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Milan's Studio di Fonologia: Voice Politics in the City, 1955–8

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Delia Casadei
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Abstract

The Studio di Fonologia Musicale of Milan, Italy's first electronic music studio, opened in 1955. Housed in the national broadcasting (RAI) studios in Milan, the studio was founded by two celebrated Italian composers: Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna. The institution is often remembered nowadays for being the first electronic music studio to focus its activity on the human voice. As I argue, this focus was not only of an aesthetic nature, but rather reflected long-standing political and intellectual conceptions of voice, speech and public space that were rooted in Italy's early days as a republic, and in mid-twentieth-century Milan as the flagship city for this newly achieved political modernity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 141 , Issue 2 , 2016 , pp. 403 - 443
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 The Royal Musical Association

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Footnotes

I wish to thank the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania and the American Musicological Society for supporting my research through their respective Dissertation Completion Fellowships in 2014. Although no archival material is used in this article, I am grateful to Maddalena Novati for welcoming me into the Studio di Fonologia's archives in Milan in 2012, thus marking the beginning of my research on the topic of this article. I am much indebted to Carolyn Abbate, Jairo Moreno and Roger Parker for their feedback at various stages of the article's ideation and numerous drafts. Lastly, I wish to thank the peer reviewers for their helpful and thorough comments on this article.

References

1 Fred K. Prieberg, ‘Elektronische Musik in Mailand’, Musica ex machina: Über das Verhältnis von Musik und Technik (Berlin, 1960), 137–50; also in Italian as ‘Musica elettronica a Milano’, Musica ex machina, trans. Paola Tonini (Turin, 1963), 146–61. All translations from the German are my own.

2 Prieberg strikingly translates the studio's name as something completely unrelated to phonology – namely as ‘Studio für musikalische Schallkunde’, which translates as ‘Studio for the Musical Science of Sounds’. See Prieberg, ‘Elektronische Musik in Mailand’, 138: ‘Zunächst diente es freilich weniger der Musikals vielmehr allgemeinen elektroakustischen Versuchen – daher die Bezeichnung “Studio für musikalische Schallkunde”’ (‘In the beginning the studio was certainly not used to make music so much as electroacoustic experiments of a general nature, hence the name “Studio for the Musical Science of Sounds”’).

3 See Flo Menezes, Un essai sur la composition verbale électronique Visage de Luciano Berio (Modena, 1993); Richard Causton, ‘Berio's Visage and the Theatre of Electroacoustic Music’, Tempo, 194 (1995), 15–21; and Steven Connor, ‘The Decomposing Voice of Postmodern Music’, New Literary History, 32 (2001), 467–83.

4 ‘Ich sass im Schnellzug nach Mailand, die Ebene hinter Como flog vorbei. Allmählich verschwand die weiβe Kette der Alpen, die sich wie ein riesiges Gebiss im Nordosten herangeschoben hatte, im Dunst. Vorstädte, Elendsquartiere, Industrieviertel. Die Metropole nahm den Zug mit offenen Armen auf. Mailand. In engen Gassen und auf ausladenden Boulevards drängten sich die Massen. Autos hupten unaufhörlich und strebten rottenweise, von den Verkehrsampeln aufgescheucht und angehalten, in halsbrecherischer Fahrt heran und davon, Autobusses und Strassenbahnen dazwischen; Menschen und wieder Menschen, alle in Eile, alle mit einem Ziel. Man hätte daran zweifeln können, dass Mailand in Italien liegt, aber dann schritt an einer Strassenecke – wie hergeweht aus einer romantischen Legende – ein braungebrannter Mann in bäuerlicher Kleidung durch das Gewühl, der eine antike Schalmei blies und einen kleinen Holzkäfig mit einem weiβen Vogel bei sich trug.’ Prieberg, ‘Elektronische Musik in Mailand’, 137.

5 Roberto M. Dainotto, Europe (in Theory) (Durham, NC, 2007), 6.

6 I am referencing the idea of wind instruments as a way of disabling – or alternatively channelling – the voice by engaging the player's breath. See Carolyn Abbate, In Search of Opera (Princeton, NJ, 2003), 79: ‘Flute and pipes, played with the mouth, entail an absolute suppression of the voice. They are wind instruments that substitute for singing, with melody but no words.’

