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Opera
 4 other titles

Italian Perspectives 16

Legenda: Oxford, 2006
£45.00 ($69.00 US)  Hardback  304pp
ISBN: 1-904350-60-7

Italian music of the 1960s is one of the most unjustly neglected areas in the arena of twentieth-century classical music. This volume pays tribute to the astounding complexity of the music and libretti of five vocal compositions by leading experimental composers of the decade: Luigi Dallapiccola, Bruno Maderna, Luciano Berio, Giacomo Manzoni, and Armando Gentilucci. It highlights how the ‘difficult’ and unconventional methods of composition employed by these artists — dodecaphony, total serialism, Webernian minimalist techniques, aleatory and electronic music — displayed a refusal to compete with the market-place values of Italy’s new capitalist society. At the same time, the libretti’s collage arrangement of a plethora of European and Oriental literary sources dating from the sixteenth century BC onwards, reflected the contemporary Neo-avant-garde rejection of conventional literary practice, and their preference for ‘organised disorder’, in Umberto Eco’s phrase.

Vivienne Suvini-Hand is Reader in Italian at Royal Holloway, University of London.