Form, fi gure, and the experience of time in seven southern composers of the 1950s-60s
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Date
2012
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Katedra Muzykologii, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PTPN, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM
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Abstract
After 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.
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post-serial, atonality, continuity, Ivan Fedele, Giuseppe Colardo, Rosario Mirigliano, Giuseppe Soccio, Nicola Cisternino, Biagio Putignano, Paolo Aralla
Citation
Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology 12, 2012, pp. 91-106.
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ISBN
ISSN
1734-2406