Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology
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Karlheinz Stockhausen’s stage cycle Licht. Musical theatre of the world
Get PDF The main idea of the paper is a presentation of the stage cycle Licht, absorbing the composer for over one-third of his active creative life. The question arises as to the generic affiliation of Stockhausen’s opus magnum: close to operatic works by Luciano Berio and Mauricio Kagel or to pop productions of works by Philip Glass? Analysing the subject matter and content of Licht, as well as its message and the means of expression employed, it is difficult not to discern the unification, within a single work, of what might appear to be contrasting musical genres and kinds of theatre (mystery play, expressionist drama, happening). It is worth remembering that the composer himself does not employ any specific generic term except for Opernzyklus. He often, however, refers to the forms and genres of theatre, cultivated in many different parts of the world, which have inspired him (e.g. in Malaysia, Japan, Bali, the USA), and he admits to the evolution of his views on faith. Can the substance of Licht be reduced to a common denominator? Can the heptalogy be called ‘sacred’ theatre? Or - on the contrary - an extremely profane, ‘pagan’ avant-garde spectacle
Luzifers-Ab schied from Samstag aus Licht. Stockhausen and the Italian affair
Get PDFThe homeland of Leonardo and Palestrina, Dante and Eco, Verdi and Fellini became crucial for the reception of music of one of the most controversial, and at the same time innovative composers of the second half of the 20th century, a German artist, Karlheinz Stockhausen. The genius- and visionary-bearing nation opened itself to the new musical art, and appointed the author of Hymnen to be the coryphaeus of that art. This fascination transformed into a desire to better present the composer’s personality to a wider audience. Many of the most recent Stockhausen’s compositions were created as a response to numerous Italian orders, including ArtArche’s from Milan or Massimo Simonini’s from the Angelica Foundation, many of them were performed for the first time in the most magnificent works of Italian architecture, for example the Milan cathedral. The stage premieres of Donnerstag, Samstag and Montag aus Licht took place in Milan’s La Scala, with the creative participation of such celebrities as a theatre and opera director, Luca Ronconi and an architect, Gae Aulenti, famous most of all for her contemporary designs of Parisian museum buildings, and in the project of Licht - for scenography. In 2007 Stockhausen’s music filled 25. Rassegna di Nuova Musica in Macerata Teatro Lauro Rossi; during two days the most famous electronic compositions were presented: Mittwochs-Gruss, Cosmic Pulses, Gesang der Jünglinge, Telemusik and Kontakte. Lucifer’s Farewell is the last - and the most “Italian” - scene devoted to this character of the opera - Samstag aus Licht. It was finished in August 1982 upon the order of Associazione Sagra Musicale Umbra in Perugia, celebrating the 800th birth anniversary of St. Francis of Assisi. The opening night took place on 18th September that same year in Chiesa di San Rufino in Assisi. In the composition Stockhausen interprets the text of Lodi delle virtu (A Salutation of the Virtues) of the little poor man in the original wording of the Italian language. The article is an interpretation both text and music of Luzifers Abschied within a wide range of problem context of the whole stage cycle Licht (‘Light’) by Karlheinz Stockhausen
Musicafatta spirituale. Aquilino Coppini’s contrafacta of Monteverdi’s Fifth Book of Madrigals
Get PDFThis article focuses on Aquilino Coppini’s contrafacta of Monteverdi madrigals from the Fifth Book, Musica tolta da i Madrigali di Claudio Monteverde, e d’altri autori [...] e fatta spirituale, published in Milan in 1607. Coppini (d. 1629), a Milanese priest, professor of rhetoric at the University of Pavia and man of letters, was Monteverdi’s personal friend and admirer. He was associated with the circle of Cardinal Federico Borromeo (1564-1631), Archbishop of Milan and a great connoisseur of the arts, and his cousin, Cardinal Carlo [Charles] Borromeo (1538-1584), principally responsible for the Tridentine reform of church music, to whom Coppini dedicated the first of his three collections of contrafacta discussed here. Coppini’s efforts in re-texting Monteverdi’s compositions and transforming them into madrigali spirituali were very much welcomed by the mighty Borromeo family, as they allowed the newest stylistic achievements of the seconda prattica to be transferred to church music. Coppini’s contrafacta are of interest for their concentration on madrigals by Monteverdi, as Coppini chose to work on eleven madrigals from Monteverdi’s controversial Fifth Book. His treatment of the poetic text is quite elaborate. First, his Latin contrafacta are creative re-textings in which he reproduces the metric structure and the sound quality of Guarini’s original Italian texts through the careful placement of phonemes, vowels and consonants. Second, he transforms them into madrigali spirituali, always following their original affetti, creating strong associations and often profound intertextual relationships among the original and the new texts, in which he elevates the profane situations from Guarini’s texts to the spiritual level of the Gospel teachings. In this respect, Coppini’s work remains a fascinating contribution to the enduring discussion on the thin line between the sacred and the profane
