Indici - editoriali - abstracts

Margaret Bent, Pietro Emiliani’s Chaplain Bartolomeo Rossi da Carpi and the Lamentations of Johannes de Quadris in Vicenza. (Cfr. p. 16, 95/I).

Pietro Emiliani, vescovo di Vicenza dal 1409 al 1433, umanista veneziano e protettore di musicisti, solo dopo la morte ricevette, nel manoscritto Bologna Q 15, la dedica del mottetto Excelsa civitas Vincencia (scritto per il suo successore Francesco Malipiero, al quale risulta pure dedicato in altra fonte). Uno dei suoi cappellani, Bartolomeo Rossi da Carpi, fu spesso al suo fianco in compagnia di noti polifonisti di professione e gli sopravvisse per venti anni come canonico di Vicenza. Bartolomeo, nel suo testamento (Vicenza, 1453), includeva il lascito di un consistente quantitativo di libri, tra cui libri de cantu, a favore del capitolo della cattedrale di Vicenza, e prevedeva una dotazione per la copiatura di un volume di sequenze e lamentazioni. Le volontà del testatore furono rispettate, ed il volume è attualmente conservato nell’Archivio capitolare di Vicenza (ora ospitato presso il Seminario vescovile), ms. U.VIII.11. Il codice contiene le prescritte sequenze monodiche e le lamentazioni polifoniche di Johannes de Quadris, argomento di diversi studi di Giulio Cattin.
Il presente saggio mette in relazione il testamento ed il manoscritto, documenta non solo la data ma anche le circostanze della compilazione del volume e verifica la tenace sopravvivenza di un gusto conservativo nella notazione accanto a più recenti sviluppi. Aggiunge nuovi elementi a sostegno della pacifica convivenza, nel primo Quattrocento, tra inclinazioni umanistiche in campo letterario e l’esercizio della musica polifonica, non solo per il vescovo Emiliani, ma anche per il suo cappellano Bartolomeo Rossi.

Etienne Darbellay, Continuité, coherence et "formes de temps". A propos des "Night Fantasies" d’Elliott Carter. (Cfr. pp. 324-25, 95/II).

La struttura e l’organizzazione di un’opera musicale non si rivelano necessariamente alla percezione: le regole costruttive usate per dare coerenza a sequenze sonore distinte non sono le guide indispensabili dell’ascolto. In altre parole, può esistere una logica nascosta che presiede alla differenziazione degli eventi in superficie, di tal sorta che una successione di eventi definiti appaiano solidali nella formulazione di un’idea, senza che questa solidarietà possa essere percepita se non intuitivamente, e senza che l’idea prodotta si manifesti come conseguenza costruita e deducibile della sequenza formale che la elabora.
Una soluzione di continuità tra il gioco delle regole fondatrici astratte e la determinazione dell’apparenza per così dire caotica degli eventi in superficie è di certo un dato di fondo che accomuna un buon numero di opere posteriori al 1950 (serialismo integrale, o altre formalizzazioni radicali). In queste opere, la proiezione degli eventi sonori sullo schermo della durata è vuoi (1) totalmente calcolata e determinata in una struttura astratta fuoritempo: e questa allora diviene la sola risorsa per la spiegazione di eventi che in tutte le loro manifestazioni sono direttamente collegati alla sorgente esogena; vuoi (2) parzialmente o totalmente indeterminata (lasciata ad esempio all’iniziativa del caso attraverso l’interprete): e allora domina l’oggetto bruto irrimediabilmente isolato, offerto alla pura esperienza senza risorse esplicative contestuali.
Tuttavia, un’analoga frattura di continuità si ritrova in opere che non hanno nulla a che vedere con l’utopia del formalismo puro, ma che al contrario rientrano in un progetto estetico che attribuisce un’assoluta priorità al risultato percepito, al "dare ad intendere". È il caso, quantomai stuzzichevole ed illuminante, delle Night Fantasies. Nel materiale prestabilito col quale Carter limita le sue possibilità, questa composizione determina delle condizioni iniziali di altezze e di durate come un serbatoio capace di alimentare la temporalità attuale dell’opera in ingredienti variati sì, ma riuniti dall’appartenenza a un processo generatore unificante. Rimane eccezionale, a percezione ultimata, la convergenza tra il senso dell’evento e il suo legame con la struttura che lo controlla. Nella maggior parte delle situazioni concrete d’ascolto, il colpo di genio di quest’opera risiede nella capacità di produrre la sequenza ‘attese – stato critico – ribaltamento nel senso’ senza offrire segnali e indicatori che permettano all’ascoltatore di stabilire, momento per momento, in quale di queste fasi si trovi. In altri termini, la struttura astratta fuori-tempo svolge qui la funzione di un "attrattore estraneo", che offre esplicitamente un bacino di convergenza ad una moltitudine indeterminata di traiettorie d’ascolto possibili, alle quali solo la loro dinamica attualizzazione può dare un senso. Quanto alla produzione del risultato estetico, c’è una funzionalità realmente suddivisa tra il materiale di partenza, la struttura formale e l’esperienza attiva in tempo reale; non è necessario alcun ricorso forzato al caso, né ad alcuna forma insolita di astrazione. Quest’opera perciò funge qui da serbatoio sperimentale per proporre un modello di percezione musicale particolare, ispirato al riconoscimento dinamico della forma dei reticoli sinaptici.

