<i>La comunicazione multimediale e la musica: Presupposti teorici e proposte analitiche</i> (review)

Abstract

Andrea Garbuglia, La comunicazione multimediale e la musica: Presupposti teorici e proposte analitiche (Macerata, Italy: Edizioni Universita di Macerata, 2008), 244pp.review by Emanuele D'OnofrioHow does the young Mozart attending a performance of Gregorio Allegri's Miserere in the Sistine Chapel in 1770 resemble a reader of Ken Parker, the popular Italian comic book? Is it legitimate to adopt the same methods of interpretation for an illustrated score sheet from the late nineteenth century as for a sacred miniature from the Early Middle Ages? Perhaps such diverse cultural phenomena (and experiences) can be interpreted as different texts sharing the same world of communication, namely, our multimedia-informed environment. This is the theoretical territory to which Andrea Garbuglia's La comunicazione multimediale e la musica belongs. This book attempts to create and test a methodology principally drawn from music analysis and combine it with strategies and practices borrowed from disciplines such as semiotics and cognitive sciences, suited to investigate different forms of artistic expression and communication in multimedia. Indeed, Garbuglia's aim is twofold. Firstly, he aims to verify the interpretative potential of this 'contaminated' method in the study of music texts, which clearly communicate through interwoven 'media'. It is the intention of the author, whilst unveiling and working on the relationships between different components of music texts, to highlight aspects of their expressive qualities that escape conventional music analysis. Secondly, he attempts to prove this 'contaminated' method as a suitable technique for interpreting other cultural texts (some including, some not including, music), utterances and acts of speech that shape our world. In other words, this method could set the basis for a new hermeneutics of human communication.In his book Garbuglia brings together a number of essays, mostly previously and individually published, which all share at their core a common theme: the convergence of music and multimedia communication. The composite structure of this research complements both its interdisciplinary character and the variety of case studies it presents. The first two chapters establish both terminological and theoretical coordinates and the typology that the remainder of the book then puts into practice through the analysis of cultural works, freely gathered from sacred and popular arts. Only the last of these works that Garbuglia examines, a tenth-century miniature of St Gregory the Great, does not include a musical element. In this last chapter, which has specifically been written as a conclusion, the author reads the text's visual elements 'musically', citing as an example a curtain separating St Gregory while he utters divinely-inspired words and the scrivener that puts these on paper. By assigning to the curtain the function of a 'screen', similar to the effect of darkness in a concert hall, Garbuglia removes the visual stimuli and detaches the word from its physical origin, stressing the 'aural' character implicit in this image. Drawing on this consideration, he suggests on the very last page that it is in the 'oral' dimension that the multimedia nature of human communication can be accessed and studied.Garbuglia does not mention that his reflections on dematerialisation of media echo previous theories of multi-modality formulated since the 1980s by, amongst others, Michael A. K. Halliday. By shifting from the 'medium' to the 'mode', these theories shift our attention from the material source (the written page or the record) to multiple modes of communication. These include speech and gesture not only as part of the spoken language, but as part of 'contextual' phenomena, among which are the physical spaces in which our discursive actions are played out. However, despite the author's efforts to produce an organic structure, the lack of a proper conclusion disappoints, failing to link sufficiently the many and intriguing trails, and the detailed pieces of analysis that the book offers. …