Liszt and Mahler in the postmodern filmic visions of Ken Russell
Get PDFThe British film and television director Ken Russell is esteemed principally for creating filmic biographies of composers of classical music. In the 70s, he shot his most original films on musical subjects: fictionalised, highly individual composer biographies of Mahler (Mahler) and Liszt (Lisztomania), which are the subject of the article. Neither of the films is in the least a realistic documentary biography, since Russell’s principal intention was to place historical biographical facts in cultural contexts that were different from the times in which Mahler and Liszt lived and worked. This gave rise to a characteristically postmodern collision of different narrative and expressive categories. Russell’s pictures remain quite specific commercial works, exceptional tragifarces, in which the depiction of serious problems is at once accompanied by their subjection to grotesque deformation and the demonstration of their absurdities or denaturalisation. The approach proposed by this British director, in which serious issues are accompanied by elements of triteness, is a hallmark of his style. The director’s musical interests are reflected by the fundamental role of music in the structure of his cinematographic works. The choice of musical works also denotes a kind of aesthetic choice on the director’s part, especially when the composers’ biography comes into play
Salvatore Sciarrino. The Sicilian alchemist composer
Get PDFSalvatore Sciarrino (Palermo, 1947) began his career in the fervent climate of the six Settimane Internazionali Nuova Musica. Still very young he attracted the attention of the musical world, with his sonorous invention full of startling innovation that was to make him one of the protagonists of the contemporary musical panorama. Sciarrino is today the best-known and most performed Italian composer. His catalogue is a prodigiously large one, and his career is dotted with prestigious prizes and awards. Alchemically transmuting sound, finding new virginity in it has for fifty years been the objective of his music. Timbric experimentation is the goal of his virtuosity. The prevailing use of harmonic sounds and other subversive emission techniques make his sonorous material elusive, incorporeal, particularly close to noise: hence not sounds in the traditional sense, but ghosts and shades of sounds, systematically deprived of the attack and situated in a border zone between the being of the material and its not-being. The sound comes out changed by the osmotic relationship with silence: it is a mysterious epiphany, a “presence” that strives to appear on the surface, living and pulsating almost according to a physiology of its own. Hence it is a music of silences furrowed by minimal sound phenomena, for an “ecology of listening” - an antidote to the noise pollution of consumer society - able to clear perception, to sharpen auditory sensibility and to free the mind of stereotyped stimuli. His music is not concretized in intervallic relations and in harmonic-contrapuntal constructive logics, but in complex articulatory blocks which Sciarrino calls figures. Even though the structural use of timbre becomes a disruptive fact, which brings an upheaval to the perception of pitches and seems to burn up every linguistic residue, in thefigural articulation and in its perceptibility the composer finds a new logic and a new, infallible sense of form. Musical discourse proceeding through complex wholes is mirrored in Sciarrino’s peculiar composition method. For him the layout of a score in traditional notation is preceded by a graphic-visual project (which he calls “flow chart”) allowing synthetic control of the form and highlighting the relationship between construction and space. “Window form” had become a characteristic feature of his composition technique. With this term, borrowed from computer terminology, the composer indicates a formal procedure that mimics the intermittence of the human mind and that he considers typical of the modem and technological era. The gradual recovery of a new singing style is a central problem in his most recent production: psychotic and gasping utterance, messa di voce, glissandos, portamenti, slipping syllabification, incantatory and alienating reiterations avoid all danger of stylistic regression, shaping a new and personal monody, artificial and hallucinatory. The working-out of a personal singing style is Sciarrino’s main conquest in the last years. Hence his fundamental contribution to experiments in contemporary musical theatre and a particular flowering of vocal works that characterizes his most recent creative phase
Krzysztof Penderecki’s Eighth Symphony, ‘Lieder der Vergänglichkeit’ - from inspiration by nature to existential reflection
