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”.
Categoria Evento: Conferences and Seminars
Seminar Civilisation of Venice and the Venetian State. The politics of the Serenissima between Italy, Europe and the Mediterranean (1530–1797)
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.
Meeting with the musician and concert, Giancarlo Schiaffini, artist of complex sound: before and after Prometheus
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.
Occultural Transfers between North and South
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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Study Day Professor Bad Trip Fausto Romitelli’s triptych, amid compositional technique and aesthetic reflections
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.
Study Day The Theatre of the Actors. Wanda Benedetti, Toni Barpi and their Era
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of actress Wanda Benedetti (Treviso, 31 October 1923 – Treviso, 12 July 2017) and of the tenth anniversary of the death of actor Toni Barpi (Feltre, 13 July 1920 – Treviso, 31 October 2013), the Institute for Theatre and Opera intends to promote a study day dedicated to the Veneto theatre scene in the second half of the twentieth century. The two actors, companions both in life and on stage, worked with some of the most important directors of the
time, including Cesco Baseggio, Carlo Lodovici, Renato Simoni, Maurizio Scaparro and Luigi Squarzina. The meeting will provide an opportunity to recall not only the work of these two performers, but more generally to reconstruct a cross-section of theatre in the Veneto area in the decades following WWII.
Wanda Benedetti and Toni Barpi, whose personal archives are conserved by the Institute, worked with other artists whose memory is preserved by the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, including stage designer Mischa Scandella, directors Arnaldo Momo, Giovanni Poli and the aforementioned Luigi Squarzina and Maurizio Scaparro.
Accademia Vivaldi. Masterclasses on the interpretation of the music of Antonio Vivaldi
The courses of the Accademia Vivaldi will continue in the autumn with masterclasses on the performance practices of Antonio Vivaldi’s compositions, dedicated to young singers and instrumentalists. The last two encounters will be dedicated to singers and will be led by baritone Sergio Foresti and soprano Gemma Bertagnolli. The ten students selected and scholarship winners will have the opportunity not only to enhance their own interpretation, but also to explore musicological aspects of the pieces examined, thanks to lectures given by musicologists in partnership with the Istituto Italiano Antonio Vivaldi and with the research group ‘La drammaturgia musicale a Venezia (1678–1792)’ of the Fondazione Ugo e Olga Levi.
There will be a concert at the end of each of the two encounters.
Conference | Contemporary spiritualities: open theoretical and methodological issues
Organised by the Centre for the Study of Comparative Civilisations and Spirituality in collaboration with the Italian Association of Sociology (AIS) – Sociology of Religion Section, the conference aims to discuss the state of the art in the sociology of spirituality both on a national and international level. In particular, reflections will address whether and how the ‘spirituality’ category can be translated into theoretical, methodological and empirical terms in various socio-cultural contexts and religious traditions. Furthermore, possible continuities and discontinuities will be examined between spirituality and other categories that, while different, have elements of affinity such as, for example, religion, esotericism, mysticism, New Age, paganism and new religious movements. We will also explore issues such as: spirituality within and out of traditional religion, the comparison between ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ spirituality, the relationship between spirituality and social spheres (economics, politics, culture, the media and leisure, etc.), the theoretical boundaries between spirituality and religion, spirituality and gender, and finally methods for studying the relationship between spirituality and secularisation.
The conference will be in Italian.
Free entrance upon registration.
For more information download the programme here.
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Early Music Seminars Egida Sartori and Laura Alvini Pulcinella musician and philosopher. The Neapolitan comic cantatas in the 18th century
“Along with Peppe Barra, Pino De Vittorio is the last heir to the ancient tradition of singer-actors who for centuries staged the utopian union between high and low-brow: a characteristic that made the history of Neapolitan theatre unique. Like Peppe and Concetta Barra, De Vittorio was discovered
by Roberto De Simone for the first edition of his Gatta Cenerentola, and from then on, continued along the dual path of ethnomusicological research and baroque interpretation with worldwide success” (La Repubblica, 24.11.2017). Nothing to be added to these words of Dinko Fabris, one
of the most internationally renowned Italian musicologists and Scientific Director of the San Carlo Theatre in Naples. The Early Music Seminars, in this particular edition, aim to pay tribute
at the same time to the great singer-actor and promote the precious repertoire
of Neapolitan comic cantatas that he so masterfully interpreted.
Corrado Bologna, a distinguished philologist and academic who will accompany him, will comment on the ambivalent tradition – and especially the sacrificial dimension – of Neapolitan and Italian comic characters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The collaboration of two specialists,
a musicologist and a theatre historian, is also foreseen. Singers and/or actors selected through an international contest will participate in the seminar, accompanied by a basso continuo ensemble.
The event is organised with the contribution of the Swiss foundations Concordance, Irma Merk and L.+Th. La Roche.
On 12 October, the traditional final concert will take place in the Auditorium “Lo Squero”.
Study Day: The Instrumental Ensemble with Voice in the Twentieth Century: Pierrot Lunaire and Ten Poems by Emily Dickinson
Arnold Schoenberg and the reception of his thought in the second half of the twentieth century is the focus of this second appointment of the Research-Led Performance cycle.
The origins, diffusion and differentiation of solo voice ensembles and instrumental ensembles with voice were the subject of a lecture that Gianmario Borio gave at an event in collaboration with the 2021 Music Biennale, significantly entitled Choruses. Drammaturgie vocali.
During this study day, organised by the Institute for Music, in collaboration with the Beaumont Consort and the “Benedetto Marcello” Conservatory in Venice, musicians and musicologists will compare Schoenberg’s pioneering composition to Giacomo Manzoni’s work on texts by Emily Dickinson.
Afterwards, the two works will be played in a performance by the Beaumont Consort with the participation of students from the Venetian Conservatory and singer Cristina Baggio.
