Institute of Music – Page 9 – Fondazione Giorgio Cini

Workshop The Creation of Timbre: Amplified String Instruments in the Music of George Crumb, Franco Oppo, Fausto Romitelli and Giacinto Scelsi

This workshop follows on from the 2016 event entitled Research-led Performance. The aim is to
encourage collaboration between composers, musicologists, instrumentalists and sound technicians
to create performances based on a thorough study of musical structures, the sources of
compositional processes and documented historic performances. Jointly organised with the group
RepertorioZero and in collaboration with the Fondazione Isabella Scelsi, this year’s workshop is
devoted to amplified string instruments. Following a comparative study of Crumb’s Black Angels
quartet, there will be a first performance of Elohim for ten amplified bows by Scelsi, and a special
focus on the sources in the Institute of Music with the preparation of Oppo’s Amply for amplified
string instruments, and Romitelli’s quartet Natura morta con fiamme, while Frances-Marie Uitti
will explore some aspects of notations and performance techniques for the cello. A dozen string
players will be selected to take part in the workshop through a call for applications.

Successful applicants will be offered accommodation in the Branca Residence enabling them to follow all the stages in preparing for the performance. Among those involved in the workshop will be Alessandra
Carlotta Pellegrini, Pierre Michel, Ingrid Pustijanac, Giovanni Verrando and Alvise Vidolin.

Download the program

Download the announcement of selection (deadline for enrolement 31 May 2017)

Download the application form

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Conference For Francesco Degrada: Music Criticism and Italian Musicology in the Militant Years

Coordinated by Gianmario Borio, Adriana Guarnieri and Franco Piperno, this study day is the third stage in the series Musicology: Criticism, Philology and History: Remembering Francesco Degrada, jointly organised by the Fondazione Pergolesi Spontini, the Centro Studi Pergolesi and the University of Milan, to commemorate the Italian musicologist who died in 2005. Held in collaboration with the Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello, the Venice meeting will cast light on the role played by Degrada in diffusing musical knowledge through his work at the Teatro La Scala, his relations with avant-garde composers and his organisation of festivals and concerts, seen through concert programmes and communications on the media – the subjects of papers by Cesare Fertonani and Alessandro Turba.
Degrada’s role in mediating between academic work and civic education took place in a politico-cultural context which may be described as militant. Papers by Carla Cuomo on Massimo Mila and Angela Carone on Roman Vlad will fill out this context and outline a season of great vitality for Italian culture. The conference will also include a talk by Mercedes Viale Ferrero and will begin with a round table on changes in music criticism over the last three decades, with Angelo Foletto, Mario Messinis, Giorgio Pestelli and Paolo Petazzi.

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International Conference. Monteverdi’s Venetian Operas: New Ideas for Interpretation and Mise en Scène

16 June 2017
Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Island of San Giorgio Maggiore

17 June 2017
Teatro La Fenice, Sale Apollinee

Part of the celebrations of 450 years since the birth of Claudio Monteverdi, this conference has been organised by the Institute of Theatre and Opera and the Institute of Music in collaboration with the Teatro La Fenice. Coordinated by Ellen Rosand and Stefano La Via, the event will bring together scholars and performers with diverse skills and backgrounds. The intense two-day conference is divided into three sessions. The first two sessions ‒ entitled L’Incoronazione di Poppea: from Busenello to Monteverdi and Poppea vs. Ulisse: keys for interpretation and performance ‒ will held at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini on 16 June, while the last session, History and criticism of stage productions, will take place in the Sale Apollinee of the Teatro La Fenice on 17 June.

After the conference and a performance of the “Monteverdi Trilogy”, conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner will meet Tim Carter and the other speakers. Among those invited to take part are Guillaume Bernardi, Mauro Calcagno, Jane Glover, Wendy Heller, Mario Infelise, Jean-François Lattarico, Maria Martino, Magnus Schneider, Hendrik Schultze, Anna Tedesco and Nicola Usula.

In concomitance with the conference at the Teatro La Fenice, Sir John Eliot Gardiner at the head of the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestras will stage the Monteverdi Trilogy: Orfeo, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria and L’incoronazione di Poppea. For its world première in Venice, this production will have a cast of young singers selected by Gardiner from among the students who came from Italy, Britain and France to take part in a series of preparatory workshops for the operas entitled the Accademia Monteverdiana. The workshops were held at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in April 2016 and organised by the Institute for theatre and Opera.

