Landscape drawing has long been regarded as an amateur pastime or exercise of compositional skills at the service of painting. The orientation of more recent studies towards issues of artistic practices and the materiality of
works has made it possible to explore landscape drawing as an autonomous artform or as a rendering of the experience of nature. After all, drawings and prints of landscapes produced by artists such as Leonardo and Dürer,
Rembrandt, Cozens and Fragonard have continued to fascinate the public for centuries. On this theme, the Institute of Art History, with the support of the Tavolozza Foundation, is promoting a conference (curated by Camilla Pietrabissa and Elisa Spataro) that sets out to examine the complexity of this artistic manifestation by focusing on its material and aesthetic aspects.
From the media and the tools used to observe and record nature and urban spaces on paper to the assemblage of albums and the innovation of printing techniques, the two study days aim to demonstrate how the most recent research is shaping the history of landscape imagery, challenging traditional historiographical narratives. Among the various aspects that the conference intends to address – and which will be the focus of the speakers selected through a call for papers – are the notion of drawing from real life or ‘from nature’ in relation to artistic practices and experiences; landscape drawing materials: drawing media and tools; the practices of collecting individual sheets, assembling and dispersing notebooks and albums of landscape drawings; compositional schemes, perspective and viewpoints on the landscape; as well as the use of optical instruments and other technical devices.
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This workshop is part of the Research-led Performance series, one of the most popular and esteemed activities at the Institute for Music since its inaugural edition in 2016. Our guest lecturer for 2024 is Lucas Fels, cellist of the Arditti String Quartet and professor at the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts. A masterful musician, Fels combines his expertise with a keen interest in philological aspects and theoretical reflection. The workshop will focus on works for solo cello by Italian composers, with particular attention to the collections preserved at the Institute for Music. The following compositions will be studied:
• Luigi Dallapiccola, Ciaccona, Intermezzo e Adagio (1945);
• Renato de Grandis, Serenata seconda (1970);
• Giacomo Manzoni, Freedom (2001);
• Ernesto Rubin de Cervin, Omaggi (2002).
The workshop is aimed at young cellists with a strong ability to understand and interpret research and experimental music. The program includes both practical and theoretical sessions, as well as a final concert featuring performances by a select group of workshop participants. The practical sessions will be led by Lucas Fels, while the theoretical sessions, open to the public, will be given by musicologists Gianmario Borio (Director of the Institute of Music and Professor at the University of Pavia), Francisco Rocca (scientific collaborator at the Institute of Music) and Francesca Scigliuzzo (doctoral student at the University of Udine).
Call for applications for 8 cellists with scholarships
Application deadline: 25 October 2024
The Italian Antonio Vivaldi Institute proposes a series of seminars aimed at instrumentalists, singers, conductors and musicologists who wish to study the performance practices of Vivaldi’s music in depth. The encounters focus on the study of his original manuscripts and the many performance indications contained therein.
PROGRAM
5 February: 2.30 pm-5.30 pm
6 February: 9.30 a.m.-12.30 p.m. and 2-5 p.m.
7 February: 10 a.m.-1 p.m.
On Tuesday 6 February, at 6 pm at the Fondazione Ugo e Olga Levi, Federico Maria Sardelli’s book Vivaldi secondo Vivaldi – Dentro i suoi manoscritti will be presented.
Participation in the Seminar is free of charge, subject to registration by 31 January 2024.
Participants will be given the opportunity to stay, at a reduced price, on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, at the Residence of the Vittore Branca International Centre for the Study of Italian Civilisation. Request to be sent to segreteria.vivaldi@cini.it no later than 31 January.
With this event, the Institute for Music participates in the celebrations of the centenary of Luigi Nono’s birth and renews its collaboration with the Fondazione Archivio Luigi Nono. The two days are in direct concurrence with the performance of one of the composer’s greatest creations: Prometeo. Tragedia dell’ascolto.