Get PDFIn the Penderecki oeuvre, symphonic music has been pivotal, with eight symphonies written over the span of forty years, including Symphony No. 6, which remains in the sketch stage. As he admits, the sequence of symphonies constitutes a sort of musical autobiography. In the life and work of Penderecki his interests in nature and culture have long run parallel, and in both spheres the moment of creation has been particularly significant. Penderecki’s artistic work has clearly focused on two domains: composing music and moulding the nature which surrounds his Luslawice house - the space of the garden and park. The latter type of art concerns nature not in its primeval form, but rather in the shape imposed on it by man. Over the last decade, the composer’s two passions have tended to drift closer together and intertwine. During this time, he has written his Eighth Symphony (‘Lieder der Vergänglichkeit’), devoted to trees, and Three Chinese Songs, permeated by his enchantment with the beauty of nature. In his Eighth Symphony, Penderecki employs poetic and musical images to show the beauty and diversity of the forms of the surrounding world of nature, in which it is given to man to live the successive phases of his life. However, a relevant dimension of the symphony is that of looking from a distance at the fate of man - the existential reflection offered mainly by the commenting choral parts, as in ancient tragedy. What dominates is a sense of transition, the sadness of decline and the thought of the inevitability of the fate of man, who searches for a way to unravel the mystery of existence
The Image of Love in Musical Culture - Introductory Notes, Aspects, Realization
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Musical sense-making between experience and conceptualisation: the legacy of Peirce, Dewey and James
Get PDFThis contribution revolves around the concept of musical sense-making. Starting from the seminal works of Peirce, Dewey and James, it focusses on the musical experience, which can be defined from an empiricist position as a process that calls forth epistemic interactions with the sounds. Central in this approach is the tension between the richness and fullness of the musical experience and the cognitive economy of symbolic abstraction. Dewey, in particular, has stressed the role of having an experience proper as a kind of heightened vitality. James, on the contrary, has dealt with the distinction between percept and concept, stressing the role of knowledge-by-acquaintance as the kind of knowledge we have of something by its presentation to the senses. In what he coined as radical empiricism he states that the significance of concepts always consists in their relation to perceptual particulars, which, in turn, are embedded in a conceptual map. This map can be described in semiotic terms, which holds a symbolic approach to cognition to the extent that it is concerned with signs rather than with sensory realia. The question should be raised, however, as to the nature of these signs. There is, in fact, a critical distinction between internal and external semantics with signs referring primarily to themselves or to something external to the music. In an attempt to bring these claims together, it is argued that musical signs should provide a self-referential semantics for which the abstract is really material, a real semiotics of singular potential wich is grounded in the real and natural experience. Reying on some grounding work of Peirce and Morris and the relation between signs and tool using, a theoretical framework is introduced that has at least some operational power in going beyond a merely acoustic description of the music as it sounds
Form, figure, and the experience of tíme in seven southern composers of the 1950S-60S
Get PDFAfter the 1980s it is difficult, following stylistic criteria, to draw a map of contemporary academic music. All styles are compossible, and all are practiced. In this context, the geographical entity “South of Italy” does not stand out for a musical identity with special technical-stylistic features. Rather, at a socio-cultural level, the South remains today - in music no less than in all areas where there is a gap between top development and stagnation - a land of emigrants: six out of the seven composers treated (Ivan Fedele, Giuseppe Colardo, Rosario Mirigliano, Giuseppe Soccio, Nicola Cisternino, Biagio Putignano, Paolo Aralla) live in the North of Italy. The positive aspect of this is the affinity of the South with the transnational and superstructural community of contemporary music, which from European and Western has now become almost global. The composers under consideration belong to the generation of the ‘50s, rooted in the serial and post-serial movements (from which Franco Donatoni, Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, Salvatore Sciarrino, Giacinto Scelsi, are the principals models, to mention only the Italians), dipped in the general phenomenon of timbrism (particularly spectralism), and acquainted with electronics. They draw from these sources various instruments of compositional technique and aspects of their poetics. In particular these composers, active from the ‘80s, develop new ways of construction of the temporal form of music. They share the goal to establish a new continuity, different from the tonal one but at the same time transcending the serial and post-serial disintegration and fragmentation. The primary means to this end is a new enhancement of the ( ategory of figure, as a clear and distinct, recognizable aggregate of pitches, intervals, register, duratio is, timbre, articulation, dynamics, and texture. Each composer elaborates the atonal figurai material in different ways, emphasizing one aspect or another. For example, Fedele (1953) is a master in the management of form per se, Colardo (1953) in the activation of disturbed harmonic effects, Mirigliano (1950) in the creation of a slight tension from the smallest vibrations of sound, Soccio (1950) in the set up of movement by means of accumulations and discharges of energy, Cisternino (1957) in a Cagean-Scelsian emphasis on sound as such, Putignano (i960) in the suspension of time through the succession and transformation of images, Aralla (i960) in the foundation of form from below, from the concreteness of sound