Andrea Dell’Antonio, La prima forma-sonata. Morfologia e sintassi nelle sonate di Dario Castello (1621). (Cfr. pp. 45-46, 95/I).

Descriptions of the early baroque sonata have to date focused on what has been referred to as their "patchwork" nature: the form of these works is purported to be a regular alternation of contrasting sections without overall coherence. This essay examines Dario Castello’s Sonate concertate in stil moderno, libro primo of 1621, and concludes that the surface discontinuity in the sonatas from this collection belies their structural similarity. While the overall process of the sonatas seems to be one of experimentation with disparate compositional procedures and gestures – the circle of fifths being a primary example, but also the sequence in general and the formation of motives out of motivic fragments this experimentation takes place within a fairly clear model.
A paradoxical attribute of this model is its flexibility. Although the overall structure, internal procedures, and harmonic language are the same in all sonatas, no two sonatas are exactly alike in the way in which those elements are manipulated. Thus, we can see in these works not only the establishment of what Kallberg terms the "generic contract" but also the conscious breaking of the "contract" for purposes of affect and meraviglia.
While it is difficult to generalize from the sonatas of Castello’s Libro primo a set of defining characteristic traits for the instrumental stile moderno, it does not appear unreasonable to conclude that Castello considered the structural traits and built-in system of formal and harmonic expectations of his sonatas to be components of the new style. It would seem, in any case, that the commonplace about the early sonata being a chaotic patchwork of contrasting sections should be reevaluated; it certainly does not apply to Castello’s works.

Renato Di Benedetto, Dal Metastasio a Pergolesi e ritorno. Divagazioni intercontestuali fra l’"Adriano in Siria" e "L’Olimpiade". (Cfr. p. 295, 95/II).

Departing from an analysis of relationships between music and poetic text in the first aria of Pergolesi’s Adriano in Siria, the essay examines four different types of approach which can be observed in the opera performed in Naples in 1734 as compared with the original literary-dramatic text by Metastasio (Vienna 1732). If in the first aria Pergolesi seems to proceed with absolute faithfulness to the poet’s intentions, in a following one he sets a paraphrase of Metastasio’s text, which fundamentally alters its character; in another he sets the original text, but then re-utilizes the music twice the following year in L’Olimpiade to set completely different words; finally, he substitutes the text of Adriano’s last aria (symmetrical in Metastasio’s libretto to the first) with a completely different one, which egregiously belies the faithfulness displayed at the beginning. The essay seeks to find the dramatic reason for each approach, and simultaneously attempts to establish a connection among the different solutions which might return some organic coherence to the drama, despite its being manipulated. The failure of this latter task brings to the conclusion that only a flexible approach, rife with a multiplicity of points of view not necessarily coherent among themselves, allows for a historical judgement adequate to the complexity of the phenomenon at hand.