7 ‘Das riesige Funkhaus des Italienischen Rundfunks ist ein weisslicher Gebäudeblock, der die anderen Häuser weit überragt, aber gleich einem Bauklötzchen zu Füssen eines stählernen, von Dezimeter spiegeln und Antennengekrönten Sende- und Empfangsturmes liegt. Unaufhörlich öffneten und schlossen sich die Windfangtüren der Vorhalle. Man hatte das Gefühl, in eine pompöse Fabrik einzutreten; wohl in keinem Funkhaus hat man die Rationalisierung überwiegend geistiger Arbeit so deutlich vor Augen wie in Mailand.’ Prieberg, ‘Elektronische Musik in Mailand’, 137.

8 The most famous literary rendition of the journey between the cemetery and the city centre is the long poem ‘Caporetto 1917’, written by the Milanese dialectal poet Delio Tessa in 1919. In the poem, Tessa portrayed the talk and shifting mood of a tram full of people returning to the city after visiting their dead at the Cimitero Maggiore on All Souls’ Day in 1917, while the Battle of Caporetto is being fought in the north-east of the peninsula by Italians against German and Austro-Hungarian troops. The poem was published in the collection L’è el dì di mort, alégher! (Milan, 1932).

9 On ‘La gioconda’, see Francesco Ogliari, Milano in tram: Storia del trasporto pubblico milanese (Milan, 2006). The history of the cemetery's location in relation to city boundaries (particularly the shift from inner-city local cemeteries to external large cemeteries) is noted in Michel Foucault's famous unpublished essay ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopia and Heterotopia’, trans. Jay Miscowiec, available at <http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf> (accessed 2 May 2014). Foucault postulates that the modern city contains spaces that present alternative versions of the city itself. To him, the cemetery – particularly in its out-of-city-bounds, nineteenth-century incarnation – is one such space.

10 John Foot notes how ‘Milan had, historically, “expelled” its workers en masse to its endless urban fringe’. Milan since the Miracle: City, Culture and Identity (Oxford and New York, 2001), 53.

11 The concept of threshold here is derived from the work of Giorgio Agamben, who theorizes the formation of sovereign power in the state as a moment of threshold where the boundary between animal life and human life, inchoate voice and rational language, is suspended. Agamben famously charged the distinction between phonè and logos as the moment of political differentiation between bare life and political life. That he should clasp sonic phenomena and politics together through voice in this way is a testament to the deep and complex ties between voice and politics in the history of Italian thought. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la vita nuda (Turin, 1995), trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen as Homo sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Palo Alto, CA, 1998).

12 Indeed, Ritratto di città was created soon after Berio had submitted a first proposal for an electronic music studio to the general director of RAI, Filiberto Guala. The proposed name for the studio at the time was Centro Sperimentale di Ricerche Radiofoniche (Centre for Experimental Radiophonic Research), a name that sounds close to the Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concrète. This chronology of the first proposal in relation to Ritratto is pointed out by Angela Ida De Benedictis in her ‘Opera prima: Ritratto di città e gli esordi della musica elettroacustica in Italia’, Nuova musica alla radio: Esperienze allo Studio di Fonologia della RAI di Milano, 1954–1959, ed. Veniero Rizzardi and Angela Ida De Benedictis (Rome, 2000), 27–56.

13 Recent research is indeed pushing back this history of Milanese celebrations of modernity into the nineteenth century. See, for example, Gavin Williams, ‘Excelsior as Mass Ornament: The Reproduction of Gesture’, Staging the Scientific Imagination, ed. Benjamin Walton and David Trippett (Cambridge, forthcoming).

14 Much could be said about the relation between ‘risveglio’ and ‘ritratto’ as historical modes of thinking about Milan, modes that are less than half a century apart. For one, the awakening of the city evoked by Russolo implies a certain organic cohesiveness in the city, the movements of a body politic whose noises implied an aggressive modernity and an aestheticization of burgeoning industry as a tool for war. This beautification of war as the apotheosis of the body politic was long ago diagnosed as an element of Fascism by Walter Benjamin in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility’ (1936). More specifically, Susan Buck-Morss notes that the structure of spectacle in Fascism is a tripartite one – matter (hyle), agent, observer – in which the masses of spectators are both the matter acted upon and detached observers, a dual role that obscures the fact that they have no agency with a kind of aesthetic pleasure. I can imagine Risveglio's intonarumori within this structure, in which the listener is both the sonic matter worked into action and the observer of the rising of the city, but not its prime mover. See Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered’, October, 62 (1992), 3–41, esp. pp. 30–3. In contrast, Ritratto, with its insistence on the wedging of representation between the subject and the object of observation, and its constant emphasis of the mediating role of the senses, could be said to return, in a way, a perceptual – and thus implicitly political – agency onto its listener.