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Image:

Francesco Primaticcio, Ulysses and Penelope, c. 1560, Toledo Museum of Art (Toledo, Ohio). Purchased with the contribution of the Libbey Endowment, gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, 1964.60

Archival Notes. Source Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First-Century Music

An open-access, peer-reviewed journal, curated by the Institute of Music of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini and published annually.

Archival Notes is dedicated to research on musical sources from the 20th and 21st centuries, promoting a variety of interdisciplinary approaches. The journal not only highlights the musical collections held by the Foundation but also supports the development of international relations in the field of music heritage preservation.
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No. 1 (2016)
No. 2 (2017)
No. 3 (2018)
No. 4 (2019)
No. 5 (2020)
No. 6 (2021)
No. 7 (2022)
No. 8 (2023)
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“Alternating Tones”: Musical Elements in the Poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin and its Reception with Composers. A Dialogue between German Studies and Musicology

This seminar has been organised by Gianmario Borio and Elena Pollastri with the support of the Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani, the Hölderlin-Gesellschaft, Tubingen, the Italian Section of the Hölderlin-Gesellschaft and the Department of Languages and Literature, Communications, Education and Society at the University of Udine and funded by the DAAD with funds from the German Foreign Office. It sets out to examine the relations between Hölderlin and the musical sphere and the interest shown by composers in his poetry. These aspects are seen as two sides of the same coin deserving to be studied in a multidisciplinary context. On one hand, German studies have highlighted how the art of sounds gives a definite feel to the work of Hölderlin, so much so that he himself described his creative procedure as “alternating tones” and his poems as “songs”; and on the other hand, musicological studies have explored the breadth and longevity of Hölderlin’s influence on composers, which gradually intensified in the 20th century.

The seminar’s objectives include creating moments of convergence between these two fields of research, thus continuing the path begun on the study day entitled Poetry “laden with future”. Friedrich Hölderlin and 20th-century music, held in 2014 by the Institute of Music in collaboration with the Fondazione Archivio Luigi Nono, the Centro Tedesco di Studi veneziani, the Europäische Akademie für Musik und Darstellende Kunst, Montepulciano and the Fondazione Teatro La Fenice, Venice.

The seminar will end with a performance of Schubert sonatas D 845 and D 959 on a Jakesch fortepiano by Paolo Zanzu.

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International Conference New Music Theatre in Europe: Transformations between 1955-1975

Coordinated by an Advisory Committee made up of Robert Adlington, Gianmario Borio, Giordano Ferrari, Dörte Schmidt and Daniela Tortora, this conference is a crucial stage in a research project on experimentation in music theatre, the first step having been the 2015 seminar on Avant-garde Theatre and Experimental Music for the Stage in Italy: 1950-1975. As in the previous seminar, underlying this conference is a philological-historical enquiry into works, events and institutions that have played an important part in the development of new forms of music theatre.

The themes for this meeting, which has attracted a varied group of Italian and international musicologists, include redesigning the stage space and its components, the relationship between actors, mime and instrumentalists, political aspects of experimental theatre, the figure of the composer-playwright, and the creation of ad hoc texts that no longer have the characteristics of a libretto.

On the November, 26 at Padiglione delle Capriate there will be a concert of MDI ENSEMBLE Group.
The concert is free, subject to availability, upon presentation of the invitation to be collected at the entrance.

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Image:
Mauricio Kagel, Staatstheater
Staatsoper Hamburg, 25.4.1971
Foto by F. Peyer

Tota pulchra es (1961). Mottetto per soprano, tenore e organo

This publication is part of a long-term project in collaboration with publishers Schott of Mainz to release previously unpublished works by Nino Rota with a special focus on titles in the repertory for vocal works of religious inspiration. The motet Tota pulchra es is arguably one of the most frequently visited in the history of music. This has been the case from the 15th century to the present day, or from Guillaume Dufay to Anton Bruckner and James MacMillan, to sum up in three name the fascination and power this text has exercised and continues to exercise on composers. Rota develops three straightforward melodic lines which conceal a great skill in handling the two voices (male and female).

