Bruno Maderna Research Articles

Fruits of the Cross: Passiontide Music Theater in Habsburg Vienna Robert L Kendrick

With this monograph on the distinctive Viennese genre of the sepolcro, Robert Kendrick has plugged a long-standing gap in our knowledge of seventeenth-century music and theatre. This repertory comprises some forty-seven rappresentazioni sacre surviving with texts and music, of about seventy performed, mainly in Vienna, between 1660 and 1711 on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday during Holy Week each year. The genre seems to owe its origin to the tastes and patronage of Empress Eleonora Gonzaga ‘the Younger’ (1630–86), consort of Emperor Ferdinand III; it was cultivated in and after her widowhood, during the reigns of her stepson, Leopold I, and Joseph I. The book is particularly welcome as a detailed discussion of the music and texts of a well-preserved distinct, elite repertory from a period that is itself still too often taken as a mere transition to the great achievements of the eighteenth century. The poetry of the libretti is intellectually and theologically demanding; it is of high quality, as is the music. New pieces were written each year and set to music at short notice by three successive generations of composers, for performances, some in costume, before a stage set built in church to represent the Tomb of the crucified Christ; and for the Viennese court Holy Week was a time in which religious observance took precedence even over urgent political business. The four chapters of the book are arranged by topic rather than strictly chronologically, with extended discussion of selected examples, and useful appendices include checklists of surviving sepolcri and their putative modal/tonal schemes. Chapter 1 deals with the theatrical dimension of these pieces and their staging in Eleonora’s chapel (Maundy Thursday) and in the chapel of the Hofburg (Good Friday), their generic features, and their relationship to other meditative works; chapter 2 contextualizes their subject matter and their representation of Catholic penitence and metanoia (reorientation of one’s life). In chapter 3, which moves beyond conventional notions of the well-known pietas austriaca, the focus turns to the Habsburgs themselves and their immediate political and personal concerns, such as their use of the sacred relics possessed by the court, the gendering of public grieving, the expression of anti-Jewish sentiments, and the personal niche interests of the imperial family, such as astronomy. Chapter 4 concentrates on the technical aspects of the music, which had already been touched upon earlier. There are a couple of curious digressions: the first chapter includes an account of an adaptation of selections from a German-language sepolcro by J. H. Schmelzer in Vienna in 1917, and an epilogue describes another adaptation set up by Bruno Maderna and Luigi Nono in 1950.

The quest for myriad strains

In the era in which the web is fully demonstrating its archival potential, more and more composers make use of sound, melody and computer library repositories. It is a clear trend in popular music, which is increasingly being extended also to ‘academic’ composition: today authors can access and contribute to a vast array of audio materials, of procedures and languages, where historicity and innovation coexist in an eternal present. At first glance it may seem a revolution. However, a closer look reveals ancient roots in the history of music that audio reproduction has made only more evident: the fixation of music on tape, at first, has led some composers (e.g. Bruno Maderna) to create sound libraries to be reused in different works, thus blurring the borders of the Opera; later on, the dematerialization and atomization of procedures in IT have pushed towards a philosophy of sharing (e.g. libraries for Computer Assisted Composition systems) – exalted today by the capillarity of the lightning-fast web distribution – raising deep questions about the concept of author itself. Moving further backwards, to the re-uses in Rossini and Mozart, or to the anonymous formulas in Gregorian chant, could we not find the recurrence of a quest for that world of «myriad strains that once shall sound», where the composer can stretch forth a hand for a musical idea, so wonderfully glimpsed by Busoni in his Sketch for a New Esthetic of Music?

On the critical editing of electronic and mixed music. Historical matters and new perspectives

Today, the sources of electronic and mixed music produced in the XXth century by analog means have entered the digital documentary domain. Therefore, the theoretical reflection on the ethics of preservation, restoration and re-issue of audiovisual documents cannot ignore the models of communication engineering: encodeing and decoding, audio signal processing – also implemented in the World Wide Web today – are of paramount importance. After World War II, a new musical research was born within the context of acoustical and electro-acoustical communication systems and it found a privileged thread in the Theory of Information. In the world of electronic and mixed music the technological system is an integral part of the compositional project, and the audio tracks represent a ‘projection’ of the production project. Audio recordings deliver to the editor an essential evidence for reconstructing the technical and theoretical world of the composers, which is to say their pre-post-history. In this paper, the meta-conceptual role of Information and Communication Theory is historized and it becomes an integral part of a systemic method for the restitution of the electronic musical work. With a wide range of examples (including works by Edgard Varese, Luigi Nono, Bruno Maderna, Gerard Grisey) we show peculiarities and issues of the critical editing of this repertoire.

