Il volume è dedicato al compianto Claudio Gallico, improvvisamente venuto a mancare il 24 febbraio 2006 al termine della prova generale della rappresentazione della favola di Orfeo del Poliziano per la quale egli aveva composto le musiche. Già presidente della SIdM, che aveva contribuito a fondare, Gallico dal 1995 era attivo e sollecito membro del comitato direttivo di questa rivista.
Sommario
Editoriale
- Paola Besutti, Quarant'anni di 'Rivista italiana di musicologia'
Saggi
- Luigi Collarile, Giovanni Legrenzi e il concorso per il posto di maestro di cappella del Duomo di Milano (1669). Abstract.
- Bruno Forment, Dall''effeminato' al 'virtuoso': modelli d'identità di genere nel 'Telemaco' (1718) di Alessandro Scarlatti. Abstract.
- Antonio Dell'Olio, Per una indagine sulle cappelle musicali in Puglia durante il XVIII secolo. Abstract.
- Licia Sirch, Notturno italiano. Sulla musica vocale da camera tra Sette e Ottocento. Abstract.
- Angela Fiore, Musica e follia agli albori del romanticismo tedesco: 'Der Besuch im Irrenhause' di Friedrich Rochlitz. Abstract.
- Mario Ruffini, Piero della Francesca in musica. Luigi Dallapiccola e la 'Storia della vera Croce'. Abstract.
- Alberto Fassone, Strutture temporali e tipizzazione fiabesca in 'Der Mond' di Carl Orff. Abstract.
- Daniele Segre Amar, Dal Togo alle accademie europee. Influenze, tradizioni e innovazioni, dalla musica Kabiyé alle partiture di Reich, Berio e Ligeti. Abstract.
Interventi
- Luca Aversano, La musica strumentale in Italia tra Sette e Ottocento: declino o viva tradizione?
Recensioni
- Guido D'Arezzo, Le opere. Micrologus – Regulae rhytmicae – Prologus in Antiphonarium – Epistola ad Michaelem – Epistola ad archiepiscopum Mediolanensem, Testo latino e italiano, Introduzione, traduzione e commento a cura di Angelo Rusconi, Firenze, Edizioni del Galluzzo per la Fondazione Ezio Franceschini, 2005 (Marina Toffetti).
- Il canto fratto: l'altro gregoriano, atti del convegno internazionale di studi (Parma, Arezzo, 3-6 dicembre 2003), a cura di Marco Gozzi e Francesco Luisi, Roma, Torre d'Orfeo, 2005 (Domenico De Cesare).
- Marina Toffetti, Gli Ardemanio e la musica in Santa Maria della Scala di Milano nella prima metà del Seicento, Lucca, LIM, 2004 (Piero Gargiulo).
- Daniele Torelli, Benedetto Binago e il mottetto a Milano tra Cinque e Seicento, Lucca, LIM, 2004 (Piero Gargiulo).
- Alda Bellasich – Emilia Fadini – Ferdinando Granziera – Sigfrido Leschiutta, Il clavicembalo, Torino EDT, 2005 (Donata Bertoldi).
- Enrico Fubini, Il pensiero musicale del Romanticismo, Torino, EDT, 2005 (Giacomo Fronzi).
- Ponchielli e la musica per banda, a cura di Licia Sirch, Pisa, ETS, 2005 (Teresa Chirico).
- Gian Nicola Vessia, Marco Rossi, Le Firme dell'Organo. Compositori e Repertorio organistico del Novecento italiano, Bergamo, Edizioni Carrara, 2003 (Michelangelo Gabbrielli).
- Milano e il suo Conservatorio 1808-2002, a cura di Guido Salvetti, Milano, Skira, 2003 (Daniela Macchione).
- Il far musica, la scenografia, le feste. Scritti sull'iconografia musicale, a cura di Francesca Zannoni, Roma, Nuova Argos, 2002 (Lilia Mortelliti).
- Federico Del Sordo, Sociologia della musica urbana. Artisti di strada a Roma, Roma, Meltemi, 2005 (Carlo Romano).
Schede
- Federico Follino, Cronache mantovane, a cura di Claudio Gallico, Firenze, Olschki, 2004 (Paola Besutti).
- I Gonzaga e l'Impero. Itinerari dello spettacolo, a cura di Umberto Artioli e Cristina Grazioli, con la collaborazione di Simona Brunetti e Licia Mari, Firenze, Le Lettere, 2005 (Sara Dieci).