Giovanni Di Stefano, Il suono lontano. La musica come ideale poetico nel romanticismo tedesco. (Cfr. pp. 91-92, 95/I).

A recurring myth in the history of music and poetry is the original unity of word and sound, lost with the advance of civilization. In poetry this myth returns in the eighteenth century as the symbolic emblem of a period in which harmony between nature and culture was still intact. In "popular poetry" Johann Gottfried Herder seeks the "traces of those times in which song and language were one". What characterizes a Volkslied is not its social provenance or anonymous transmission, but rather its "poetic modulation" – in other words: its "melody", its inherent musicality. From Herder’s considerations on the melodic nucleus of Volkslieder (1778-79) we can draw a line all the way to Novalis’ programmatic reflections, when he writes, "our language was in the beginning much more musical and has become more and more prosaic ... it must return to being song". In Novalis’ view, poetry must liberate "words" from their referential role as "signs", so that they may regain the purity and absoluteness of "sounds", which need not refer to external reality and have internal logic just by their interrelationships. There are a number of analogies between Novalis’ musings on poetic language and contemporary essays on musical aesthetics by W. H. Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck (1796, 1799), in which a "paradigm shift" is evident: musical language is exalted over spoken language precisely for its semantic non–specificity, because it can express that which words cannot. The relationship between words and music is thus turned on its head: instrumental music, conceived in the baroque as "discourse of sound", becomes the model of an "absolute" language, free from the bounds of mimesis.
From the convergence between the ideal of absolute poetry envisioned by Novalis and the idea of a Volkslied theorized by Herder comes the Lied, the most fostered genre of romantic poetry. On the one hand we have the goal of transcending language through music, on the other the need for spontaneous and immediate "singable"-ness. The Lied as a poetic genre should not be understood as a text conceived as possibly to be set to music, but rather as a text that in a way contains its own music. This means not an attempt to imitate musical effects, but rather to transform words back into sound and to break the evidence of textual images into a network of acoustical associations, using the means of poetry – such as rhymes, assonances, alliterations, echoes, repetitions, etc. – almost as compositional tools in a musical sense. The poems Der Spinnerin Nachtlied by Brentano, Sehnsucht by Eichendorff, Aus alten Marchen by Heine, show – upon examination – three separate moments in the realization of this ideal of musical poetry: in Brentano the translation of the Volkslied scheme into a virtuoso "ars combinatoria"; in Eichendorff the transition from visual to acoustic mimesis, where optical impressions melt away; in Heine the ironic epilogue of the genre.
In modern poetry the unity sought by the romantics between spontaneous popular song and calculated artistic composition becomes definitively shattered, even though the idea of hearkening back to music as a model of "absolute language" is not lost (for example in symbolist poetry). The ideal of poetry entirely determined by voice and sound is perhaps most fully and paradoxically realized in the Dadaists’ Lautgedichte, which stand the romantic imperative on its head: if Novalis wanted to treat words as "sounds", the Dadaists attempt – as in Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate – to treat sounds as "words".

Giuseppe Gerbino, Gli arcani più profondi dell’arte. Presupposti teorici e culturali dell’artificio canonico nei secoli XVI e XVII. (Cfr. p. 236, 95/II).