15 Roberto Leydi, ‘Ritratto di città: Studio per una rappresentazione radiofonica’, Nuova musica alla radio, ed. Rizzardi and De Benedictis, 328–39 (p. 328). In this anthology, the editors present each essay both in the original Italian and in English translation; I have, however, occasionally modified the English translations provided in order to highlight certain poetic figures that are key to my argument. All other translations from the Italian are my own unless otherwise specified.

16 See De Benedictis, ‘Opera prima’, 45.

17 The text in which Schaeffer began to write in overtly phenomenological terms is his Traité des objets musicaux (Paris, 1966).

18 It is significant that Cage's ‘Lecture on Silence’ would be published in Incontri musicali, the academic journal of the Studio di Fonologia; see John Cage, ‘Lecture on Nothing’, Incontri musicali, 3 (1959), 128–49.

19 Leydi, ‘Ritratto di città’, 329.

20 The two voices are not only audibly different but carry different sets of associations. Gazzolo was 15 years younger than Fanfani, and had inherited the profession from his parents (his father was a famous actor and voice-over specialist, his mother a radio presenter). His low, forlorn, precisely enunciated voice, moulded by a slightly pleading intonation, responded closely to the affect required of the new radiophonic voices. Gazzolo subsequently had an extremely successful career as an actor who moved between theatre, cinema, radio and TV. Fanfani, on the other hand (despite a few important appearances on broadcast media), had his most successful years as a theatre actor and leading diction coach for Milan's Piccolo Teatro in the 1950s and 1960s. His nasal, clipped delivery betrays a vocal training emerging from wartime Italian radio.

21 ‘Fragore segretamente atteso, profondo respiro animale … vuote ambizioni preparano […] l'esaltato clamore della nuova giornata’. Leydi, ‘Ritratto di città’, 330.

22 Leydi, ‘Ritratto di città’, 330.

23 Ibid. The words in this quotation are not part of Leydi's text, but are the transcribed text from Berio and Maderna's vocal inserts, which is here included as part of the documentary text.

24 ‘Nei suoi occhi opachi […] leggiamo allora la storia sincera della gente di Milano.’ Leydi, ‘Ritratto di città’, 331.

25 There is no space to delve deeper into this heritage here; the two texts referenced are Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Essai sur l'origine des langues (Geneva, 1781) and Madame de Staël's essay ‘Sulla maniera e l'utilità delle traduzioni’, Biblioteca italiana, January 1816, pp. 9–18. I draw from the analyses of these authors by Dainotto in Europe (in Theory), as well as from Gary Tomlinson's analysis of de Staël in ‘Italian Romanticism and Italian Opera: An Essay in their Affinities’, 19th-Century Music, 10 (1986–7), 43–60.

26 This was the famous triptych consisting of De la grammatologie (Paris, 1967), L’écriture et la différence (Paris, 1967) and La voix et le phénomène (Paris, 1967). De la grammatologie takes to task Rousseau's theory of the origin of language, in which the linguistic sign causes the splitting of an originally united sign and signifier, and the subservience of voice to logos; La voix et le phénomène also deconstructs the relationship of voice to ideologies of embodiment and presence, albeit from the vantage point of Husserl's phenomenology of language in the Logische Untersuchungen (Leipzig, 1900–01).

27 In his seminal study Storia linguistica dell'Italia unita (Bari, 1962), Tullio De Mauro gathered the following statistics regarding literacy rates in 1951: 14% of the population was illiterate, with northern regions boasting rates as low as 3% and southern regions (Sicilia, Puglia, Basilicata and Calabria) going as high as 32%. Yet De Mauro also dwells on the fact that an ability to read and write often did not translate into spoken practice, thus establishing an area of ‘potentiality’ for spoken Italian that remained unfulfilled into the 1950s. De Mauro eventually concludes (p. 131) that in 1951 ‘more than four-fifths of the population habitually used dialect, and nearly two-thirds used dialect as the idiom for speaking on all occasions in social life’. The data on literacy rates are on pp. 90–9.

28 The concept of ‘second orality’ is developed most famously in Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy (New York, 1982).

29 De Mauro expands on the unwitting role of neo-realist cinema in framing dialects as idioms related to misery, provinciality and backwardness; see his Storia linguistica dell'Italia unita, 124.

