“If Music is Not a Memory, then what is it?”: on the Modern Approach to Musical Memory in Azio Corghi’s Creations

Abstract

The article draws attention to the music of Azio Corghi (b. 1932), a modern Italian composer, hardly known in Russia. His artistic world is organically integrated into one of the characteristic features of modern culture: its inextricable link with the memory of the past. The composer demonstrates his own, original approach to musical memory – an artistic dialogue with it through the use of excerptions from various works of the past. According to the composer it allows him to “re-discover and re-read the past in the spirit of modernity”. This Corghi’s method is defined in the article with the help of the term riletture (Ital. re-reading), invented by the Italian musicologist Raffaele Mellace. Among a large number of works of this kind, as a specific example, the author considers the dramatic cantata “...fero dolore” – on Pianto della Madonna and Lamento d’Arianna by Claudio Monteverdi, for female voice, viola (oboe d’amour), percussion and string instruments