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Narrating with Sounds: Bruno Maderna’s Music for Radio and Film
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- By Leo Izzo
- Edited by Angela Ida De Benedictis
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- Book:
- Utopia, Innovation, Tradition
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 27 June 2023, pp 171-190
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
Introduction
The numerous occasions in Bruno Maderna's artistic life when he composed so-called musica funzionale for film and radio are spread over many years, parallel to his activity as an art music composer. Although this music was initially little appreciated and scarcely known, seminal essays and articles on certain aspects, or indeed on single works, have gradually brought his production of music for film and radio to light. It goes without saying that a fundamental difficulty underlies any discussion of this topic, since radio and cinema have different linguistic specificities, require particular analytical perspectives, and, whatever their interconnections, boast their very own traditions, genres, and production processes. Added to this, we also have the noticeable fact that Maderna only worked intermittently on music for radio and cinema productions. Nevertheless, a number of constant features can be identified, and the proper degree of historical distance allows us to recognize the value and peculiarity of some of his most successful collaborations, in which the sound and/or musical component becomes crucial for the narration. In these cases, the composer's contribution goes beyond the routine of consolidated narrative genres and manages to introduce novel elements, albeit within the boundaries of well-defined linguistic codes.
The wealth of music for film and radio composed by Maderna might seem rather unusual for a post-war avant-garde composer. Moreover, from the perspective of now-outdated categorization, all this music enshrines the limits of a system of values that continues to favor a distinction between “high” and “low” cultural products, between intellectual elite and the general public. However, Maderna's vast and varied work in these fields deserves instead to be approached with an open mind, in which the shared social and cultural divide between art music and popular music is envisaged as a sort of polarized continuum, within which intermediate positions and various forms of mediation coexist. This proves to be an essential concept for radio and/or audiovisual media, where the work is the result of the synergistic action of different forms of expression and professionalism.
One can easily get an idea of just how many variables come into play in this field of production by considering Maderna's very first radio and film collaborations in the immediate post-war period.
Bruno Maderna and His Arrangements
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- By Leo Izzo
- Edited by Angela Ida De Benedictis
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- Book:
- Utopia, Innovation, Tradition
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 27 June 2023, pp 245-274
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In the early 1960s, Maderna produced a large number of arrangements to be broadcast on radio and recorded on albums, indirectly becoming part of a cultural movement intent on renewing the Italian popular music scene. This important arranging experience evolved out of two occasions that had to do with the main media of popular music, that is, radio and records. In 1960 he took part in the launch of a radio musical program entitled Arcidiapason, and a few years later, in 1964, he recorded two LPs dedicated to Kurt Weill's songs, performed by Laura Betti. Maderna's temporary foray into the world of popular music coincided with a period of fervent musical activity and multiple commitments and projects. These include the composition of Don Perlimplin, the writing of various pieces that were later merged into the Hyperion cycle, intense activity as a conductor, collaboration with several radio productions, the creation of a number of compositions for the theater, and his experiences in the field of electronic experimentation, conducted at the RAI's Studio di Fonologia in Milan.
It is not surprising to find that Maderna, one of the leading composers of the European musical avant-garde, was quite familiar with the world of song, or so-called “light” music. Entertainment music had been part of Maderna's biographical horizon since childhood. Jazz music (in its various forms), popular music, and hit songs were in fact the repertoires played by his father's band, “The Happy Grossato Company – Original Jazz Band.” At the age of ten, Maderna had for a short time been the band's main performer as violinist and enfant prodige. Throughout his working life as a composer – from the jazz style he used in his first radio drama Il mio cuore e nel Sud (1949) to the embedded quotes of Satyricon (1972–73) – the traces of this link with popular or jazz culture are easy to see. In several works one can even observe a genuine act of “mediation” between languages whose different origins and rules make them apparently irreconcilable.