Contemporary and Traditional Patterns in Bruno Maderna’s Vocal Works

STUDIA UNIVERSITATIS - BIOLOGIA , CHEMIA , DRAMATICA , EDUCATIO ARTIS GYMNASTICAE , EPHEMERIDES , EUROPAEA , GEOGRAPHIA , GEOLOGIA , HISTORIA , INFORMATICA , IURISPRUDENTIA , MATHEMATICA , NEGOTIA , OECONOMICA , PHILOLOGIA , PHILOSOPHIA , PHYSICA , POLITICA , PSYCHOLOGIA-PAEDAGOGIA , SOCIOLOGIA , THEOLOGIA CATHOLICA , THEOLOGIA CATHOLICA LATINA , THEOLOGIA GRAECO-CATHOLICA VARADIENSIS , THEOLOGIA ORTHODOXA , THEOLOGIA REFORMATA TRANSYLVANICA

Sonic Commentary: Bonus Ghost Tracks

December 01 2017 Sonic Commentary: Bonus Ghost Tracks Veniero Rizzardi Veniero Rizzardi LMJ27 Audio Curator, Email: veniero@unive.itVENIERO RIZZARDI is an Italian musicologist and cultural historian, full professor and chief librarian at the State Conservatory of Padua, and adjunct professor at the Ca’ Foscari University in Venice. His main research interests are the genetic analysis of the compositional process, the history of sound technologies, and the social history of sound. He has lectured extensively in Europe and in the United States, published numerous essays and books on twentieth-century music, including one on Miles Davis’s recorded work, and also curated editions of previously unpublished music by Luigi Nono and Bruno Maderna. Together with A.I. De Benedictis he has edited the writings of Luigi Nono (English edition in preparation for University of California Press) and a volume on the Studio di Fonologia of RAI, Milan and the beginnings of electroacoustic music in Italy (RAI-ERI 2001). He has co-founded the Luigi Nono Archive in Venice, where he is member of the Managing Board and of the Scientific Committee, and the music review AAA/TAC. He has also been active as a curator and concert producer at the University of Padua. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Veniero Rizzardi LMJ27 Audio Curator, Email: veniero@unive.itVENIERO RIZZARDI is an Italian musicologist and cultural historian, full professor and chief librarian at the State Conservatory of Padua, and adjunct professor at the Ca’ Foscari University in Venice. His main research interests are the genetic analysis of the compositional process, the history of sound technologies, and the social history of sound. He has lectured extensively in Europe and in the United States, published numerous essays and books on twentieth-century music, including one on Miles Davis’s recorded work, and also curated editions of previously unpublished music by Luigi Nono and Bruno Maderna. Together with A.I. De Benedictis he has edited the writings of Luigi Nono (English edition in preparation for University of California Press) and a volume on the Studio di Fonologia of RAI, Milan and the beginnings of electroacoustic music in Italy (RAI-ERI 2001). He has co-founded the Luigi Nono Archive in Venice, where he is member of the Managing Board and of the Scientific Committee, and the music review AAA/TAC. He has also been active as a curator and concert producer at the University of Padua. Online Issn: 1531-4812 Print Issn: 0961-1215 ©2017 ISAST2017ISAST Leonardo Music Journal (2017) 27: 99–100. https://doi.org/10.1162/LMJ_e_01030 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Veniero Rizzardi; Sonic Commentary: Bonus Ghost Tracks. Leonardo Music Journal 2017; 27 99–100. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/LMJ_e_01030 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsLeonardo Music Journal Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. ©2017 ISAST2017ISAST Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Interval Structures in the Music of Carmelo Bernaola: An Approach from PC Set Theory and Textural Analysis