The conference part is dedicated to recent musicological studies on this work. Esteban Buch, Pauline Driesen, Jörn Peter Hickel, Jonathan Impett, Matteo Nanni, and Veniero Rizzardi will discuss the following aspects: the myth of Prometheus in 20th century culture and music, the choice and setting to music of the texts, the planning of the acoustic space, the role of live electronics, the stages of the compositional process, and the philosophical foundations of the work. In the central session, Marco Angius, Roberto Fabbriciani, Giancarlo Schiaffini and Alvise Vidolin will examine performance issues: the placement of instrumental and vocal groups in the space of San Lorenzo the church, the management of live electronics equipment, the correct rendering of soloist and choir parts, the overall sound balance. Joseph Auner and Michela Garda will participate as discussants.
As part of the activities promoted by the National Committee for the celebrations of the centenary of Mischa Scandella’s birth, of which the Institute of Theatre and Opera is the promoting body, a study day on the Venetian artist and Italian set design in the second half of the twentieth century is planned. The meeting will provide an opportunity to conclude the work of the National Committee and to introduce the public to both the Venetian set designer’s theatre and the activities promoted during the
Committee’s three-year existence. At the end of the work, the Scandella Prize will be awarded, for the second year running, to students at the Fine Arts Academies for the best set design projects inspired by the work of the Venetian master.
The scenographer Pier Luigi Pizzi, the scholar Cristina Grazioli and the members of the Scandella National Committee – Maria Ida Biggi, Nicola Bruschi, Lorenzo Cutuli and Marianna Zannoni – will be present at the event.
The aim of this day, organised by the Institute of Music, is an initial exploration of the relationship between painters and composers in a period rich in innovation in terms of construction techniques and the communicative channels of the arts, for which the terms seriality, informal, kinetic art
and Fluxus have been used. The interdisciplinary imprint of the topic is reflected in the composition of the panel of speakers. Marcello Aitiani will outline how visual artists and musicians come together. Daniela Tortora (Santa Cecilia Conservatory, Rome) will offer an overview of the cultural
periodicals of the 1960s and ’70s, in particular Marcatré. Patrizio Peterlini’s (Fondazione Bonotto) paper will move from graphic scores to exploring the impact of Fluxus aesthetics on musicians and figurative artists in Italy.
Pietro Misuraca (University of Palermo) will discuss the highlights of the Settimane Internazionali di Nuova Musica in Palermo, in particular the two painting exhibitions at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna (REVORT 1 and REVORT 2) and the magazine Collage. Paolo Somigli (University of Bolzano)
will reconstruct the stages that led to the birth of Gruppo 70, focusing on the role of Giuseppe Chiari, Sylvano Bussotti and Pietro Grossi in the intersection of artistic forms in Florence in the 1960s. Paolo Bolpagni (Fondazione Ragghianti) will investigate the iconic component in the scores of Aldo Clementi and Francesco Pennisi and will present the pictorial activity of Giovanni Pizzo and Lucia Di Luciano, former founders and exponents first of Group 63 and then of Operativo R, who collaborated with Pietro Grossi. The day will end with a concert by the mdi ensemble at the Auditorium “Lo Squero”.
The Republic of Venice was a single state, stretching between Europe and the Mediterranean, from West to East, and for this reason it was among the first to develop a foreign policy understood in modern terms, through the work of ambassadors, confidants and spies, coupled with a full awareness
– at the highest governmental levels – of the dynamics at play in the various contexts where La Serenissima was situated. After decades in which political history has been neglected in favour of other research areas, often influenced by passing fads, with the second appointment of the cycle of seminars Civilisation of Venice and the Venetian State, promoted by the Institute for the History of the Venetian State and Society, we wish to resume the discourse on the foreign policy of La Serenissima in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, attempting to consider the strategic choices of the Republic from a comparative perspective. In contrast to the neutrality pursued in Italy, understood in the most dated historiography as a retreat, Venice’s Mediterranean policy and the fact that the domination of
an entire sector, such as the Adriatic and Ionian seas, gave authority and prestige to the Republic on a European level, has not been fully evaluated.