This article analyzes the theoretical and cultural context within which the artifice of canon developed in the first half of the seventeenth century. The exploration draws on Giancarlo Bizzi’s hypothesis (1982), according to which the complex canonic structures that accompanied the history of counterpoint from the Franco-Flemish composers to J. S. Bach took the form of elaborations of prearranged structural grids. Theoretical works of the first decades of the seventeenth century, characterized by a renewed interest for canonic imitation, offer interesting observations to that effect. The development and systematization of canonic procedures over a cantus firmus, following techniques and criteria derived from the practice of contrappunto alla mente, have strongly influenced theoretical writing on canon and – as a consequence – our understanding of the criteria for its construction. But, as it seems we can conclude from the works of some theorists (Morley, Picerli, Kircher) and some practitioners of this type of composition (Micheli, P. F. Valentini), the invention of canonic artifice implied the elaboration of constructive schemes along with traditional contrapuntal techniques. Attention to such elaborative techniques appears to be connected to an idea of composition which, folding upon itself, becomes an abstract exploration of those mechanisms that rule relationships between sounds. In this context, Athanasius Kircher’s tabula mirifica, a logical-numerical system for the construction of double counterpoint, takes on particular significance. Interest for these procedures waned and canon became a simple exercise in counterpoint with the disappearance of those cultural assumptions which had fueled faith in the possibility of exploring, through the artifice of construction, more profound musical laws.

Paolo Gozza, Una matematica rinascimentale: la musica di Descartes. (Cfr. p. 257, 95/II).

Two recent editions of Descartes’ Compendium Musicae (by Fr. de Buzon and L. Zanoncelli) reintroduce ancient and unresolved historiographical questions: the identification of the ancient, medieval, and renaissance musical sources of the Cartesian treatise; the epistemological paradigm developed by Descartes within the context of late renaissance mathematicism; the role of music in Descartes’ intellectual education and in the development of his ideas; the manuscript circulation of the Compendium and its influence on music theory in the 1620s and 1630s; the reception of the Compendium, from the posthumous edition of 1650 to Rameau’s tribute in his Traité de l’harmonie of 1722. The answer to these questions may come from the firm historical and cultural grounding of the Compendium musicae in the tradition of musica speculativa and its renaissance updates, from which Descartes draws the epistemological models and the intellectual lexicon for the central theme of the treatise: geometricization of a sensation – i.e., sound – as a premise to musical listening, to experiencing the perceived musical continuum. This essay discusses this theoretical nucleus and the frame of problems within which it unfolds (the Euclidean structure of the treatise, the relationship between ratio and sensus, praenotanda, duration, imagination, deduction, and classification of consonances) in light of the state of late renaissance music theory, between the crisis of the numero sonoro in the tradition that had culminated with Zarlino and the new foundations laid in the 1630s by Mersenne and Galileo. A correct historical contextualization of Descartes’ treatise is the premise for an evaluation of its significance in the "marvelous triennium" of 1618-21, inspired by his meeting with Isaac Beeckman (the dedicatee of the Compendium musicae) and scanned by the scientia penitus nova and by the inventum mirabile, of which the arithmo-geometry of the Compendium is a logical and chronological passage.

Wilhelm Seidel, Division und Progression. Zum Begriff der Musikalischen zeit im 18. Jahhundert. (Cfr. 64-65, 95/I).