INTERVAL STRUCTURES IN THE MUSIC OF CARMELO BERNAOLA: AN APPROACH FROM PC SET THEORY AND TEXTURAL ANALYSIS DANIEL MORO VALLINA HE BASQUE COMPOSER CARMELO ALONSO BERNAOLA (1929–2002) was one of the most representative figures of Spanish music in the second half of the twentieth century and of the group of Spanish composers born between 1924 and 1938 known as the “Generation of 51.”1 His professional career coincided with other well-known musicians, such as Cristóbal Halffter, Luis de Pablo, Tomás Marco, and Ramón Barce. Despite the fact that to date several studies have been written on Bernaola,2 these have been biographical in nature and have not tackled essential questions to better understand his music from technical or esthetic points of view. There are hardly any analyses of his music developed from defined methodologies, nor is there a contextualization of the role that Bernaola played in the cultural milieu of Franco’s regime and the transition to Spanish democracy.3 The aim of this paper is to analyze a representative sample of Bernaola’s atonal works from the perspective of PC set theory, as theorized by Allen Forte,4 John Rahn,5 and more recently by Joseph T 86 Perspectives of New Music Straus6 and Michiel Schuijer.7 Several principles of this methodology are useful for explaining Bernaola’s compositional technique, which uses a restricted number of intervals to generate the twelve pitchclasses of the chromatic scale. Defined by the composer as “interval structures,” these consist almost exclusively of relations of minor and major seconds, tritones, minor and major sevenths, and minor ninths, distances which can be reduced to the three interval classes (ic): 1, 2, and 6. The prime form derived from these ic, 4-5: [0, 1, 2, 6],8 generates an interval vector very close to the all-interval tetrachord [210111]. This implies that, although Bernaola employs only three interval classes during the first stage of the compositional process of several of his works, other relations take place due to superposition, permutation, and alternation of the same distances. Although Bernaola never explained in writing the fundamentals of his own compositional technique, it is possible to deduce a type of serial structure from the analysis of his scores and from the comments he made regarding his work. This paper analyzes seven compositions written in the 1960s and 1970s: Constantes (1960), his work that is closest to twelve-tone technique; Superficie No. 1 (1961), where he first uses the aforementioned interval structures; Espacios variados (1962), one of the very first examples in Spain of mobile form; Impulsos (1968–72), which uses a personalized adaptation of serial techniques; Per due (1974), representative of the restricted use of intervals of the tritone and major seventh to generate the twelve PCs; Tiempos (1976), like Per due using sets equivalent under transposition or inversion; and A mi aire (1979), based on symmetrical intervals with respect to a central axis. Together with these examples, the sketches of the work Mixturas (1964)9 illustrate how Bernaola conceived musical structure based on principles very close to PC set theory. Moreover, a brief introduction to other pieces such as Superficie No. 3 (1963) and No. 4 (1968–1969) allows us to discuss some textural and temporal features that belong to his concept of “Música flexible,” one of the hallmarks of Bernaola’s mature production. My aim is also to study the influence that certain international figures had on the Bernaola’s esthetic. Winner of the Premio de Roma (Rome Prize), Bernaola enjoyed a stay in Italy between 1960 and 1962 that would be fundamental for his later compositional career. It was during this period that he met composers like Goffredo Petrassi and Bruno Maderna. Both Petrassi and Maderna employed intervallic serialism as a means of microstructural organization. Bernaola himself mentioned the use of interval structures as a particular characteristic of the lessons Petrassi and Maderna held in Rome and Darmstadt respectively, as shown in an unpublished 1962 document that summarizes his Italian stay.10 Interval Structures in the Music of Carmelo Bernaola 87 Although PC set theory has become a standard methodology in the English-speaking academic field for the analysis...