The same also goes for the repeated wars and various periods of peace with the Ottoman Empire, each with its own connotations on the diplomatic and strategic level. A vital element, that of La Serenissima, confirmed by its wholehearted participation in the joint attack against the Ottomans
in the late-seventeenth century, to define the new order between powers in the Balkans and thus in the eastern Mediterranean. The stability achieved towards the Ottoman adversary/partner, from 1718 onwards, was the ideal balance, the ideal outcome of a long history of conflict and coexistence.
But the greatest and most fatal challenge for the Republic, as we know, did not come from the Mediterranean but from Europe towards the end of the eighteenth century.
In the meeting organised by the Institute of Music, in conversation with Gianmario Borio, Giancarlo Schiaffini will retrace his career as a performer, improviser and composer. Since the mid-1960s, Schiaffini has been one of the protagonists of free improvised music: he took part in Mario Schiano’s
‘Gruppo Romano Free Jazz’; in 1970, he founded the Nuove Forme Sonore ensemble, which alternated interpretations of aleatory compositions and improvisation; later, he was part of the Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza and collaborated with the leading protagonists of European improvised music, including the Globe Unity Orchestra and the Instant Composers Pool Orchestra. In the 1980s, Schiaffini played a key role in Luigi Nono’s compositions with live electronics, providing materials and performance techniques. The intertwining of the three (usually separate) roles of performer, improviser and composer makes Schiaffini a unique figure in the panorama of research and experimental music, and an indispensable reference for brass performance practices. At the end of the talk, Schiaffini will perform Sottile canto III by Edgar Alandia, Solo for tuba + Fontana Mix by John Cage, Luz by Domenico Guaccero and Post-Prae-Ludium per Donau by Luigi Nono.
This conference is organised by Centre for Comparative Studies of Civilisations and Spiritualities in collaboration with Dr. Giuliano D’Amico, Associate Professor at the University of Oslo and director of the research network Esotericism and Aesthetics in the Nordic Countries, and Dr. Marco Pasi, Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam and director of the Centre for the History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents.
The osmosis between esoteric/occult and artistic discourse, which scholars have termed “occulture”, has mainly been studied from a national perspective and drawing upon case studies from the last 60 years. Such lack of comparative knowledge and studies is somewhat surprising if one takes into account the impact of esoteric and occult materials from a wider “South” (including not only Southern Europe, but also Northern Africa and the Mediterranean Basin) that has made its way in Northern Europe since at least the end of the 19th century, focusing, but not limited to, Sufism, Egyptosophy and Freemasonry, or, conversely, about the continuous forms of inspiration that Nordic alternative spirituality has had on artistic production in Southern Europe (e.g. with the proliferation of Nordic paganism in occultural discourse). The proposed conference aims at filling this scholarly gap, opening up avenues of research and discussing new ways of approaching and conceptualizing occultural phenomena with a North-South perspective as a starting point. We understand “North” and “South” as including, respectively, the Nordic, Baltic, German and English-speaking countries in Europe, and Southern European, Mediterranean, and African countries/areas. The event will be enriched by a concert of the mdi ensemble that will play music by Jean Sibelius, Kaja Saariaho, and Franco Oppo on the 2nd of November.
Download the programme of the conference here.
Admission is free upon registration.
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On the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the birth of Fausto Romitelli, who died prematurely in 2004, the Biennale Musica and the Institute of Music are dedicating a study day to the composer’s poetics, which will end with the complete performance of Professor Bad Trip. Issues concerning the
conception of the triptych and the sources of the compositional process, instrumental synthesis and spectral morphology, para-texts and the evocation of a ‘mental cinematography’ and the issues of performance will be addressed.
Participants: Alessandro Arbo, Oliver Korte, Luigi Manfrin, Nicholas Moroz and Jean-Luc Plouvier.
