Narrating with Sounds: Bruno Maderna’s Music for Radio and Film

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 Moreover, from the perspective of now-outdated categorization, all this music enshrines the limits of a system of values that continues to favor a distinction between “high” and “low” cultural products,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.