- Carla Conti, Nobilissime allieve della musica a Napoli tra '700 e '800, Napoli, Guida, 2003 (Roberto Giuliani).
- Hartmut Hein, Beethovens Klavierkonzerte. Gattungsnorm und individuelle Konzeption, Beihefte zum Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 48, Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag, 2001 (Luca Aversano).
- Antonio Caroccia, La corrispondenza salvata. Lettere di maestri e compositori a Francesco Florimo, Palermo, Mnemes, 2004 (Francesca Seller).
- Maria Luisa Sánchez Carbone, Vox arcana. Teoria e pratica della voce, Milano, Rugginenti, 2005 (Michelangelo Gabbrielli).
Libri ricevuti
L. Collarile
Giovanni Legrenzi e il concorso per il posto di maestro di cappella del Duomo di Milano (1669)
In this study Luigi Collarile analyses the historical documentation that concerns the competition for the appointment of Kapellmeister of the Duomo in Milan after Michel'Angelo Grancini's death (1669), in connection especially with the participation of Giovanni Legrenzi. After a first examination of six candidates in June 1669 (Francesco Bagatti, Giovanni Antonio Grossi, Carlo Cesare Cabiati Gioseffo Antonio Celidone, Andrea Pizzala and Pier Simone Agostini), the Capitolo del Duomo decided in August to proceed to a new selection. Francesco Carderelli and Giovanni Legrenzi also participate in the final round (28 November 1669), which shows the affirmation of Giovanni Antonio Grossi.
Giovanni Legrenzi took part in the competition in Milan during a very hard period of his life/biography In 1665, confident that he would obtain a position at the imperial court of Leopold I, he left the direction of the chapel of the Accademia dello Spirito Santo in Ferrara. He had however not yet received the appointment in Vienna. Without having a secure position, he moved to Venice. During 1668 he was offered a position at the court of Louis XIV. But he had to renounce to go to Paris because of a very serious illness. He was still convalescing when he answered the invitation to the competition in Milan.
A philological investigation of the preserved musical scores of the competition in Milan has permitted to recognize the autographical sources of Grossi, Celidone, Cabiati and Pizzala. No elements however allow one of the six preserved compositions to be attributed to Giovanni Legrenzi. Most likely, they are the six candidates' experiments for the first examination. Four appendices with a complete presentation of the precious archival documentation that concerns the competition complete the study.
B. Forment
Dall''effeminato' al 'virtuoso': modelli d'identità di genere nel 'Telemaco' (1718) di Alessandro Scarlatti
Few books can claim both the popularity and controversiality of Fénelon's Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699), a novel translated into several languages and repeatedly praised for containing «delightful images of practical philosophy» (Muratori, 1706). But Télémaque had more to offer than just reading matter. The dramatic episodes punctuating its epic framework have invited numerous theatrical adaptations. Fénelon's recasting of Telemachus's adventures on Calypso's isle (Books I, IV and VII) bore such conspicuously 'operatic' qualities that it became a favorite opera scenario.
Clues as to the reception of this particular episode in settecento opera can be found in Muratori's widely-read Della perfetta poesia italiana (1706). In fact, the story of a young prince experiencing difficulties in abandoning « the charms of an idle and effeminate life » chimes with Muratori's rationalist stance on opera and gender. The seducing 'siren songs' of Calypso and her nymphs can be seen as representing the debasing effects of music on contemporary audiences, and the discursive persuasion of Telemachus's counselor Mentor (Minerva in male disguise) as the voice of rationality. As a result, Telemachus's rejection of effeminacy and sensuality must have provided reformist poets with a powerful tool to redefine operatic virtue. Alessandro Scarlatti's Telemaco (Rome, 1718), the first full-scale Italian opera to elaborate on Fénelon's novel, confirms such reading. Intertextual analysis indicates that Carlo Sigismondo Capeci drew his libretto from a hereto-unknown source, Pellegrin's Télémaque (Paris, 1714). Yet, while copying Pellegrin's scenic lay-out, Capeci at the same time restored elements from the novel that were absent from the French opera, most notably the character of Mentor and the semantic devices with which Fénelon had stressed the 'poisoning' effect of feminine eros on masculine eloquence. A closer look at Scarlatti's score reveals how the restoration of Fénelon's gender ideology has helped to differentiate characters exclusively performed by male singers.
A. Dell'Olio
Per una indagine sulle cappelle musicali in Puglia durante il XVIII secolo
Research on musical chapels in the Kingdom of Naples has so far focused on the capital. Recently, many documents emerged, out of several Puglia archives, allowing to outline a history of the musical institutions in three provinces: Capitanata, Terra di Bari, and Terra d'Otranto.