Divisione e successione sono i concetti-base di due sistemi temporali profondamente diversi. Nella sua organizzazione mensurale, la musica antica si svolgeva entro la cornice di segmenti temporali delimitati, ritagliati dal continuum temporale mediante il tactus – il movimento automatico della mano – e internamente articolati vuoi secondo un rapporto d’eguaglianza (1:1), vuoi secondo una proportio dupla (2:1). La musica doveva adeguarsi all’uno o all’altro di tali ordinamenti e proporne una specifica suddivisione, coerente con uno dei "moderni" schemi di battuta. I nomi tedeschi delle note (ganze, halbe, Viertelnote = semibreve, minima, semiminima) recano ancor oggi l’impronta di questo processo di adeguamento ch’era, nel contempo, un processo di suddivisione.
Questo sistema vetusto si pretende ancora valido nel Settecento: ma è una validità ormai caduca. Sbiadisce l’importanza del segmento temporale inteso come cornice. L’evento concreto, il carattere motorio, l’accentazione, la dinamica, sono i fattori su cui si concentra l’attenzione. Si cessa di concepire i valori metrici inferiori, che sostengono il decorso della musica, come frazioni di una quantità astratta: li si riconosce come elementi costitutivi del movimento musicale. Su di essi poggia la moderna teoria della battuta: nascerebbe, la battuta, da una sequela ininterrotta di valori brevi – perlopiù ottavi o quarti –, implicitamente o apertamente articolata in maniera uniforme. La battuta assume concretezza, risuona in figure metriche. Proprio perciò diviene oggetto del comporre: il compositore incomincia a cimentarsi con tale realtà. Di fronte alla successione uniforme, può assecondarla, può abbandonarla a sé stessa, ma può anche, componendo, manipolarla a suo grado: può sospenderla e riassorbirla, opponendole – per dire – pose o mosse grandiose, come può accelerarla, per esempio riducendo i valori metrici. Insomma, comincia ad avvertire ed a manifestare, mediante artifici compositivi, l’avvicendamento di configurazioni temporali diverse.
In estrema sintesi: la battuta all’antica, metamusicale, proteggeva la musica dalla temporalità, assicurandole la qualità estetica – tanto vantata dai contemporanei – del passatempo (Zeitvertreib). La battuta moderna, la battuta musicale che emerge nel Settecento, apre la musica all’avvicendamento di temporalità diverse: è il presupposto perché essa si conceda alla temporalità e, da passatempo qual era, assurga ad arte temporale (Zeitkunst) per eccellenza.

Mercedes Viale Ferrero, Da "Fédora" a "Fedora": smontaggio e rimontaggio di uno scenario (melo)drammatico. (Cfr. p. 104, 95/I).

From Fédora, a pièce de théatre by Sardou, written specifically for Sarah Bernhardt, derives Fedora, opera by Colautti and Giordano. The transplant involved delicate disassembly and reassembly of the original text and scenario. Once this operation was complete, the character that Sarah Bernhardt had defined "Fédora, la création de Sardou, c’est toutes les femmes" had metamorphosized into Fedora, a very different person from her prototype. If Fédora herself was difficult to transport into lyrical theater, it was no more simple to transfer the scenic framework in which Sardou had placed her: a continuous series of salons and sitting rooms all decked in high fashion, which indicated the elevated social sphere of the protagonists and simultaneously gave the spectators the illusion of being introduced into that privileged world.
Colautti and Giordano modified – sometimes dramatically – Sardou’s scenario. Following the changes they imposed, we can suggest a relationship between characters and scene: in that, where the scenic variants are greatest, the contrast between Fedora and the original Fédora are most evident. In Act I the scenery of the opera follows the French model fairly faithfully, though emphasizing the "Russian" color (while the protagonist is given a more seductive sentimentality). In the second act the two scenes of Act II and Act III of Fédora are fused, resulting in more obvious changes, while the new Fedora continues her affective metamorphosis. The third act of the opera, which corresponds to Act IV of Fédora, takes place – instead of in a Parisian salon – in a chalet in the Oberland, perhaps in an updating move to capitalize on international society’s latest craze for sport tourism and life en plein air. To be sure, in this rustic context the protagonist takes on a different character, of which we had already seen a foreshadowing in the previous acts. Sardou’s Fédora, with her "aristokratische Grazie" (as Hofmannsthal described Eleonora Duse in the role) didn’t go on the swing, didn’t do needlepoint, didn’t grow or pick flowers as does the surprisingly "housewifely" and bourgeois Fedora in the opera’s third act. Instead of dying between a pouf and a Louis XVI canapé, the operatic Fedora wants to die in the open air: "Let me die here ... among the flowers ... my flowers ..." – she is transformed (with the help of the transformed scenic backdrop) into a heroine of the new "modern style" aesthetic, which – not coincidentally – is dubbed stile floreale in Italian.