Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology, 2012
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Item Musica fatta spirituale. Aquilino Coppini’s contrafacta of Monteverdi’s Fifth Book of Madrigals(Katedra Muzykologii, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PTPN, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2012) Budzińska-Bennett, AgnieszkaThis 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 fi rst 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.Item Seventeenth-century chant manuscripts held at University of Warsaw Library in the context of Bernardine musical culture(Katedra Muzykologii, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PTPN, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2012) Grabiec, DominikaThe Music Department at Warsaw University Library is in possession of three seventeenthcentury chant manuscripts. All three were probably produced in the Bernardine community, although only two of them contain provenance notes which allow us to establish more precisely where they were compiled or used. In the present paper, the focus is on one of those manuscripts, which formerly belonged to the Bernardine nuns of Łowicz. This source provides valuable information on such subjects as the exchange of musical experiences and cooperation among various congregations.Item The mysterious provenance and uncommon repertoire of the music collection belonging to the Dominican Pius Hancke(Katedra Muzykologii, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PTPN, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2012) Hauptman-Fischer, EwaFather Pius Hancke’s music collection includes numerous pieces written for harp. Its outstanding repertoire and provenance distinguishes it from other monastic collections. Hancke expanded it throughout his life and took it with him when moving home. He spent the last thirty years of his life in the Dominican monastery in Nysa. Music for the liturgy contained in his collection (masses, litanies) was certainly used there and is currently the only testimony of that monastery’s musical culture. Besides liturgical compositions, Hancke’s collection includes a number of instrumental pieces for harp with the accompaniment of other instruments and contrafacta of operatic arias. The latter often include parts arranged for harp, probably by Hancke himself. The scriptors’ names link this collection to a unique manuscript containing a Credo ascribed to Antonio Vivaldi.Item Musical life in Slutsk during the years 1733–1760 in the light of archive materials(Katedra Muzykologii, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PTPN, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2012) Bieńkowska, IrenaThis article represents the very fi rst attempt at reconstructing musical life in Slutsk (Pol. Słuck) during the fi rst half of the eighteenth century, and it merely outlines the issues involved. Slutsk was a typical private town – a multicultural centre inhabited by Jews, Orthodox Ruthenians, Lithuanians and Poles of the Protestant and Roman-Catholic faiths. Among the representatives of the Roman-Catholic faith, the Jesuits were the main animators of the town’s cultural and educational life, alongside the court of Prince Hieronim Florian Radziwiłł. A medium-sized music boarding school attached to the Jesuit College in Slutsk existed from around 1713. Musical instruments were purchased for the school quite regularly, often in faraway Koenigsberg. The contacts between the boarding school and the prince’s court were relatively frequent and good, and some school-leavers found jobs at the court, chiefl y in the garrison or janissary band, and sporadically also in Prince Radziwiłł’s music ensemble. The court was the main centre of the town’s cultural life. Among its numerous artistic ventures, stage shows seem to have been the most spectacular. For the purposes of such performances, a free-standing theatre was built in the centre of Slutsk at the turn of 1753. This building is worth mentioning because of the rarity of such projects in the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania during the 1750s. The repertoire of the Slutsk theatre was initially dominated by commedia dell’arte in German and the occasional dramma per musica, but during the second half of the 1750s, one-act ballets began to dominate. Among the instrumental works performed in Slutsk were compositions by Carl Heinrich and Johann Gottlieb Graun, Georg Christoph Wagenseil, and musicians active at the Radziwiłł court (Andreas Wappler, Joseph Kohaut and Johannes Battista Hochbrucker), as well as improvisations by Georg Noëlli. The town’s artistic heyday ended with the death of Prince Hieronim Florian Radziwiłł, in 1760, and the dissolution of the Society of Jesus, a decade or so later.Item Sacred music by Amandus Ivanschiz: attributions and variants of extant compositions(Katedra Muzykologii, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PTPN, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2012) Jochymczyk, MaciejThe Pauline father