30 The period of Milan's role as the fulcrum of state-owned media coincided roughly with the 15 years of radiophony that preceded the advent of television in 1954; by the mid-1950s, Milan would give way to Rome. The brief period of Milan's primacy in the media is documented in Ada Ferrari's Milano e la RAI: Un incontro mancato? Luci ed ombre di una capitale in transizione (1945–1977) (Milan, 2002).

31 It may seem unlikely that Gadda, who was by all standards a writer of rather experimental, modernist prose and a cultivator of the mixing of dialectal expressions with erudite turns of phrase (see, for instance, his famous Quel pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, published in 1957), could become a champion of utilitarian, straightforward prose. In fact, Gadda had been working for RAI's Third Programme since 1950, and believed the radio to be a medium that allowed for modes of communication radically different from those of literature. In many ways, he seemed to think that radio was to take on the political function that national popular literature was to have had according to Antonio Gramsci: that of facilitating a common language for the new republic.

32 Both Gadda and Bacchelli are mentioned in Ferrari, Milano e la RAI, 89. Original references are as follows: Carlo Emilio Gadda, Norme per la redazione di un testo radiofonico, first published anonymously as a pamphlet for internal circulation at the RAI (Turin, 1953), 1–18; Riccardo Bacchelli, ‘L'oratoria alla radio’, L'approdo letterario, 1 (1952), 50–1.

33 On this point, see Gianni Isola, L'ha scritto la radio: Storia e testi della radio durante il fascismo, 1924–1944 (Milan, 1998), 45.

34 Ferrari, Milano e la RAI, 89–93.

35 Roland Barthes, ‘The Grain of the Voice’, Image, Music, Text (London 1977), 179–89 (p. 182).

36 Ibid., 181.

37 Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘Roma e Milano’, Passione e ideologia (1952) (Milan, 1960), 60–92 (p. 79).

38 This argument is made by Angela Ida De Benedictis in ‘Opera prima’.

39 The attribution of the studio's name to Castelnuovo was made in Nicola Scaldaferri, Musica nel laboratorio elettroacustico: Lo Studio di Fonologia di Milano e la ricerca musicale negli anni cinquanta (Lucca, 1997), 67.

40 Luciano Berio, Umberto Eco and Roberto Leydi, ‘Luciano Berio, Umberto Eco, Roberto Leydi rievocano lo Studio di Fonologia a quarant'anni dalla fondazione’, Nuova musica alla radio, ed. Rizzardi and De Benedictis, 216–35 (p. 222).

41 Luciano Berio, ‘Prospettive nella musica’, Elettronica, 3 (1956), 108–15 (p. 108).

42 Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 19: ‘The inaugural gesture of phonology was thus the total reduction of the voice as the substance of language. Phonology, true to its apocryphal terminology, was after killing the voice – its name is, of course, derived from the Greek phonè, voice, but in it one can also quite appropriately hear phonos, murder. Phonology stabs the voice with the signifying dagger; it does away with its flesh and blood.’

43 See Patrice Maniglier, La vie énigmatique des signes: Saussure et la naissance du structuralisme (Paris, 2006). The key point about abandoning causality between sounds and signifiers in favour of the more complex concept of equivalences is explored in Chapter 2, ‘L'immaterialité du langage’, esp. pp. 80–1.

44 Saussure as quoted and discussed ibid., 101–2.

45 See Nikolay Trubetzkoy, Fundamentals of Phonology (1939) (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1969), 3–4: ‘The “study of sound”, that is, the science concerned with the elements of the signifier, has therefore always formed a special branch of linguistics, carefully differentiated from the “study of meaning”. […] Accordingly it would be advisable to institute in place of a single “study of sound” two “studies of sound”, one directed towards the act of speech, the other toward the language system. […] We designate the study of sound pertaining to the act of speech by the term phonetics, the study of sound pertaining to the system of language by the term phonology.’

46 The point about the difference between phonetics and phonology and its significance in Berio's work has been made in Flo Menezes, Luciano Berio et la phonologie: Une approche jakobsonienne de son oeuvre (New York, 1993). Understandably, given the prevalently analytical nature of his work, Menezes does not connect this difference to broader cultural concerns.

47 Berio, ‘Prospettive nella musica’, 108. In Italian post-war intellectual circles, the term ‘musica popolare’ indicated, quite literally, a music of ‘the people’ intended, ideologically, as a subalternity composed of the working class and rural populations. It was therefore considered to be an oral tradition and something quite distinct from commercial pop.