Shedding Some Light on Donatoni's <em>Lumen</em>

SHEDDING SOME LIGHT ON DONATONI’S LUMEN GUILLERMO LUPPI INTRODUCTION: BRIEF CONTEXTUALIZATION OF LUMEN HE PRODUCTION OF THE ITALIAN COMPOSER Franco Donatoni extends precisely throughout the second half of the twentieth century , his first work being from 1950 (String Quartet no. 1) and his last one from the year 2000 (ESA [In Cauda V], for orchestra). We can divide his works into three different periods, according to his own words. First, the negative period, which extends from his first works until the end of the 60s. Next, the transition period, which occurred during the 70s. Lastly, the positive period, which began in the 80s and continued until the completion of his last work. The present work is from the year 1975, therefore occurring in the middle of the transition period and of his career. The 70s were a very difficult time for Donatoni. With his approach to musical composition, he entered into a crisis: he no longer felt any enthusiasm for serialism, aleatoricism, or combinatory automatism, where the composer had no subjective involvement (Wright 2000). The death of his master and friend, Bruno Maderna, in 1973 also contributed to Donatoni’s depression. As a result, he stopped T 180 Perspectives of New Music composing and became a copyist. We encounter this crisis reflected in the amount of works composed between 1971 and 1974—only six for this otherwise prolific composer. Nevertheless, after the end of the year 1974, he regains his passion for composing. As a result, he adapts his approach towards musical composition, as reflected in the techniques employed and, consequently, in the resulting sonority: his works after 1975 become much more confident and intense in comparison to his first works, in which he cared mostly for the logic of the musical process rather than in its expressiveness. Post 1975, he starts to develop a more ludic, imaginative style, where the first impulse of the musical idea has its own strength and creates its own path through the composition. This is what Donatoni later called L’esercizio ludico dell’invenzione (the ludic exercise of the invention). This exercise manifested a positive point of view in converting the compositional activity not into something hermetic or esoteric, as in his negative period, but instead into a playful space. This change of mindset led Donatoni to compose many works that highly impressed international audiences. Those of utmost importance were: Ash (1976), Jeux and Spiri (both from 1977), and, of course, Lumen, written in the memory of Luigi Dallapiccola, which is less known than the three other works. The materials used by Donatoni in this period were frequently minimal, consisting in a very compressed idea or gesture, which is to be found attached to the continual process of mutations. As we will further explore, the composer classified his procedures in a very precise way, and even if these characteristics are more explicit in his works after the 80s, we most importantly encounter many of them in Lumen. IMPORTANT IDEAS PRESENT IN DONATONI’S POSITIVE PERIOD One of the composers that Donatoni admired the most was Béla Bartók. In one article from the year 1982 entitled “Presenza di Bartók,” the Italian composer esteems the String Quartet no. 4 because of the presence of the following four characteristics: 1. Its cellular exposition and organic growth; 2. Its expansion without a development of the materials; 3. The juxtaposition of organisms, mutations, and evolutions; 4. Static pulsations and tone continuity. Shedding Some Light on Donatoni’s Lumen 181 Even though if this article was written seven years after Lumen, and considering that the first half of the 70s was a time of personal crisis and research of new expressions, in the present work we find most of the characteristics that Donatoni pointed out from Bartók’s string quartet in a somehow prophetic manner. The Italian composer gets further than just an abstraction of a few ideas, and decides to develop them in a very personal way. For example, from the idea of “juxtaposition of organisms” he created the notion of Codes, which are: “compositional tools that serve to keep not only the stability but also the [musical] movement. . . . The dichotomy between the stability...

Milan's Studio di Fonologia: Voice Politics in the City, 1955–8

ABSTRACTThe Studio di Fonologia Musicale of Milan, Italy's first electronic music studio, opened in 1955. Housed in the national broadcasting (RAI) studios in Milan, the studio was founded by two celebrated Italian composers: Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna. The institution is often remembered nowadays for being the first electronic music studio to focus its activity on the human voice. As I argue, this focus was not only of an aesthetic nature, but rather reflected long-standing political and intellectual conceptions of voice, speech and public space that were rooted in Italy's early days as a republic, and in mid-twentieth-century Milan as the flagship city for this newly achieved political modernity.

A System of Coordinates in Pierre Boulez’s and Salvatore Sciarrino’s Music: A Problem of Aesthetic Conceptualisation of Musical Composition

Is devoted to the disappearance of tonal system as a unifying principle in various aesthetics and techniques that led Pierre Boulez, Salvatore Sciarrino and other composers to alternative ideas of composition. Boulez’s concept of “gesture” and his two compositions “Rituel: In Memoriam Bruno Maderna” (1974-75) and “Messagesquisse” (1976) are considered within the philosophical and aesthetical contexts. The main tendencies of a new solo music as a “system of coordinates” (new notion of sound, virtuosity, instrumental theatre) are shown on the example of four plays from a cycle of “L’оpera per flauto” by Sciarrino (1977-2000). The new Boulez’s concept of gesture and Sciarrino’s “real field of operations” demand re­thinking the theory of composition as the art.

«Три греческих стихотворения» Бруно Мадерны: к вопросу о развитии серийно-додекафонного метода в итальянской музыке конца 1940-х годов

The article pursues the goal of partially illing up the blank spaces in the study of the legacy of one of the most outstanding composers from the mid-20th century, a representative of the Darmstadt School, Bruno Maderna (1920–1973). The focus of attention is geared on Maderna’s irst achievement in the sphere of serial technique – the cycle “Tre Liriche Greche” [“Three Greek Poems”], examined in the context of the main tendencies of development of Italian classical music of the late 1940s. This period is marked by a special interest on the part of young composers in the musical legacy of the Second Viennese School, most notably, the serial-dodecaphonic method of Arnold Schoenberg. The decisive role of disseminating the dodecaphonic technique in Italy belongs to Bruno Maderna, along with Luigi Dallapicolla. The author of the article comes to the conclusion, based on his detailed study of the music score, of the original way of interpreting Schoenberg’s method in Maderna’s composition, which explains in many ways the evolution of serial writing in the music of the leading serialist composer of Italy in the second half of the 20th century, Luigi Nono. Keywords: dodecaphony, Second Viennese School, Darmstadt School, Klangfarbenmelodie, Bruno Maderna, Luigi Dallapiccola, Luigi Nono