Amandus Ivanschiz (1727–1758) was a composer whose music heralded the style of the early Classical period. He worked mainly in Austria (Wiener Neustadt and Mariatrost), as well as in Rome (it has recently been established that he spent three years there). His sacred music, especially masses, litanies and cantata-style pieces to non-liturgical texts, has been preserved in numerous manuscripts (over 260 items) held in eight countries of Central Europe (Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland and Hungary). Comparative analysis of all the manuscripts allows one to distinguish several problems commonly encountered in research into eighteenth-century musical sources, such as variants, multiple versions of works and contradictory attributions of authorship, further exacerbated by the lack of originals. This article focusses on the most recent fi ndings relating to Ivanschiz’s life and religious music, as well as discussing and illustrating discrepancies between various copies of the same compositions by reference to selected works. We will also consider the differentiation of authorial variants from variant versions arising from custom.Item The Charter of the Kwidzyn (Marienwerder) Convivium Musicum of 1587 as a source for the history of musical culture in Prussian towns(Katedra Muzykologii, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PTPN, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2012) Bogdan, IzabelaMusic societies, referred to in German documents as ‘Kantoreigesellschaften’, ‘Musikgesellschaften’ or ‘Musikkränzlein’, and in Latin records as ‘collegia musica’ or ‘convivia musica’, were founded in numerous towns in German-speaking territories during the very fi rst years after the Reformation. They were of an elite character, comprising the most prominent burghers, including the mayor, aldermen, councillors, church offi cials (pastor, deacon, cantor, organist) and local schoolteachers. Pupils and students attending Protestant schools and universities in German-speaking regions also actively participated in musical performances given by the societies. Their members provided a polyphonic setting for the Mass and other services, as the convivia had the noble mission of singing to the glory of God and educating young people. There are few extant charters of sixteenth-century societies of this type. The present article provides a detailed description of the charter of the Convivium Musicum in Kwidzyn, a town located during the sixteenth century and the fi rst half of the seventeenth century within the borders of Ducal Prussia. This society, founded on 18 February 1587, followed an early modern trend for creating music societies under the patronage of municipal councils and the Church. Its initiator was a local Protestant superintendent (‘Erzpriester’) and pastor, Salomon Klein, supported by deacons, a local teacher, an organist, mayors, aldermen, a notary, a municipal judge, town councillors and others. The article carefully examines each chapter of the charter, providing information on the Convivium’s structure, organisation and activities and the duties of its members.Item Stockholm manuscript S 230 and its Prussian context(Katedra Muzykologii, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PTPN, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2012) Leszczyńska, AgnieszkaThe manuscript S 230, held in the National Library of Sweden in Stockholm, has not been thoroughly investigated until now. The only extant partbook of the source contains thirty-two works, comprising motets and German songs. Only four of them bear the composers’ names: Orlande de Lassus, Franciscus de Rivulo, Johannes de Vienna and Joachim a Burck. Among the composers of anonymous works to have been identifi ed are Jacob Bultel, Jacobus Clemens non Papa, Arnold Feys, Nicolas Gombert, Josquin des Prez and Jacob Meiland, as well as Lassus and Rivulo. At least two works are unique to this source: Rivulo’s A Domino egressa est res ista and Vienna’s Wohl dem, der den Herren fürchtet. The text of Rivulo’s motet is taken from the non-Vulgate version of the Book of Genesis, and the only other composer to write music to these words was Johannes Wanning, who succeeded Rivulo as magister chori musici at the Marian church in Gdańsk in 1569, fi ve years after the latter’s death. Johannes de Vienna was composer at the Königsberg court in 1564–1568 and 1571–1576. The work from the Stockholm manuscript is his only extant composition. Two motets from the Swedish collection also appear in the Prussian manuscript J 4o 24–28, held in the Copernican Library in Toruń: the anonymous Non est bonum and Rivulo’s Nuptiae factae sunt.Item Old polish christmas carols by contemplative nuns (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries)(Katedra Muzykologii, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PTPN, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2012) Gwioździk, JolantaOld Polish Christmas carols in the contemplative female orders of Benedictine nuns, Poor Clares and Carmelite nuns were