48 Lomax's assistant during his field trips to Italy, Diego Carpitella, became one of Italy's leading ethnomusicologists. Carpitella was also part, in 1959, of a multidisciplinary team of scholars led by the famous anthropologist Ernesto De Martino; they went to Apulia to conduct fieldwork, and produced a seminal text on tarantism. See Ernesto De Martino, La terra del rimorso: Contributo a una storia religiosa del Sud (Milan, 1961).

49 This is, necessarily, a very cursory assessment of Lomax's project. It is important to note that recent and innovative scholarship has re-evaluated the actuality of cantometrics precisely because of its creation of a means of talking about voice in non-aestheticizing terms, of connecting it to politics without forgoing its flesh-like qualities. Perhaps, then, more than preliminarily excising language from voice as an object of analysis, it would be fairer to say that Lomax created a way of naming and analysing a plethora of paralinguistic phenomena about the voice, thus effectively creating a language for vocal phenomena rather than taking an interest in the relation of language and voice at the level of phenomenon. On this topic, see Elizabeth Travassos, ‘Ritos orales, cantometrics y otros pasos en dirección a una antropología de la voz’, A contratiempo, 14 (2009), available at <http://www.territoriosonoro.org/CDM/acontratiempo/?ediciones/revista-14/artculos/ritos-orales-cantometrics-y-otros-pasos-en-direccin-a-una-antropologa-de-la-vozspan-class-hotspot-on.html> (accessed 20 August 2015).

50 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford, 1975).

51 For an analysis of the constitution of Europe's southern states as a periphery of enlightened civilization during the French Enlightenment and German post-Enlightenment and idealism, see Dainotto, Europe (in Theory).

52 Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni dal carcere (Turin, 1975), 969; trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg as Prison Notebooks, 3 vols. (New York, 1992–2007; repr. 2011), iii, 263. I have here modified Buttigieg's translation in order to highlight both the figure of pestilence (as something highly contagious) in Gramsci's metaphor for opera's effects and the image of thought as something whose flow is shaped but not arrested.

53 Luciano Berio, ‘Musica per tape recorder’, Il diapason, 4 (1953), 10–13 (p. 10).

54 ‘It is high time that the world […] got to know a different Italian from that of yesterday – the eternal tenor and mandolinist.’ Benito Mussolini, quoted in Harvey Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy (New York, 1988), 17; also quoted in Richard Taruskin, Oxford History of Western Music, 6 vols. (Oxford, 2005; repr. 2010), iv: The Early Twentieth Century, 751.

55 It is testament to the lasting traction of the conflation of Italy with a vocality that hampers both language and politics that Dolar's seminal text A Voice and Nothing More opens with an anecdote about Italian soldiers who in order to evade an order to go into battle pretend instead to attend to the beauty of their superior's voice. Although Dolar is quoting the anecdote with critical distance, the complex politics of the conflation of voice with the European South are not the subject of his text, which delves into more broadly philosophical issues. See Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, 6 –7.

56 Berio, ‘Prospettive nella musica’, 109: ‘I simboli della musica elettronica sono i suoni stessi nella loro obiettiva realtà fisica.’

57 Banfi's phenomenological school was, it is important to note, a reaction against the philosophy of Benedetto Croce, whose rather rigid take on idealism was considered, in the years of economic rebirth after the end of the Second World War, obsolete.

58 Ferrari, for instance, reports that the radio journalist Pino Mezzera also informally attended Banfi's classes in Milan. See Ferrari, Milano e la RAI, 96.

59 The anecdote on Le rire is recounted in Luigi Rognoni, ‘Memoria di Bruno Maderna negli anni cinquanta’, Bruno Maderna: Documenti, ed. Rossana Dalmonte and Mario Baroni (Milan, 1985), 146 –51 (p. 150).

60 The columns are now collected in a single publication as Enzo Paci, Il senso delle parole, ed. Piero Rovatti (Milan, 1987).

61 Enzo Paci, Diario fenomenologico (Milan, 1961), 29; entry dated 18 May 1957.

62 Luciano Berio, Intervista sulla musica (Bari, 1981), 55: ‘Luigi Rognoni, Roberto Leydi, Enzo Paci e Umberto Eco erano i nostri compagni di strada.’ Paci's first published essay on music was ‘Per una fenomenologia della musica contemporanea’, Il Verri, 1 (1959), 3–11. The second essay was ‘Fenomenologia e relazione nella musica contemporanea’, Incontri musicali, 4 (1960), 3–8.