Orality, Invisibility, and Laughter: Traces of Milan in Bruno Maderna and Virginio Puecher's Hyperion (1964)

Orality, Invisibility, and Laughter: Traces of Milan in Bruno Maderna and Virginio Puecher's Hyperion (1964)

Maderna’s Requiem Recovered

Maderna’s Requiem Recovered Claudia di Luzio Bruno Maderna. Requiem per soli, cori e orchestra (1946). A cura di Veniero Rizzardi. (Riedizione critica delle opere di Bruno Maderna.) Milan: Edizioni Suvini Zerboni, [2012], c2006. [Introd. in Ital., Eng., p. v–xii; desc. of sources in Ital., Eng., p. xiii–xvi; editing criteria in Ital., Eng., p. xvii–xxiv; apparatus criticus in Ital., Eng., p. xxv–xxxiv; note on the completion of the “parte prima” by Giorgio Colombo Taccani, in Ital., Eng., p. xxxv; text of the requiem, p. xxxvi–xxxviii; complete orchestration, p. xxxix–xlii; score, p. 1–155. Pub. no. S. 13075 Z. €200.] “I have resumed work on the Requiem, interrupted for many months for obvious reasons, and I hope to bring it to a satisfactory end. This work will be a real landmark for me,” Bruno Maderna wrote in a letter to his teacher and mentor Gian Francesco Malipiero on 31 August 1945 (p. vi). Maderna had been called to the Italian army of Benito Mussolini during World War II, but during the last months of the war he entered the Italian Resistance. For a short time in February 1945, the German SS detained him under arrest. Presumably composed between 1944 and 1946, the Requiem for soloists, choirs, and orchestra by Maderna, one of Italy’s most eminent composers and conductors of the post-World War II avant-garde, has come to light only after sixty years. For a long time it was believed lost. The discovery of the autograph score in a United States library occurred thanks to the perseverance and expertise of Veniero Rizzardi, who was supported by the Istituto per la Musica of the G. Cini Foundation in Venice. Following the publication of a facsimile ( Esumazione di un Requiem: Edizione anastatica della partitura e note informative sul ritrovamento del giovanile Requiem di Bruno Maderna, ed. Veniero Rizzardi, Studi di musica veneta, Archivio G. F. Malipiero, 3 [Florence: Leo Olschki, 2007]) and first performed on 19 November 2009 at the Gran Teatro La Fenice in Venice (Andrea Molino conducting the Orchestra and Choir of the Teatro La Fenice and soloists Carmela Remigio, Veronica Simeoni, Simone Alberghini, and Mario Zeffiri), the score of Maderna’s Requiem is now available in a critical re-edition of Maderna’s works compiled by Mario Baroni and Rossana Dalmonte, a collection of Maderna’s early and some of his mature compositions “in a form best suited to study and performance” (p. iii; with the prefix “re,” Baroni and Dalmonte intend to distance themselves from the idea of a “Complete Works”). An additional goal of the collection is to promote research into Maderna sources, in the hope of discovering further materials concealed in archives or in private possession. A starting point for [End Page 538]work in this direction was the volume Bruno Maderna: Documenti(ed. Mario Baroni, Rossana Dalmonte, and Francesca Magnani [Milan: Suvini Zerboni, 1985]). In the introduction to the critical re-edition, Rizzardi describes the context of the Requiem’s genesis and destiny. While he was completing his Requiem (the date appearing in the autograph score is September 1946), Maderna had the opportunity to conduct for the first time at the Biennale di Venezia in a concert dedicated to the “giovane scuola italiana” (Young Italian School), presented by Malipiero, a member of the “generazione dell’Ottanta” (generation of the Eighties). The concert included his piece Serenata, which is now lost. Around the same time, Maderna met the American composer and critic Virgil Thomson, to whom he was introduced in July 1946 by Malipiero. Having scrutinized the Requiem still to be finished, Thomson praised it enthusiastically in an article he wrote for the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune, “Venice and Its Musical Life” (Paris, 10 August 1946), and called for a performance in the United States. A letter from Maderna to Thomson dated 3 March 1947 (published in Esumazione di un Requiem, p. xvii) reveals that Maderna sent him a cyanotype copy of the manuscript, which became the motivation for Rizzardi’s search for the lost work. Maderna asked for no backup copy, according to Rizzardi, once the composer learned that attempts to perform the work...