written and functioned at the junction of traditions – Polish and European, lay and religious, noble and elite, monastic and folk – and also in the Polish borderlands, which exhibited great diversifi cation in terms of nationalities, religious denominations and cultures. The numerous versions of carols confi rm not only their popularity, but also the fact that they functioned in specifi c environments, with the mutual infl uence of various motives, particularly noticeable in this genre, which was susceptible to all sorts of interference. The singing of carols, including those types which were characteristic of the monastic environment, such as lullabies, religious carols, songs of the nativity and of adoration and New Year carols, was a traditional part of Christmas celebrations. Performed both as part of the liturgy and outside it, they constituted a sort of a paratheatrical spectacle, characteristic of the Baroque mentality and of the spirituality of a specifi c order.Item The musical practice of the Sandomierz Benedictine nuns during the eighteenth century(Katedra Muzykologii, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PTPN, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2012) Walter-Mazur, MagdalenaThe congregation of the Benedictine nuns of Sandomierz, active between 1615 and 1903, belonged to wealthy magnatial foundations, which allowed the convent to foster cultural activities. Special emphasis was placed on musical performance of various types – the musical adornment of the liturgy. The ‘Glory of God’, as Benedictine nuns referred to it, constituted the essence of their congregational life. On weekdays, the celebration of the Liturgy of the Hours, Masses and – occasionally – other services in choir took six hours, and on numerous feast days of the liturgical year, when the Liturgy of the Hours was sung, not read, it required even more time. The higher the rank of the feast day, the greater was the effort to stress its importance by providing it with a proper musical setting, which led to the cultivation of musical practices of various kinds on special occasions. The musical repertory of the Sandomierz Benedictine nuns comprised plainchant without instrumental accompaniment, plainchant with organ accompaniment, polyphonic a cappella singing (referred to as ‘fi gure’), vocal-instrumental music (‘fractus’) and instrumental music. A picture of religious musical practice emerges primarily from extant musical sources, and also from a ‘choir agenda’ from 1749, a convent chronicle of the years 1762–1780, ‘treasury records’ from 1739– 1806 and convent registers. Eighteenth-century sources document the musical activity of twenty-four nuns of the Sandomierz convent, some of them considered to be ‘professional’ musicians and referred to as ‘singers and players’. The most interesting, but also most problematic, areas are vocal-instrumental practice and the likely consitution of the nuns’ music chapel. We fi nd information about nuns playing keyboard instruments, violin, viola da gamba, tromba marina and horn.Item Manuscripts of Antoni Habel’s symphonies in Wielkopolska archives(Katedra Muzykologii, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PTPN, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2012) Gołębiowska, JuliaThe main aim of this article is to present the manuscripts of Antoni Habel’s symphonies preserved in archives in the Wielkopolska region of Poland and attempt to order them chronologically in respect to their dates of composition. Habel lived in Gniezno around the turn of the nineteenth century. Most of our information about him comes from payroll registers, inventories and other documents preserved in the Archiepiscopal Archive of Gniezno, but they do not contain any information about his symphonies. The following works by Habel have survived to this day: a Sinfonia D, preserved in two copies (in Grodzisk and Gniezno), and a Sinfonia ex F, preserved in Gostyń. A critical analysis of these two compositions allows us to indicate which was composed fi rst, since the simplicity of the composition techniques used in the F major Symphony suggests that it is older than the D major. We must also address, however, the question of the differences between the two copies of the D major Symphony, which vary with regard to melody, rhythm, dynamics, articulation and even form. Analysis makes it possible to reconstruct the order in which the two manuscripts were produced and determine the original version of the D major Symphony.Item Sardinian composers of contemporary music(Katedra Muzykologii, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PTPN, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2012) Giglio, ConsueloThe meeting point between the school headed by Franco Oppo and the rich traditional music of the island gave birth in Sardinia to an intense fl owering in the fi eld of New Music, with a strong feeling of belonging and a constant call for a positive concept of identity. Thus, since the time of Oppo (1935) and his contemporary Vittorio Montis, we come across