63 In his thoughtful article on Thema (Omaggio a Joyce), Agostino Di Scipio opts to refer to the recording of Thema approved by the composer himself, which consists of Berberian's declamation of the Ulysses excerpt and the subsequent manipulations spliced into a single track of 8’ 13” duration. Agostino Di Scipio, ‘Da un'esperienza in ascolto tra phoné e logos: Testo, suono e musica in Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) di Berio’, Il saggiatore musicale, 7 (2000), 325–59. However, my timings will refer to Thema as the 6’ 13” section of Berio's manipulations of Berberian's recorded declamation only, both for ease of reference (I do not carry out any analytical work on the declamation) and also because this is the form in which the composition is most widely known, despite the composer's rather late-in-the-day correction of this practice.

64 As work by Scaldaferri has shown, Thema was preceded by a constellation of electronic compositions that explored the voice as an acoustic material – for instance, Schaeffer's Symphonie pour un homme seul (1952) and Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge (1956), the latter of which was well known and deeply admired by Berio. See Scaldaferri, Musica nel laboratorio elettroacustico, 35–56.

65 Luciano Berio, ‘Poesia e musica: Un'esperienza’, Incontri musicali, 3 (1959), 98–112, repr. in Berio, Scritti sulla musica, ed. Angela Ida De Benedictis (Turin, 2013), 251– 66 (p. 261; subsequent references also refer to this reprint). It is important to note that the text of the documentary Omaggio a Joyce, originally meant to accompany Thema, has a section specifically on formants. The documentary has been released as part of the CD attached to Nuova musica alla radio, ed. Rizzardi and De Benedictis; the text of the documentary is also published as Berio and Eco, ‘Omaggio a Joyce: Documenti sulla qualità onomatopeica del linguaggio poetico’, ibid., 340–56.

66 In fact, Berio writes specifically about the work of welding together consonants with different phonetic traits for the purpose of word chords, thus rendering articulation more flexible. Berio, ‘Poesia e musica’, 262: ‘Con diverse velocità di distribuzione e con accostamenti più o meno densi, sono state raggruppate quelle consonanti che il nostro apparato vocale difficilmente avvicina. Questi incontri artificiali di consonanti (soprattutto successioni rapide di unvoiced and voiced stop consonants: b-p, t-d, ch-g) hanno permesso una evoluzione decisiva verso una più grande ricchezza di articolazione’ (‘With different speeds of distribution and with juxtaposition of varying density, we have grouped those consonants that our vocal apparatus struggles to join. These artificial groups of consonants (especially rapid successions of unvoiced and voiced stop consonants: b-p, t-d, ch-g) have permitted a neat evolution towards a greater richness of articulation’).

67 Peter Manning has recently argued that the particular attention and focus on spatialization as a compositional and technological asset was one of the key characteristics of electronic composers in 1950s Milan. See Manning, ‘The Significance of Techné in Understanding the Art and Practice of Electroacoustic Composition’, Organised Sound, 11 (2006), 81–90 (p. 84). It must be noted that Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge was especially influential both in its radically innovative use of sampled voices in conjunction with synthesized sounds and in its association of voice with complex spatialization techniques. Yet although Berio makes frequent mentions of Gesang in his writings on electronic music, he seemed to think that its innovation lay chiefly in the combination of sampled and synthesized sound. See, for instance, Berio, ‘Musica elettronica’ (1958), Scritti sulla musica, ed. De Benedictis, 212–16 (p. 214): ‘L'apertura più significativa e più ricca di conseguenze realizzata in questo nuovo dominio è fornita dal Gesang der Junglinge, di Karlheinz Stockhausen, e proprio perché è qui riuscito, per la prima volta, l'incontro organico dei suoni naturali […] e dei suoni sintetici’ (‘The most significant and influential discovery in this new domain [of electronic music] is Gesang der Jünglinge, by Karlheinz Stockhausen, precisely because the organic combination of natural sounds […] and synthesized sounds is here achieved for the first time’). It is also worth mentioning some key differences between Stockhausen's and Berio's approaches to the voice: Berio's commitment was always to voice as sound material (and to spatialization as a way of exploring the relationship of voice both to acoustic space and to the internal spaces of the body), whereas Stockhausen was far more interested in spatialization techniques than he was in the human voice as specific sound material. This point is made, for instance, in David Osmond-Smith, Berio (Oxford and New York, 1991), 62.