"Ritratto di città": Hearing, Listening, Imagining

This article proposes an educational path based on Ritratto di citta , a radio composition (1955) by Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna and Roberto Leydi. Relying on activities that focus on the analysis of both the general structure and specific parts of the composition, the didactic path aims at conveying to students the high image-evoking power of sound, in this case, how music can enhance a ‘visual translation’ of the places described by the narrators in the radio work. The didactic path also provides food for thought about the way in which the emergence of sound reproduction equipment has boosted research and experimentation in the field of musical composition.

Idea and Actualization: Bruno Maderna's Adaptation of Friedrich Hölderlin's Hyperion

Abstract Among characterizations of the Darmstadt Summer Courses, none is more pervasive than the assertion that Darmstadt represented an intense Modernism, in particular a form of Modernism diametrically opposed to the excesses of Romanticism. But if Darmstadt is to be understood as a response to Romanticism, what are we to make of the ascendancy of Friedrich Hölderlin, a key figure in German Romanticism, as a source for texts? Hölderlin's texts have been a perennial favorite for Darmstadt composers since its inception, but Bruno Maderna undertook the most ambitious use of Hölderlin's works during the period from 1960 to 1969. Maderna's Hyperion, a collection of works based on Hölderlin's writings, amounted to no less than a rethinking of the Modernist project—one that does not shrink from its roots in Romanticism. Like the epistolary novel on which it is based, its idea is only approached through an interchangeable series of fragments, thereby engaging Romantic ideals of the work. Maderna's Hyperion continually awaits its completion through performance.

Allegorical Erasmus: Bruno Maderna's Ritratto di Erasmo

AbstractThis essay aims to find a unifying thread amid the eclectic works of Bruno Maderna, and also to situate his compositional philosophy in relation to his more famous colleagues of the Darmstadt Summer Courses. More than any of the other composers at Darmstadt, Maderna was committed to its ‘project’ and to the values it placed on musical discourse, in spite of the fact that he seemed to abstain from its often-heated polemics. In contrast to many of his colleagues, Maderna was not one to speak at length about his compositions, preferring to express himself through his music. However, one work – his 1969 radio documentary, Ritratto di Erasmo – makes a poignant statement both about his music and the post-war generation as a whole. By championing Erasmus's equivocation, the work reveals something of Maderna's relationship to the arguments at Darmstadt. Just as Erasmus was situated between Luther and the Catholic Church, Maderna seemed to sit silently in the middle, while the more ideologically inclined composers swarmed at the periphery.

Auditive analysis of the Quartetto per Archi in due tempi (1955) by Bruno Maderna

The present study on Maderna's quartet aims to compare the “macroform” (the large-scale structure of a musical piece) perceived by subjects while listening to the piece in real time, and the “macroform” as perceived by professional analysts. The study also examines the correlation between “macroform” and perception of tension/relaxation. Two groups of subjects took part in the experiment: 25 non-musicians and 32 musicians. The experiment was carried out both in Bologna and in Edinburgh. We made use of a special computer program, which allows each subject to listen to a piece through head-phones and indicate the points of division and the tension/relaxation perceived while listening in real time. The experiment lasted approximately 60 minutes and involved various steps and tasks. After an initial listening which served to become familiar with the piece and with the computer program, the subjects had to listen to the piece again and identify its main sections. They then had to indicate the criteria they used in formulating their solutions. In the next listening they had to indicate the largest zones of tension and relaxation they perceived. The macroforms perceived by the subjects were compared with 4 macroforms indicated by professional analysts based on listening rather than on analytical theories. The data showed higher correlation between macroforms perceived by the subjects and only 2 macroforms indicated by the analysts, and correlation between the macroforms and tension/relaxation perceived by subjects. The differences between musicians and non musicians and Italian and Edinburgh groups were not significant.