many composers that differ between each other but are almost always recognizably “Sardinian”. Oppo has been one of the most interesting fi gures on the international scene during the last few decades. After his studies in Rome, Venice and Poland in the early 1960s, he remained, by his own choice, in his home territory, sharing his “Sardinian-ness” in a free and dialectic manner with the avant-garde. After formulating his own particular aleatory approach, Oppo reached a turning point halfway through the 1970s: in Musica per chitarra e quartetto d’archi, Praxodia and, fi nally, in Anninnia I, the meeting point between avant-garde research and the special phonic quality of traditional music became more and more close-knit and organic, at the same time also acting on the founding language structure whilst still remaining under the control of incisive and informed disciplines (during the same period, moreover, he put forward new methodologies of analysis which were also necessary for his teaching). In this sense the most important works are chamber pieces like Anninnia I and II (1978, 1982), Attitidu (1983) and Sagra (1985), the theatrical work Eleonora d’Arborea (1986), some piano “transcriptions” – the Three berceuses (1982), Gallurese and Baroniese (1989; 1993) – Trio III (1994), Sonata B for percussion and piano (2005) and the two Concerts for piano and orchestra (1995–97; 2002). Meanwhile, the foundation of a new Sardinian musical culture was also placed within the social context too, with Oppo’s deep personal engagement. At fi rst Oppo promoted the Giornate di musica contemporanea (1977–1978), a weighty international festival, inside the Teatro Lirico of Cagliari, later founding, with some of his students, the Festival Spaziomusica (1982). Still an active event, the latter has proved to be a solid structure thanks to which generations of Sardinian composers have been able to promote their music alongside the most famous names of the avant-garde, with also the opportunity of several important conferences. From the earliest days much attention was paid to Scelsi, and, with the backdrop of the presence of Nono, Xenakis and Stockhausen, electronic music also continues to maintain a very active profi le on the island. Moreover, three research centres conceived in 1990 by some of Oppo’s students have been very active: Spaziomusica Ricerca, Ricercare and the CERM of Sassari, which in 1992 brought the Sardinian experience to the 36. Ferienkurse für Neue Musik. Fabrizio Casti, Antonio Doro, Lucio Garau, Marcello Pusceddu and Giorgio Tedde, together with the younger Ettore Carta and Andrea Saba, who started writing in the 1980s, can be identifi ed as the fi rst and most interesting generation of musicians who grew up studying with Oppo at the Conservatory of Cagliari, while Antonio Lai, the last of his students, specialized in theoretical research, working in Paris.Item Form, fi gure, and the experience of time in seven southern composers of the 1950s-60s(Katedra Muzykologii, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PTPN, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2012) Vallauri, Stefano LombardiAfter the 1980s it is diffi cult, 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 affi nity 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 category of fi gure, as a clear and distinct, recognizable aggregate of pitches, intervals, register, durations, timbre, articulation, dynamics, and texture. Each composer elaborates the atonal fi gural 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 (1960) in the suspension of time through the succession and transformation of images, Aralla (1960) in the foundation of form from below, from the concreteness of sound.Item Salvatore Sciarrino. The Sicilian alchemist composer(Katedra Muzykologii, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PTPN, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2012) Misuraca, PietroSalvatore 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, fi nding new virginity in it has for fi fty 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 physio logy 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 fi gures. 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 the fi gural articulation and in its perceptibility the composer fi nds 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 “fl ow 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 modern 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 syllabifi cation, incantatory and alienating reiterations avoid all danger of stylistic regression, shaping a new and personal monody, artifi cial 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 fl owering of vocal works that characterizes his most recent creative phase.Item Aldo Clementi musicus mathematicus(Katedra Muzykologii, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PTPN, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2012) Carapezza, Paolo EmilioLike that of Liszt and Stravinsky, the composers by whom he was attracted in his adolescence and early youth, Aldo Clementi’s (Catania 1925-Rome 2011) musical production went through various phases, greatly changing on the surface and in appearance, though not in depth and substance. He himself suggests a division into fi ve phases: 1. Preliminary (1944-1955), juvenile and apprenticeship works. 