Itinera

Introduzione

Nicola Di Stefano — 2020-12-31

The relationship between music and language is one of the main axes of Western philosophy of music. In particular, the link between music and literature has fostered an intense debate that resulted in a plurality of different solutions. The present issue of "Itinera” aims at analyzing some of the fundamental questions that emerge from Azio Corghi's use of literary sources in composition. The complexity of the themes that characterize Corghi's work, across musicology, aesthetics and literature, leads the reader to deal with fundamental categories such as postmodernity and avant-garde, in music and beyond.

"Tra strutturalismo e postmodernismo”. La drammaturgia musicale di Corghi alla luce del confronto con Saramago

Graziella Seminara — 2020-12-31

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.

Rossini andata e ritorno. Un petit train de plaisir di Azio Corghi

Livio Aragona — 2020-12-31

The ballet Un petit train de plaisir for two pianos and percussion by Azio Corghi is based on pieces for piano contained in Gioachino Rossini’s Pechés de vieillesse, and was performed for the first time at the Rossini Opera Festival in 1992. The comparison with the Rossini texts, that Corghi puts into effect in his compositional work, seems to configure an eccentric position both with respect to the keywords of musical aesthetics that were for a long hegemonic in the second half of the twentieth century, and with respect to the ‘post-modern’ opening that also affected music from the early seventies. Processes of sound amplification and timbre differentiation articulate a sympathetic relationship with the author of the paratexts. A relationship that takes the form of an irony understood as doubling, in which what is said tends to mean something other than what appears.

Da Händel a Corghi: la drammaturgia timbrica in Rinaldo & Co*

Marco Uvietta — 2020-12-31

This essay starts from a fundamental question: can orchestration take on specific dramaturgical functions in musical theatre? The answer is affirmative, provided that it falls within a rational project like the other musical components. In order to define the function of orchestration in Azio Corghi's Rinaldo & C. (1997), a rewriting of Handel's Rinaldo, the analysis first addresses the relationship between the “script” created by the composer himself and the dramaturgy of astonishment, inherited from the late Baroque model. The instrumental characterization of the characters derives directly from it. A fundamental function is performed by the vocal octet, often used in an instrumental way. In Rinaldo & C. the orchestration and development of textures act as an analytical filter of the original model.

L'eco di un fantasma (2017) di Azio Corghi Un saggio preliminare

Tiziana Pangrazi — 2020-12-31

L’eco di un fantasma (2017) by Azio Corghi went on stage at Teatro Lirico in Cagliari on November 3, 2018. It is a “lyric tragedy” on text by Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis and the subject is inspired by Euripides’ Trojans. I will examine the main characteristics of the composition among the concepts of opera and tragedy.

Tra drammaturgia e linguistica: analisi di "…tra la Carne e il Cielo" e intervista alla librettista Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis

Davide Ciprandi — 2020-12-31

...tra la Carne e il Cielo is an opera by Azio Corghi set to a libretto by Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis. The inspiration of the opera is the essay Studi sullo stile di Bach by Pier Paolo Pasolini, a critical analysis to Bach’s violin sonatas. Mazzocut-Mis re-uses Pasolini’s words in the libretto, while the music is a variation on Bach’s sonatas by Corghi. The aim of this paper is the analysis of the language of Pasolini and the dramaturgical use of his words in the opera focusing on the passage from essay to libretto.

Azio Corghi “…tra la Carne e il Cielo” da Pier Paolo Pasolini. Drammaturgia poetica di Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis per Violoncello concertante, Recitante maschile, Soprano, Pianoforte e Orchestra

Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis — 2020-12-31

Here we publish the libretto of Azio Corghi’s Opera Tra la Carne e il Cielo, written by Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis. The libretto assembles and transforms different passages from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s texts in order to investigate the relationship within poetry between word and music.

The Ontology of Art: Six submissions

Christopher Norris — 2020-12-31

This is a verse-essay in the form of six extended villanelles that discuss various aspects of the relationship between poetry, music, and the visual arts. More specifically they concern issues of ontology, autonomy, endurance, expressive power, and formal resistance to the vicissitudes of cultural change. The rhyme-scheme (tight but highly musical) is used to point up and differentiate the range of aesthetic attributes involved in this running debate.

Durs Grünbein’s Lob des Taifuns: Images and city figures of Japan

Daniela Liguori — 2020-12-31

This paper aims to analyse the “Lob des Taifuns. Reisetagebücher in Haikus” by Durs Grünbein, with the intention of showing how Japanese theories of thought, poetic and artistic practises – in particular, haikus – have played a decisive role for Grünbein, not only for understanding “another culture”, but also for reflecting on the aesthetic experience and the forms of telling proper to the metropolitan setting. In this perspective, Grünbein’s book becomes an “ideal place” to see the dialogue between “East” and “West” as an establishment of a tension-filled space between different styles which, without denying their own specificity, offer themselves to contamination and give life to the most recent form of the “metropolitan aesthetic”.

Cultural appropriation and theatre. Rethinking aesthetics, starting with the case of Robert Lepage’s Kanata

Daniela Sacco — 2020-12-31

Observing the phenomenon of cultural appropriation in a case of theatre: Kanata the controversial spectacle by the Québecois Robert Lepage raises issues of aesthetics. The specific cultural, political and social context, together with the singularity of theatre as an art form, makes this a unique case study shedding light on that phenomenon and causing us to rethink some long-standing principles of aesthetics.

L’unica risposta è la prossima domanda. L’esperienza teatrale e il suo mistero: conversazione fra Denis Diderot e Carmelo Rifici

Cecilia Uberti Foppa — 2020-12-31

This interview with Carmelo Rifici, Drama School Director of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano and award-winning theatrical director, discuss on the relationship between some thesis of theatrical aesthetics of the 18th century philosophe Denis Diderot, enclosed in their most complete way in the work Paradox of the actor, and the contemporary reflection on theatre, but also the practice of acting itself.

How much does Diderot's thought still question and stimulate the debate on the experience of theatre in its various themes? Without neglecting the contents of this thought, on which 20th century theatre has been questioned a lot and which also emerge in all their facets and possible developments in the interview, during the interesting conversation with Rifici it appears that the true modernity of diderotian reflection and its still generating force today, lies in its asystematic character, in the search for paradox, for perennial question, as a fundamental element for preserving the theatre and its "mystery". It is necessary asking others and themselves questions rather than defining solutions, to restore the theatrical experience, which is the experience of an event, in all its complexity, in diderotian theatrical theory as well as in modern acting practice.