Inside Luciano Berio's Serialism

ABSTRACTLike many other composers who later distanced themselves from serialism, Luciano Berio (1925–2003) embraced its principles in the 1950s and beyond. While Berio's early serial techniques from the Due pezzi of 1951 to Nones of 1954 are well known, his subsequent serial practice is still little understood for three principal reasons: in his writings and interviews Berio provided only limited information on his serial works; it is very difficult to decipher Berio's later complex serial techniques from the published scores alone; and only one sketch survives for any of his serial works from 1951 to 1958 (for Allelujah I, 1955–6).Following a brief examination of the integral serialism in Nones (whose principles have been known for some time thanks to an analytical note by Berio), the present study investigates the serial techniques deployed in the Quartetto per archi (1955–6) and Allelujah I. Berio's serial materials are reconstructed with the help of distributional analyses and from an historical angle that has been little explored thus far: the influence of Bruno Maderna (1920–1973), Berio's mentor and close collaborator at the Studio di fonologia musicale in Milan.

Sweet Thunder: Music and Libretti in 1960s Italy by Vivienne Suvini-Hand

MLR, I03.4, 2008 I14I Self-borrowing-repetition-is most foundwhere a readermight expect it least, in moments of epiphany. There are twomajor kinds of epiphany inPirandello's works: the 'positive',which uses the language of revelation andmysticism, and the 'negative', which uses the language of violence and rupture (p. 52). In his use of epiphany Pi randello imitates both Romantic concepts and himself, suggesting that a 'humoristic' sublime moment can be achieved by amagical incantation, 'the fetishisticattachment to the same groups ofwords' (p. 54). O'Rawe argues not only that an examination of epiphany and metaphor reveals a narrative strategy but that they also provide a key to Pirandello's narrative poetics. Linking the figural language ofmetaphor and epiphany with an examination of layers of textual revisions leads to the realization thatPirandello's poetics can be best described as a 'grafting',a combination of organic growth and violent intrusion, a process described at some length by the gardener in Pirandello's play L'innesto. 'In thegraft, the main, dominant or historically grounded textaccepts the foreign element and makes itstronger' (p. I38). A short review cannot do justice to this arresting critical work. A combination of bold ideas with ameticulous attention to detail and a broad theoretical foundation characterizes O'Rawe's critical approach. Insights are always well substantiated with abundant evidence. Each of the chapters on individual texts provides a cogent and illuminating reading (andmany of the footnotes are treasures in themselves). O'Rawe keeps her observations firmlyfixedon thePirandellian textbut there are important implications here for the process of reading itself. Authorial Echoes is both amajor contribution toPirandello scholarship and a seminal challenge tonarrative criticism. UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK JENNIFER LORCH Sweet Thunder: Music and Libretti in I960S Italy. By VIVIENNE SUVINI-HAND. (Ita lian Perspectives, i6) London: Legenda. 2006. x+294 pp. C45. ISBN 978-I 904350-60-6. The term 'libretto' names the text-usually poetic-set tomusic by the composer of an opera. Published separately from thevocal or full scores, this 'littlebook' will also give stage directions and a list of characters. Of the fiveworks studied by Vivienne Suvini-Hand, only Luigi Dallapiccola's Ulisse (Berlin, I968) has a libretto.The other four setwhat musicians simply call 'texts' (not 'lyrics', as Suvini-Hand repeatedly has it: a term reserved forpopular genres). But Italian composers of the I96os had not ceased towrite operas, even if the younger generation preferred to call theirmusic theatrical assaults on bourgeois proprieties 'azioni sceniche'. A book that lived up to Suvini-Hand's subtitle would survey a good three dozen works, demonstrating a striking range of verbal and musical forms and styles, from thepolitically committed avant-gardism of Luigi Nono's Intolleranza I960 (Venice, I96I) through the high modernist Ulisse to the quirky productions of Gian Francesco Malipiero and the conservative music dramas of Ildebrando Pizzetti. After her Dallapiccola chapter, Suvini-Hand instead discusses three avant-garde concert works that combine voices, instruments, and tape: Luciano Berio's Laborin tusII (I965), Giacomo Manzoni's Parole da Beckett (1970), and Bruno Maderna's Ausstrahlung (197I). Between the Berio (which, admittedly, may also be presented theatrically but rarelyhas been) and theManzoni she tacklesArmando Gentilucci's Strofe di Ungaretti (i 967) forsix voices. Texts and translations follow as an appendix. Ulisse and Laborintus II are reasonably well known; scores of theother three,by con trast,are not easily to be found inBritish libraries, ifat all; and neither the Manzoni nor theGentilucci is available on CD. One wonders why Suvini-Hand has elected to write detailed commentaries on pieces thatwill be inaudible or invisible (or both) for I I42 Reviews most readers, as she does not make much of a case for them: throughout the book, she largely bypasses themusic of her chosen compositions inorder to trace sources forand connections between thecomponents of their texts. When one considers that, apart from theUngaretti poems set by Gentilucci and the libretto of Ulisse, these texts scarcely inviteconsideration away from theirmusic, and further,that inParole da Beckett, as Suvini-Hand puts it, thewords 'are, to a large extent, treated as raw elementary sound, and the actual text is often unintelligible' (p. I42), the project begins to take on an air...