68 Berio, ‘Poesia e musica’, 253.

69 Thema has done extremely well as a stand-alone piece of avant-garde art music. It had two separate releases as a commercial LP in 1958 (LP Turnabout TV 34177) and 1959 (LP Limelight LS 86047); the tape was then restored and released as a CD in 1995 (CD BMG 09026-68302-2). A further CD version – not restored – was released in 1991 as CD BVHaast 9109. Recently, Thema was even featured (uniquely among the studio's musical offerings) in a prestigious seven-volume anthology of noise and electronic music released by the Belgian label Sub Rosa between 2001 and 2013 (CD Sub Rosa, SR300). A section of Omaggio a Joyce – some of Berio's basic manipulations of Berberian's reading – was remixed (uncredited) by the noise band Crystal Castles in 2007.

70 Early formalist approaches to Thema include François Delalande, ‘L'omaggio a Joyce de Luciano Berio’, Musique en jeu, 15 (1974), 45–54, and Norbert Dressen, Sprache und Musik bei Luciano Berio (Regensburg, 1982), 38–57; among more broadly theoretical and philosophical interpretations are Nicola Scaldaferri, ‘“Bronze by Gold”, by Berio by Eco: Viaggio attraverso il canto delle sirene’, Nuova musica alla radio, ed. Rizzardi and De Benedictis, 100–57, and especially Di Scipio, ‘Da un'esperienza in ascolto tra phoné e logos’.

71 It is also important to note that within Ulysses, the eleventh chapter is related to sound according to several of the overlapping symbolic narrative structures at play in the book. It is the chapter that corresponds to the encounter between Ulysses and the Sirens; the chapter corresponding to the sense of hearing; and the chapter also devoted to the sonic arts and music. What is more, Joyce famously declared in his correspondence that the overture of the chapter contains ‘the eight regular parts of a fuga per canonem’. See James Joyce, letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 6 August 1919, in Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann (London, 1975), 242. Berio and Eco were well aware of the sonic symbolism behind the eleventh chapter; the documentary Omaggio a Joyce, for instance, opens with a quotation from Book XII of Homer's Odyssey (the encounter with the Sirens).

72 Analyses of Thema rich with philosophical detail regarding the voice have recently been published by Scaldaferri and Di Scipio, whose work I have already mentioned, and also include Romina Daniele, ‘Il dialogo con la materia disintegrata e ricomposta’: Un'analisi di Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) di Luciano Berio (Milan, 2010). Scaldaferri has also published two important essays that provide technological and cultural context for Thema: ‘Aesthetic and Technological Aspects in Berio's Thema (Omaggio a Joyce)’, Science, Philosophy and Music: Proceedings of the XXth International Congress of History of Science, ed. Erwin Neuenschwander and Laurence Bouquiaux (Turnhout, 2002), 207–15, which provides crucial detail on the (still unexamined) process of spatialization; and ‘The Voice and the Tape: Aesthetic and Technological Interactions in the European Studios during the 1950s’, Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interactions 1900 –2000, ed. Felix Meyer, Carol J. Oja, Wolfgang Rathert and Anne C. Shreffler (Woodbridge, 2014), 335–50.

73 James Joyce, Ulysses (1922) (Oxford, 1998), 245–6.

74 One of the theorists who has most worked on the connection between language and the experience of the city in Ulysses is Henri Lefebvre, who mentions Joyce repeatedly in his Critique of Everyday Life (1991) (New York, 2014). Apart from the author's own overt engagement with Joyce, key concepts elaborated by Lefebvre such as the ‘production of space’, understood as the relationship between lived-in space, formalized space and imagined or represented space, are used as analytical and hermeneutic tools in recent Joyce scholarship. See, for instance, Making Space in the Works of James Joyce, ed. Valérie Bénéjam and John Bishop (New York and Oxford, 2011).

75 Cathy Berberian, quoted in Scaldaferri, ‘The Voice and the Tape’, 340.

76 Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, CA, 1999), 29.

77 Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (1960), trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London and New York, 2004).