Composing for the State. Music in Twentieth-Century Dictatorships

COMPOSING FOR THE STATE

Music in Twentieth-Century Dictatorships

Edited by Esteban Buch, Igor Contreras Zubillaga and Manuel Deniz Silva

Second volume of the series Musical Cultures of the Twentieth Century

Ashgate Publishing, Farnham (Surrey, UK) – Burlington (VT, USA), 2016

This book presents ten studies focusing on music inspired and promoted by regimes such as Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, France under Vichy, the USSR and its satellites, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Maoist China, and Latin-American dictatorships. By discussing the musical works themselves, whether they were conceived as ways to provide “music for the people”, to personally honour the dictator, or to participate in State commemorations of glorious historical events, the book examines the relationship between the composers and the State.

This important volume, therefore, addresses theoretical issues long neglected by both musicologists and historians: What is the relationship between art music and propaganda? How did composers participate in musical life under the control of an authoritarian State? What was specifically political in the works produced in these contexts? How did audiences react to them? Can we speak confidently about “State music”? In this way, Composing for the State: Music in Twentieth Century Dictatorships is an essential contribution to our understanding of musical cultures of the twentieth century, as well as the symbolic policies of dictatorial regimes.

Investigating Musical Performance: Towards a Conjuction of Ethnographic and Historiographic Perspectives

_{Dioskourides Di Samo, Mosaico con musici, Villa Di Cicerone, Pompei. Su concessione del Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo – Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli.}

International conference

Investigating Musical Performance: Towards a Conjunction of Ethnographic and Historiographic Perspectives

Continuing with the project to study the practice of performance, launched in 2012 in collaboration between the Intercultural Institute of Comparative Music Studies and the Institute of Music, this conference is the concluding stage of the interdisciplinary thinking pursued in previous seminars. Authoritative experts from various disciplines (musicology, ethnomusicology, popular music and jazz studies) will gather to discuss the possible convergence between ethnographic and historical research in addressing an important theme for contemporary musicology. It is a cut little explored in other meetings on the same theme, which characterizes the project since its debut.

The papers of the participants, organized in four sessions coordinated by Gianmario Borio, Giovanni Giuriati, Alessandro Cecchi and Marco Lutzu, represent the latest research experiences on musical performance, which are developed both within the Anglo-Saxon and American musicology than in that of several European countries. Participate: Philip Auslander, Camilla Bork, Martin Clayton, John Covach, Michela Garda, Francesco Giannattasio, Travis A. Jackson, Laura Leante, Pierre Michel, John Rink, Martin Scherzinger, Janet Schmalfeldt, Mary Ann Smart, Martin Stokes, Timothy Taylor, John Covach, Richard Widdess.

On the 9th July at 7 pm in the Auditorium ‘Lo Squero’ it has programmed a concert of MDI ENSEMBLE group that will perform the song Allegro Sostenuto of the composer Helmut Lachenmann.

The concert is free, subject to availability, upon invitation presentation to be collected at the entrance.

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Musical Listening in the Age of Technological Reproduction

Musical Listening in the Age of Technological Reproduction

Edited by Gianmario Borio

Musical Cultures of the Twentieth Century

Ashgate Publishing, Farnham (Surrey, UK) – Burlington (VT, USA), 2015

This is the first book in a new series entitled “Musical Cultures of the Twentieth Century”. The aim of the series is to document the research activities promoted by the Fondazione Giorgio Cini Institute of Music, including those at times pursued in collaboration with other research institutes. Dedicated to the memory of Giovani Morelli, the eminent musicologist and director of the Institute of Music from its creation in 1985 until his premature death in 2011, the book brings together the proceedings from the conference in his memory, held on the island of San Giorgio in March 2013. Significantly, this book has seen the light of day in the thirtieth anniversary year of the Institute itself. The various chapters consist of the papers presented by a large group of scholars. The book thus oers an accurate account of the methodological pluralism in the studies carried out at the Institute and the constant dialogue between experts with dierent backgrounds and cultural origins on a host of themes, as the title might suggest. At the same time, the book pays homage to some of Morelli’s main research and teaching interests, such as themes related to the reproduction of music and the repercussions of technological innovation on composition and its subsequent reception.