Bruno Maderna’s Serial Arrays

A central figure at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music in the 1950s, Bruno Maderna (1920–73) pioneered a type of serialism that was as deeply rooted in the contrapuntal tradition of the past, as it was committed to the exploration of new avenues in musical expression. This article investigates the serial arrays that lie at the core of his works written between 1951 and 1956. The constructive principles behind Maderna’s tone rows are explained, as are the ways in which he subjected them to order permutations that he represented graphically in matrices, tabulating order positions and pitch-class space. The article further examines how Maderna’s matrices served as the source for his rhythmic language. With evidence from the sketch materials and other sources, the analyses show how Maderna designed his serial arrays in response to what he considered to have been the shortcomings of the twelve-tone technique.

Electronic and Computer Music (review)

Electronic and Computer Music. By Peter Manning. Revised and expanded ed. York: Oxford University Press, 2004. [x, 474 p. ISBN 0-19-517085-7. $35.00.] Bibliography, illustrations, discography, index, photos. No other genre of music has experienced such expansion, in terms of both mechanics and craft, as electroacoustic music has in its approximately 100 year history, a history as much about developing technology as it is about music itself. As director of electroacoustic music studio at University of Durham, Peter Manning has background and experience that enables him to provide a thoughtful and thorough account of electroacoustic music, an umbrella term he uses to describe electronic and computer music because it does not attempt to partition medium in terms of techniques by which sound material is generated, processed, and organized. Instead, it focuses attention on very special nature of acoustic results, taking account of fact that these will always be reproduced via loudspeakers or headphones (p. 403). intent of Electronic and Computer Music is not only to provide a chronology of genre, but also to impart technical foundations that magnify of each development in its history; a particularly important aspect, considering nearly one half of this revised and expanded book is new material dedicated to digital audio and its related elements. Admittedly, book does become heavily laden with technical jargon at times for casual reader, but it is clearly necessary in order to fully appreciate innovations that contributed to evolution of modern music synthesis and digital audio techniques. book is divided into eight sections: (1) Developments from 1945-1960; (2) New Horizons in Electronic Design; (3) The Electronic Repertory from 1960; (4) The Revolution to 1980; (5) Digital Audio; (6) MIDI; (7) Desktop Synthesis and Signal Processing, and (8) The Expanding Perspective. Manning precedes first chapter with background information on activities and developments from turn of century to 1945, describing some initial attempts at electronic sound generation, including such exotica as Dynamophone (measuring in at 60 feet and 200 tons) and Givelet (a precursor to Hammond Organ), as well as more familiar and established ondes martenot and theremin. He also explores influence of Italian Futurist movement in poetry on evolving compositional techniques during first decade of twentieth century, an influence that bolstered an assertive call for incorporation of new instruments, larger tonal palettes, and liberal extension of compositional strategies as a whole. This highly experimental period also marked emergence of optical and magnetic recording, as well as introduction of commercial 78 rpm records. French and German musical aesthetics have had a long history of fundamental differences with regard to their respective tenets. With musique concrete of Pierre Schaeffer's Radiodiffusion Television Francaise in Paris, and elektronische Musik of Werner Meyer-Eppler's Norwestdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne, quarrels and disputes were a regular course of action for these two major forces in electronic music. differences were, however, kept at a professional level, as Manning explains it: Intense disagreements developed between studios and these were aired in public on a number of occasions, notably at summer European festivals of contemporary music that were then approaching their zenith in terms of their international significance (p. 19). He clarifies that the reasons for this overt hostility were not merely a matter of patriotism, although understandably this factor played a part. They lay more fundamentally in marked differences of outlook as regards acceptable practices of electronic composition (pp. 19-20). section 2 concentrates on these two camps, as well as Milan school, founded in 1955 by Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna, and developments in America, represented in work of Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, John Cage, and others, along with Milton Babbitt and seminal developments he made with punched tape control system of RCA synthesizer at Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. …