This essay focuses on chapels located in cathedrals, collegiate churches, or convents. As combing-up of 18th-century business books and conclusioni capitolari shows, musical positions were mostly given to clerics, especially as organists and chapel masters—two often interchangeable roles. Only the two palatine chapels in Altamura and Acquaviva delle Fonti and the Bari basilica, St. Nicholas, could afford to pay lay musicians—those were dominio regio churches, placed under the Neapolitan major chaplain's direct power. Here, both polyphonic and concertato-style music was played, albeit with small outfits. As documents show, more performers were recruited on patron saints' days, when musici forestieri were also involved, usually drawn from the same province.
Musicians were trained in Naples conservatories, or in music schools attached to seminars or—less often—in private schools, like the one the Tricarico family ran in Gallipoli. Some activity is also attested in a few convents, were a maestra di cappella position was created. Along the entire century, being a musician in Puglia was largely a family tradition, or a job related to specific social agreements.
L. Sirch
Notturno italiano. Sulla musica vocale da camera tra Sette e Ottocento
This essay discusses Italian chamber vocal music ca. 1760-1830 and its sub-genres—canzonetta, arietta, duetto notturno, cantata, anacreontica, focusing on the duetto notturno, a novelty in those times. Its original main traits, as outlined by Harrison J. Wignall (1993), are: (1) lyrics are short arias à la Metastasio; (2) the musical setting displays formal, melodic, and harmonic traits akin to period popular or pseudo-popular genres, such as the Venetian boat song (canzone da battello); (3) use of 'lyric form' is frequent, again like in those very pop songs, of which the duetto notturno actually forms a two-part variant. In short, the genre can be defined as a musical cameo, pioneering excursions into the anxiety prompted by darkness, night, or exotic settings.
Discussion of the lyrics reveals: (1) favored authors are Metastasio and others from Arcadia, along with such pre-Romantic poets as Jacopo Vittorelli, Aurelio De' Giorgi Bertòla, Ippolito Pindemonte, and Melchiorre Cesarotti (the translator of Ossian); (2) descriptive traits, often from open-air settings, increase over time, along with a sentimentality tinged with melancholia, negative feelings, and the chill of death; (3) Metastasio's poetry still looks effectively voicing the new late-century taste, aiming at the simple, the natural, and the witty.
Close scrutiny of Felice Blangini's duettos shows their artificial naiveté, so fashionable in Napoleon-era drawing rooms. Instead, the rediscovery of nature as a source of emotion is apparent in Cherubini's duettos on Paolo Rolli's ode, Solitario bosco ombroso. Bonifazio Asioli's work shows yet another side, that was to leave its mark on the formal prototype of the genre—music grows expressive to plunge listeners in the moods conjured up by the lyrics.
This study sheds light on a little-known and under-researched genre, often less considered vis-à-vis contemporary art song, of which it represents, after all, an aspect, with all its sundry facets—the simple and popular, the drawing-room pretty and sophisticated, the 'imitation of nature', and the pathetic/expressive. Taken together, such elements make up that generic Romantic trend which stemmed out of Arcadia, ran across the 18th century, and reached the Romantic movement proper. Those elements also help us disentangle seemingly conflicting tendencies, here represented by Francesco Pollini's work. Such mix of traits was to achieve vital importance in the birth of Italian Romantic art song—e.g. in Bellini's lyricism, Donizetti's dramatic realism, Mercadante's theatrical gesturing, as well as in 19th-century 'picturesque' compilations, of which Rossini's genial Soirées musicales are both a climax and a sign of upcoming decline.
A. Fiore
Musica e follia agli albori del romanticismo tedesco: 'Der Besuch im Irrenhause' di Friedrich Rochlitz
In the year 1804, Friedrich Rochlitz was editor of the influential Leipzig review, «Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung». There he issued his short story, Der Besuch im Irrenhause (“A Visit to an Asylum”), which can be regarded as a pivotal work in the field of writings on the Romantic musician myth, as well among those relating art to madness. In fact, its most original aspect is its tight music–madness link—a novelty in those times—functioning as a Leitmotiv.
