Scienze umanistiche

A cosa servono le metafore? Le metafore con cui descriviamo la musica sono "im-pertinenze" del linguaggio, fantasiose licenze di scrittura? Oppure in qualche modo ci conducono più vicino al fatto musicale nella sua essenza? Il rapporto tra metafora e musica è stato fino a oggi trascurato: l'elaborazione di una teoria della metafora che mettesse al centro il rapporto tra segni verbali e strut-ture musicali non è mai stata veramente posta in agenda dai musicologi. Il tema è rimasto latente in alcune classiche di-cotomie che attraversano la discussione musicologica, come intramusicale ex-tramusicale, immanente trascendente, struttura semantica, senso significato. È arduo tuttavia stabilire quale sia il discrimine tra il parlar della musica in senso proprio e in senso figurato. Le metafore insite nei concetti musicali non sono infatti un mero abbellimento di presunti modi letterali di nominare la musica, ma sono la sostanza stessa del nostro armamentario concettuale. Se le metafore sono un vettore della concettualizzazione musicale, esse sono importanti in pari misura per la riflessione estetico-filosofica intorno alla musica e per l'analisi musicale vera e propria. I processi di comparazione metaforica sono un tratto connaturato al modo in cui pensiamo la musica, al modo in cui la descriviamo e la verbalizziamo, forse persino al modo in cui la ascoltiamo. Pensare, parlare o scrivere di musica, in-somma, vuol dire rapportarsi a essa nei termini di qualcos'altro, metaforicamen-te appunto. aA Musica e metafora: storia analisi ermeneutica a cura di Francesco Finocchiaro e Maurizio Giani Biblioteca di Athena Musica è una collana promossa dal Gruppo di Studio Athena Musica (http://athena musica.dar.unibo.it/) e aperta ai con-tributi della comunità scientifica. La collana propone studi sulle tradizioni intellettuali che hanno modellato l'i-dea di musica nella cultura occiden-tale, definendo nel tempo il lessico, le categorie e le tematiche del discor-so musicale. In coerenza con tale di-segno, Biblioteca di Athena Musica pubblica monografie e studi miscel-lanei che intendono rinnovare il dia-logo tra la musicologia e le altre discipline umanistiche e scientifiche. aA € 17,00

Bluebeard’s Castle  ( A kekszakallu herceg vara ), composed by Bela Bartok on a libretto by Bela Balazs, is one of the most significant musical works of the early twentieth century and a masterpiece of Hungarian modernism. The opera deals with “the eternal tragedy of the dualism between man and woman” from an original point of view, divergent from the widespread one in Western European thought and art. The essay investigates Bartok’s musical dramaturgy according to this topic.

Within the “Museo Virtuale della Musica BellinInRete” project, a corpus of letters, written by the renowned composer Vincenzo Bellini (1801 - 1835) from Catania, will be encoded and made publicly available. This contribution aims at illustrating the part of the project regarding the implementation of the prototype for the metadata and text encoding, indexing and visualisation of Bellini’s correspondence. The encoding scheme has been defined according to the latest guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative and it has been instantiated on a sample of letters. Contextually, a first environment has been implemented by customizing two open source tools: Edition Visualization Technology and Omega Scholarly platform . The main objective of the digital edition is to engage general public with the cultural heritage held by the Belliniano Civic Museum of Catania. This wide access to Bellini’s correspondence has been conceived preserving the scholarly transcriptions of the letters edited by S...

This contribution aims at illustrating the ongoing work towards the digital scholarly editing, long-term preservation, web publishing and computational exploiting of 41 letters, written by the renowned composer Vincenzo Bellini. The correspondence is kept at the Belliniano Civic Museum of Catania and is being encoded in XML according to the last TEI guidelines. The edition will be made accessible both via web - exploiting the Edition Visualization Technology (EVT) - as well as integrated into an interactive and multimedia tour within the museum. The digital edition is based on the recently published transcriptions made by Seminara. The encoding scheme has been defined according to the edition requirements, the TEI best practices and the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) guidelines - where the musical context must be specified. Our initiative has some elements of innovation that distinguish it from similar projects, such as the Van Gogh letter project or the DALF project. For instance,...

This article presents the first results of the project “Nuovi approcci per godere la musica d’oggi” (New approaches to enjoying today’s music), developed within the SagGEM workgroup with the collaboration of composer Alessandro Solbiati. The aim is to fine-tune coherent, well-planned didactic modules based on the 20th and 21st-century repertory, through very close interaction between the acquired knowledge and tools of musicology and music pedagogy, and field work based on direct interaction with students. In particular, the article reconstructs didactic activities carried out on the compositions of Gyorgy Ligeti, Poeme symphonique pour 100 metronomes and Lux aeterna. These pieces belong to the early maturity of the Hungarian musician, and require that listeners develop new perceptual strategies, since they are conceived and built around music parameters that used to be regarded as secondary, such as ‘texture’, timbre and sound gesture.

This article discusses New Babylon (Novyi Vavilon), a silent film in eight parts by Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg with music by Dmitri Shostakovich, produced in 1929 by Sovkino, the state film studio of the USSR. It reconstructs the genesis of New Babylon in the context of the artistic avant-garde of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and engages with the recent debate on the different versions of the film, siding with those who believe that the “official” version of New Babylon was the result of a conscious re-editing of the movie. To support this position, the author proposes a structural and aesthetic analysis of New Babylon that focuses on the literary and visual sources of the film and their relationship to sound. Shostakovich found compositional solutions that matched the choices of the directors perfectly, both in terms of musical quotes (corresponding to figurative references) and techniques. On the one hand, the composer employed strategies and topoi of the European musi...

In this essay the author reconstructs Azio Corghi's path to conquest of musical theater and the importance of the confrontation with José Saramago for the development of a personal musical dramaturgy. In addition, the author investigates the main dramaturgical processes adopted by Corghi in the works Blimunda and Divara and finally, he clarifies Corghi's position towards the aesthetics of postmodernism.

The article examines Alessandro Solbiati’s second theatrical work, Leggenda, which takes inspiration from the tale “The Grand Inquisitor” included in Dostoevsky’s novel The Karamazov Brothers. After presenting the meaning of this tale in the novel of the Russian writer, it reconstructs the genesis of the opera and the structure of the libretto. Then it analyses the musical forms, the vocal language and the composer’s ‘pensée sonorielle’ and considers them in the light of his musical dramaturgy. Finally, it outlines Solbiati’s aesthetical conception, his relationship with the musical tradition and his personal stance on postmodernism and postwebernian avant-garde.