Chapter Six examines the second section of Pontio's Dialogo as an early attempt at critical writing, similar in scope to that presented by Lodovico Zacconi in the second part of his Prattica di musica (1622). In both chapters, Pontio's theoretical writings are amplified by reference to his own musical works and those of his contemporaries. Chapter Seven assesses Pontio's influences on contemporary and later writers, and details the degree of influence Pontio's treatise had on Valerio Bona's Regole del contraponto (1595) and Pietro Cerone's El Melopeo y maestro (1613). Both are shown to be heavily dependent on many of the most original aspects of Pontio's work. A summary assesses the important role of Pontio in sharpening our understanding of critical aspects of theory and practice in the period. Volume Two presents an annotated works list for Pontio's compositions, transcriptions of archival documents used in the study, and transcriptions of representative musical compositions.
The Voice of the Composer: Theory and Practice in the Works of Pietro Pontio, Volume 1
1989
The life, music, and theoretical writings of Pietro Pontio (1532-1596) yield considerable insight into questions of theory and practice in the late sixteenth century. The dissertation places Pontio within his musical and cultural milieu, and assesses his role as both theorist and composer. The first two chapters present an expanded biography based on new archival evidence. The course of Pontio's career is detailed, and corrections such as his exact date of death and his location and employment for the years 1569-1574 are presented. The documents also uniquely detail the working conditions and pedagogical methods and concerns of the sixteenth-century maestro di cappella. Chapter Three surveys Pontio's two treatises, the Ragionamento (1588) and the Dialogo (1595), outlining important issues addressed by Pontio. Chapter Four presents a brief survey of Pontio's music, hitherto unstudied, showing his work to be of consistent quality and inventiveness. Chapter Five discusses issues from the Ragionamento. Pontio's important discussion of the use of mode and psalm tone in polyphony suggests a hierarchical approach to cadential structure based on pitch, text relationship, and cadential type, and the author presents a system of cadential classification based on these constructs. The result is a clearer understanding of modal structure and distinctions of genre. Chapter Six examines the second section of Pontio's Dialogo as an early attempt at critical writing, similar in scope to that presented by Lodovico Zacconi in the second part of his Prattica di musica (1622). In both chapters, Pontio's theoretical writings are amplified by reference to his own musical works and those of his contemporaries. Chapter Seven assesses Pontio's influences on contemporary and later writers, and details the degree of influence Pontio's treatise had on Valerio Bona's Regole del contraponto (1595) and Pietro Cerone's El Melopeo y maestro (1613). Both are shown to be heavily dependent on many of the most original aspects of Pontio's work. A summary assesses the important role of Pontio in sharpening our understanding of critical aspects of theory and practice in the period. Volume Two presents an annotated works list for Pontio's compositions, transcriptions of archival documents used in the study, and transcriptions of representative musical compositions.