Der Besuch im Irrenhause, sub-titled “An Essay in Psychology”, depicts a scientific experiment. The narrator is an amateur psychologist. While touring an insane asylum, he is struck by a young inmate who withdrew from the real world to live in a personal one, mostly made of sounds and musical visions. Music, the language of heart and soul, gradually rises up to the role of ideal mean for inner expression. The act of listening implies transport and ecstasy, a journey in a fantasy world conjured up by sounds, and the vehicle to rise up to God. Music is seen as the «language of angels and blessed spirits», the sacred art par excellence, and the route to grasp the deep unity of the universe. Yet music will also drive the main character to madness, with mystic visions, imaginary dialogues, and raving.
For sure, this work is interesting as a forerunner of several topics subsequently seized up by a whole generation of writers, musicians, and thinkers—the upcoming Romantic movement. Rochlitz's short story stands tall in its times, on a par with the best work by Wackenroder, Hoffmann, and Grillparzer. It is all the more interesting for its creator was no Romantic writer, but rather an 18th-century thinker, rooted in the Enlightenment, its views, and its values. Today, Rochlitz is an unduly neglected figure, whereas in his days he exerted vast influence in the German-speaking area.
M. Ruffini
Piero della Francesca in musica. Luigi Dallapiccola e la 'Storia della vera Croce'
The topic of this research project is the correspondence between different disciplines, between geographical spaces and distant historical times, between the category of time, specific to music, and that of space, specific to the visual arts: the starting point for this research are two different masterpieces: one, from the figurative arts of the Renaissance, the fresco cycle of the Legend of the true cross by Piero della Francesca, the other a modern musical masterpiece, Luigi Dallapiccola's Ulisse. Twentieth-century musical theatre is a privileged place for a well thought-out dialogue between music and the figurative arts because in it the two disciplines fully demonstrate the close proximity of their respective expressive modes and worlds, both in methodology and spirit. Syncretisms between the two arts become obvious: the perspective purity of Piero della Francesca and the melodic essentiality of Dallapiccola find their common points in mathematics, a medium that connects Renaissance figurate art with twentieth-century music. The mirrored structure of Piero's scenes for the Legend of the true cross is paradigmatically evident in the structure of the scenes in a work such as Ulisse, just as the contraposition between the elegance of The encounter between the Queen of Sheba and Solomon and the violence of The battle between Heraclius and Chosroes finds its perfect musical correspondence in the Two Studies for violin and piano, then developed into Two Pieces for Orchestra, composed by Dallapiccola as a musical transposition of these specific images. The thematic unity that finds in the “Sacred Wood” the perspective focus of two so diverse scenes is repeated in the musical composition, with themes that join and intersect each other, as well as with dynamic colourings of pianissimo and fortissimo that resonate perfectly with elegance and violence. But there is another fundamental aspect that joins together these two artistic experiences: their spiritual universe. The “serial” organization of the frescos and the “figurative” organization of Ulisse are metaphors for research that goes well beyond the specific semantic demands of the two respective disciplines, because it goes past knowledge of humankind and pushes research towards what can be hypothesized and what cannot.
A. Fassone
Strutture temporali e tipizzazione fiabesca in 'Der Mond' di Carl Orff
In Der Mond, a work staged in 1939, Carl Orff set to music a fairy tale from the Grimms' collection and tried to pinpoint appropriate stage solutions—as he was to do again, few years later, in his fairy opera, Die Kluge, also from the Grimms. This essay takes up Werner Thomas' research (1994) and shows how Orff put together this miniature Baroque theatrum mundi by emphasizing archaic mythic elements the original tale left in the background. Two elements are vital for the stage production to be effective: (1) the narrator, who makes the work resemble an oratorio or a Brecht Lehrstück; (2) Part II introduction by Petrus, the Heaven Watcher—a parable on the meaning and fate of humankind. A thorough analysis of the plot must take into account such folk-tale laws as the law of cyclical time structure, described by the noted theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin. His work is often cited here, to point out the typical folksy time structures the stolen moon tale displays.
D. Segre Amar
Dal Togo alle accademie europee. Influenze, tradizioni e innovazioni, dalla musica Kabiyé alle partiture di Reich, Berio e Ligeti
The study of causes and chance events that happened to connect two distant musical traditions may help understand some aspects of both. Certain basic principles, often only implied, become apparent as we look at them from a different standpoint. And it grows clear that sundry meanings are given to the word “influence”, so ubiquitous in discourse on cultural exchange.
By discussing some specific traits of sub-Saharan music, the Author explores how and why some major 20th-century Western composers came to welcome its influence, thus establishing relationships that reveal (apart from superficial comparison) how such musical concepts as “influence”, “tradition”, and “innovation” developed in Africa and in Western music, and how they were received in academia. This work is rooted in the Author's personal experience in musical analysis, from Togo to European scholarship.