2. Structural (1956-1961). 3. Informal material (1961-1964). 4. Non-formal optical (1966-1970). 5. Polydiatonic (1970-2011): groups of letters indicating musical notes (for example: B-A-C-H), or canti dati (modal or tonal – monodic or polyphonic – compositions of the western tradition, from the Stele of Sicilus to Stravinsky), but most often segments of melodic lines inferred from them. But – in the polyphonic counterpoint that derives from it – they are simultaneously intoned in the different voices in different tonalities: hence their superimposition restores the chromatic dodecaphonic total. Clementi himself proclaims the constitutional continuity of this development. The substance of his music consists in the direct transposition of a fi gurative project into a sonorous structure. Geometrie di musica: the title of the 2001 book by Gianluigi Mattietti refers fi rst of all, as the subtitle says, to The diatonic period of Aldo Clementi, but it perfectly defi nes his whole musical production, all pervaded by dense polyphonic counterpoints. For Clementi construction is a goal, not a means to articulate discourse: indeed, he was even to do without discourse in his three central creative periods; and when in the fi fth and latest one he has returned to it, he has enslaved it entirely to construction: he draws fragments from it, to be used as raw material, i.e. the diatonic subjects, of his dodecaphonic counterpoints. After the different phenomenology of the eruptions of sound matter of Varčse and Stravinsky, Clementi’s music represents a further peak of pure construction in the sonorous space. His counterpoint however, like Webern’s, is limpid, subtly articulated, and dominated by reason: but here construction reigns supreme, and the composer in accordance with his requirements uses discursive melodic segments as raw material, as bricks (“modules” he says, and he describes them as mosaic tiles). “The idea of a construction achieved with the dovetailing of mirror-like images is also at the base of the fi gurative research of Escher, hinging on the concept of division of the plane, through repeated fi gures, mirror-like and congruent” (Mattietti). Indeed, Clementi’s music is “disciplina quae de numeris loquitur” (discipline that speaks of numbers), according to the defi nition by Cassiodorus, rather than “scientia bene modulandi” (art of singing well), according to the defi nition by Augustine; and it is, more precisely, paraphrasing the famous defi nition by Leibniz, “exercitium arithmeticae manifestum coscientis se numerare animi” (evident arithmetical exercise of the mind aware of counting). Three compositions of Clementi’s polydiatonic period are here thoroughly considered: two canons for string quartet, the very simple four-voiced Canone on a fragment by Platti (1997) and the very complex eight-voiced Tributo (1988) on “Happy birthday to you!”; and a de-collage, Blues and Blues 2, “fantasies on fragments by Thelonious Monk”, for piano (2001).Item Federico Incardona and Giovanni Damiani(Katedra Muzykologii, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PTPN, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2012) Carapezza, Paolo EmilioTogether with Sciarrino and Casale, Incardona and Damiani are the most important composers trained at Palermo University’s Musicological Institute. Federico Incardona (Palermo, 1958–2006) reconciles the social commitment of Berg and the political tension of Nono with the sublimated eroticism of Szymanowski. If Nono’s works, like those of Evangelisti in a different way, blend dodecaphonic dialectic with the corporeity of the sound of Varèse, Incardona blends Evangelisti’s sonorous cosmogony with the erotic immediateness of Bussotti. But his principal reference point is Mahler. His music is rich in meaning and strong emotional intensity, concentrated and sublimated: it is like “processes of denuding of the melody, carnal embraces between the parts, dodecaphonic series modelled on the body of the loved one” (Spagnolo). Its “new linearity and temporal tension”, is wedded to the “absolute primacy of expression and emotion”, in full awareness of the “deep unity of emotion and knowledge” (Lombardi Vallauri). Indeed, in the intense expressionism of his music, dodecaphonic construction is always at the service of a dialectical discourse which is dense and deep, but – in his last works – clear and fl uid like a melody by Bellini. “Infi nite melos”, Marco Crescimanno defi nes it: harmonic richness and dense heterophonic complexities are blended; the counterpoint is based “on the superimposition of manifold variations on the same fi gure, with precise control of the vertical encounters on its melodic-harmonic hinges”. Born into a dynasty of engineers and architects, Giovanni Damiani (Palermo, 