78 Berio and Eco, ‘Omaggio a Joyce’, 341.

79 The section devoted to onomatopoeia in Saussure's Cours is brief but highly interesting: Saussure seems to do an almost disingenuous somersault to avoid considering a causal, sonic relationship between sign and signified. See Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (1916), ed. Tullio De Mauro (Paris, 1995), 101–2: ‘On pourrait s'appuyer sur les onomatopées pour dire que le choix du signifiant n'est pas toujours arbitraire. […] Des mots comme fouet et glas peuvent frapper certes oreilles par une sonorité suggestive; mais pour voir qu'il n'ont pas ce caractère dès l'origine, il suffit de remonter à leurs formes latines (fouet dérivé de fāgus, “hêtre”, glas = classicum); la qualité de leurs sons actuels, ou plutôt ceux qu'on leur attribue, est un résultat fortuit de l’évolution phonétique’ (‘Onomatopoeia might be used to prove that the choice of the signifier is not always arbitrary. […] Words like French fouet “whip” or glas “knell” may strike certain ears with suggestive sonority, but to see that they have not always had this property we need only examine their Latin forms (fouet is derived from fagus “beech-tree”, glas from dassimim “sound of a trumpet”). The quality of their present sounds, or rather the quality that is attributed to them, is a fortuitous result of phonetic evolution’; Saussure, General Course in Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York, 1959), 69).

80 Berio and Eco, ‘Omaggio a Joyce’, 341.

81 Giambattista Vico, Principi di scienza nuova d'intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni […] corretta, schiarita, e notabilmente accresciuta, ed. Paolo Rossi (Milan, 1959), 157.

82 Umberto Eco, The Open Work (1964), trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, 1989), esp. Chapter 8 (‘Two Hypotheses about the Death of Art’), 166–79.

83 Berio, ‘Poesia e musica’, 254–5.

84 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages (1781), trans. John H. Moran and Alexandra Gode (Chicago, IL, and London, 1986), 51.

85 Jacqueline Waeber, ‘Introduction’, ‘Rousseau in 2013: Afterthoughts on a Centenary’, colloquy in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, 66 (2013), 251–95 (p. 254).

86 Postcolonial critiques of Rousseau, such as Dainotto's, notably do not afford great significance to Rousseau's embracing of the European South as a positive, and mourned, site of origin – a characteristic that separated him from other French Enlightenment philosophers who held Italy in suspicion as a place adverse to literature and democracy. See, for instance, Dainotto, Europe (in Theory), 101.

87 The most famous analysis of the influence of American language, lifestyle and media in Italy is Stephen Gundle, ‘L'americanizzazione del quotidiano: Televisione e consumismo nell'Italia degli anni cinquanta’, Quaderni storici, 21 (1986), 562–94.

88 To bring us back to more musicological pastures, one of Leydi's earliest monographs after the war was a study of American protest songs: see Roberto Leydi, Ascolta, Mister Bilbo!: Canzoni di protesta del popolo americano (Milan, 1954). Leydi was also deeply interested in jazz music in the early 1950s, an interest that also reflected a widespread positive bias towards American cultural production.

89 See Berio, Eco and Leydi, ‘Luciano Berio, Umberto Eco, Roberto Leydi rievocano lo Studio di Fonologia’, 221. It is likely that foreign languages, and particularly English, would have been spoken and read during these evenings; in those same years, Berberian began working as a translator, translating into Italian the writings of the literary critic Patricia Hutchins (Il mondo di James Joyce, trans. Roberto Sanesi and Cathy Berberian (Milan, 1960)), the comedian Woody Allen (Saperla lunga, trans. Alberto Episcopi and Cathy Berberian (Milan, 1966)) and the political cartoonist Jules Feiffer (Passionella e altre storie, trans. Umberto Eco and Cathy Berberian (Milan, 1963)).

90 The parallel between the Milanese Enlightenment and the Milanese 1950s is first discussed in Umberto Eco, ‘Il gruppo ’63 e l'illuminismo padano’, Sugli specchi e altri saggi: Il segno, la rappresentazione, l'illusione, l'immagine (Milan, 1985), 93–104. In this version of the essay, the Studio di Fonologia does not feature. It does feature in a later essay entitled ‘Gruppo ’63 quarant'anni dopo’, first delivered as the keynote lecture in Bologna on 8 May 2003 for a conference in celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the foundation of Gruppo ’63, and now published in the collection Costruire il nemico e altri scritti occasionali (Milan, 2011), 135–67.

91 The dismemberment of the studio in 1959–60 is documented in Angela Ida De Benedictis, ‘“A Meeting of Music and the New Possibilities of Technology”: The Beginnings of the Studio di Fonologia Musicale di Milano della RAI’, The Studio di Fonologia: A Musical Journey 1954–1983 (Milan, 2009), 3–19.

92 Goffredo Fofi, L'immigrazione meridionale a Torino (Milan, 1964), 142.