1966) is himself an engineer and architect, but in sound space. Rather than music, his works are organized Sound: “embodiment of the intelligence inherent in sounds themselves”, in the manner of Varèse, and specifi cally “sound vegetation”, in the manner of Bartók. His most important work, Salve follie precise (1998–2004: on a libretto in verse by Francesco Carapezza, based on Semmelweis et l’infection puerpérale that Louis-Ferdinand Céline wrote between 1924 and 1929), represents precisely the germination of life (of algae from water, of grass from rock, of man from woman, of sounds from Sound) and the threats of death that surround it, that is to say of regression of the animal and vegetable kingdoms to the mineral kingdom. In it Damiani exclusively uses, as previously in the great symphony Matrice/Organon (1995), natural harmonic sounds. We thus assist at harmonic germination; Sound generates sounds, the Note generates notes. If Damiani as a musicologist follows on from Réti, as a composer he follows on from Schenker. For him the note, seen as pure Sound internally structured a priori, is everything: the universe of artistic creation in sound space is only unfolding of the tension internal to the note itself. Everything (melody, tonality, polyphony, harmony), as Cesare Brandi wrote, “comes from the very nature of the note, which is, in the stratifi cation of harmonics, tonic, isolated note (of a melody), vertical chord and horizontal encounter of polyphonic lines”.Item Contemporary music in central Italy: an overview of recent decades(Katedra Muzykologii, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PTPN, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2012) Mastropietro, AlessandroThe present article tries to make thematic the geographical plan of the present volume, by examining the major focal points of Contemporary Music in Central Italy which act as centres disseminating compositional trends through a long-established interest in recent music, as well as didactical structures and important teachers. Clearly, Rome is a more infl uential centre than Florence (where the endemic tendency of Florentine culture towards a sense of order, the settlement there of Dallapiccola, and the rise of a pioneering activity in the fi eld of electronic music since the ‘60s are noteworthy); this is due to the teaching – through different generations – of Petrassi, Guaccero, Donatoni, Corghi and now Fedele, as well as the presence of many musical institutions, and the availability of artists and writers involved in exchanges and collaborations with composers. For this reason, many composers who were educated or active in Rome developed an outstanding – often prophetic – predilection for mix-media or theatrical works. After Bussotti, Guaccero, Macchi and Bertoncini, Giorgio Battistelli is a pivotal fi gure representing this trend in the next generation of composers; nonetheless an aptitude for it can be perceived also in other composers from both generations (Clementi, Pennisi and Renosto; Sbordoni, Lombardi, Rendine, D’Amico and De Rossi Re), including among the younger ones Silvia Colasanti, Roberta Vacca and Francesco Antonioni. In parallel, electronic music has been cultivated by Evangelisti and Branchi, as a way of renewing musical thought and language from their foundations: researches in the musical application of digital processing have been remarkable in Rome, along with experimentation in real time sound-generation and -transformation (Nottoli, Lupone, Di Scipio). On the whole, the generation born in the 1950s seems to tend (in aesthetics as well as in poetics) towards a change of thinking about musical form, integrating paradigmatic (structural) categories, typical of serial music, with syntagmatic (fi ctional) ones. Such an integration is perceivable as early as in the works of Donatoni, which have widely infl uenced many younger Italian composers, whether they have studied under him or not. The compositional horizon in Central Italy will be examined, with a special focus on that generation, with regard to two issues: 1) Has this change been determined (or helped) by post-modernism? Before post-modernism became widespread during the 1980s, some composers from Rome had already elaborated a language which included heterogeneous sound materials and playing with musical codes, even if they did not deny the necessity of historical progress of musical language. Furthermore, postmodernism doesn’t suffi ce to explain the music of many composers, for whom the stratifi cation of musical language and the sphericity of internal relationship inside a work is a result of the theory of complexity. 2) What is the aesthetical and poetical tendency in the youngest generation of composers, since a radicalization between a fi ctional and a visionary approach seems to have been established in their music?Item Bonum ex integra causa... A dialogue with Mieczysław Tomaszewski's concept of integral interpretation(Katedra Muzykologii, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PTPN, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2012) Jabłoński, MaciejThe article presents an in-depth and detailed refl ection on the concept of „integral interpretation” put forward by the Polish musicologist Mieczysław Tomaszewski. The problematics of interpretation has for many years been the focus of Tomaszewski’s attention and interest, as evidenced by his numerous publications devoted to it. They culminate in the formulation of this concept, described by the author as the method of an adequate interpretation of a musical work. In contrast to many contemporary approaches to the issue of the scope of musicology’s subject area, for Tomaszewski the concept of a musical work is central to the discipline, and he poses questions concerning its ontology and understanding in the spirit of Roman Ingarden’s theory of musical work, to which he frequently refers. Tomaszewski regards the process of interpretation as a kind of „rising” to the level of the work, the meaning of which (intentio operis), often identifi ed with the authorial meaning (intentio auctoris), stands at the highest point in the hierarchy of meanings ascribed – from this point of view – to the work. In turn, the work itself functions in different phases, existing as a score, a performance, a result of the processes of perception and as its reception within a culture. In my article I attempt not only to present Tomaszewski’s method, but above all to argue against its anachronicity and limitations resulting from a lack of reference both to contemporary artistic practice and contemporary research methodology in the humanities and in musicology.Item Giacinto Scelsi – homo viator and his musical itinerary(Katedra Muzykologii, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PTPN, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2012) Skupin, RenataGiacinto Scelsi was a “traveller to the East”, who tied his life inextricably to creative work. As a composer, he sought a path for the renewal of his own musical language, shaped during his youth under the powerful infl uence of other composers’ styles. On becoming a homo religiosus, in the Eliadean sense, he found his own path to transcendence through art (creation), deeply inspired by those great traditions of the Orient in which art was a refl ection of the artist’s spirituality. The topos of the path is one of the main keys to interpreting Scelsi’s work. His works for large orchestra and choir contain distinct traces of a Scelsian “voyage to the East”. They form one great cycle, integrated by the motif of the path, expressed through meanings added in the content of the individual programme-titles. The cycle’s fi nale, the eschatological Pfhat (1974), is the musical depiction of a journey that ends with “a clear, primordial light,” symbolising man’s encounter with a higher reality and “great liberation” as the goal of his spiritual path. The chronotope of the path is revealed in the very musical material of his orchestral works: in their quasi-visual soundspace. It is manifest, among other things, in the processual form – one might even say the storyline – and the consistently applied procedure of transforming sonorities, texture and rhythmic structures. A fundamental symbolic function is discharged by various forms of “upwards path”, linked to the dramaturgical role of an upwards motion pattern in the melody and an upwards movement in the tonal-harmonic plan of the orchestral works. The most crucial of all the variants of the motif of the path is the direction “into the core”, that is, towards the “inner space” of the sound. This carries signifi cance both in the dimension of the harmonic spectrum of a sound and also its spiritual depth – the mystical dimension. The journey to the centre acquires the status of an emblematic topos of the Scelsian poetic of the viaggio al centro del suono [journey to the centre of the sound].Item Luzifers-Abschied from Samstag aus Licht. Stockhausen and the Italian affair(Katedra Muzykologii, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PTPN, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2012) Draus, AgnieszkaThe 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 fi rst time in the most magnifi cent 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 fi lled 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 fi nished 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 Rufi no 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.Item Sixty years of the RISM(Katedra Muzykologii, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PTPN, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2012) Kraus, GuidoThe individual RISM working groups in Europe and beyond supply a shared transnational electronic database, which all scholars can examine to gain an overview of the state of sources in their area of research. The RISM’s projects, in particular the music manuscript project of series A/II, are far from complete and continue to grow. The author presents not only the project as a whole but also the RISM’s work in Poland in the past, present and future.