During the 1930s a particular emphasis was placed within fascist Italy upon cultural evolution towards the ‘new man’. Although this was in part articulated verbally by a fascist philosopher such as Giovanni Gentile, this new masculine sensibility received much of its most persuasive embodiment through the visual arts and music. Unsurprisingly, major musical figures of the era such as Alfredo Casella and the youthful Goffredo Petrassi were strongly aware of sympathies and complementarities between the two media – and the same is true of painters such as Enrico Prampolini and Fortunato Depero, or a sculptor such as Ernesto Thayaht, all of whose work is called upon in this study. (DO-S).

At the time of his death in 2007 David Osmond-Smith had begun work on his second book on Luciano Berio. Planned as a more substantial volume than the earlier one (Oxford University Press, 1991), it aimed to combine what he termed ‘creative biography’ with a multidimensional view of the composer's output, seen through the lens of such categories as text and commentary, density and harmony, voice, and theatre. Published here is the only written-up chapter, covering the early part of the composer's life (1925–53), followed by the outline of the projected book. Preceding these fragments is an introductory note by Talia Pecker Berio. (CW)

In this article David Osmond-Smith discusses the ‘creative cross-fertilization’ between Luciano Berio and the poet Edoardo Sanguineti. Berio first approached Sanguineti at the suggestion of Umberto Eco, and the article begins with a discussion of Berio and Eco's radiophonic project Onomatopea nel linguaggio poetico, which in turn stimulated one of the composer's most celebrated electroacoustic works, Thema/Omaggio a Joyce (1958). The author argues that the preoccupation revealed there with ‘working at the boundary where the word as bearer of meaning dissolves into the word as reservoir of sonic potentials’ remained central to the collaborations of Berio and Sanguineti, principally Passaggio (1961–2), Laborintus II (1965), and A-Ronne (1974–5). In particular, the former two works explore their ‘aesthetics of fragmentation and juxtaposition’ in the context of a music theatre that embraces Umberto Eco's poetics of the opera aperta (open work), Guy Debord's notion of ‘spectacularity’, and various dimensions of political and social critique. (CW)

The historical and theoretical resonances between the work of Theodor Adorno and that of Luigi Nono have hitherto remained underexplored. In this article a debate is constructed between the two figures concerning the politics of space in advanced music in order to question a frequently held opposition between ‘autonomous’ and ‘political’ art. Nono can be seen to interweave German and Italian traditions of historical materialism, responding simultaneously to the issues of both reification and imperialism. This is drawn out by way of Adorno's evolving attitude towards the younger generation at Darmstadt, via his revised understanding of the relationship between music and painting. Conversely the solidarity Nono maintained with contemporary spaces of resistance while not compromising his musical language promises to expand Adorno's aesthetic theory.

Intolleranza 1960, an ‘azione scenica in two parts based on an idea by Angelo Maria Ripellino, music by Luigi Nono’, was first performed on 13 April 1961 during the 24th International Contemporary Music Festival at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice. In the aftermath of the première, critics perceived a gap in the work's realization between intentions and results, a gap perceived mainly in political terms. An examination of the dramaturgical and compositional genesis of the work through the sketches suggests a gap of a very different nature. The work as originally announced was to have revolutionary potential, and the innovations were intended by Nono to affect the musical language, the staging, and the dramatic content. But many of these ideas and innovations remained unrealized in the final production, while the ambitious dramaturgical logic underpinning the compositional process – involving ‘character rows’ for each of the principal roles – was never fully implemented. Nono's first theatrical work proves to be the result of a singular compromise between intention and necessity, something quite different from the original project. Nevertheless, the compositional solutions forced on Nono, partly through pressures of time, were to prove decisive in later works, liberating the now ‘autonomous’ interval from parametric predetermination and classic serial grids. Moreover, the work, which had been envisaged as an ideal convergence of dramaturgical and technical principles, became an emblem not only of the new music theatre but of avant-garde theatre in general.

For more than a decade, literature on the cultural politics of the Cold War in postwar Europe has done much to question the notion that the political manipulation of music was confined to the Soviet bloc, and that musicians in the West enjoyed untrammelled autonomy and freedom. This article focuses on the case of the German composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann, presenting evidence that the reorientation he underwent in the late 1940s (during which he revised, retitled, or suppressed nearly all the works he had composed between 1930 and 1945) was motivated not by purely aesthetic or personal considerations, as some writers have suggested, but by strong pressures to eradicate from his output all manifestations of social(ist) and political commitment. In Bavaria, where Hartmann lived, anti-communism was rife in political circles. Meanwhile, in the cultural sphere, critics such as Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt (strongly influenced by Nicolas Nabokov) abandoned their pre-war commitment to socially relevant art, denounced Shostakovich (a composer much admired by Hartmann), and began promoting Schoenberg as a rational, apolitical exemplar of formalism in music. Against this background – and in the light of his experiences with one work in particular, the Symphonische Ouvertüre ‘China kämpft’ – Hartmann felt compelled to reassess his political position.

This article provides a critical account of the appropriation of semiotics in Anglo-American musicology, its theoretical and discursive foundations, and its impact on the discipline in the period from the mid-1970s to the present. Starting out from the work of Jean-Jacques Nattiez and Philip Tagg in the 1970s, it traces two principal approaches in music semiotics, here termed the ‘structural–analytical’ and the ‘semantic–interpretative’, which draw in significant measure on, respectively, the Saussurean and Peircean legacies. Both differences of musicological tradition and the wider state of the discipline have a part to play in explaining why semiotics never established itself as a discrete and distinctive subfield in the English-speaking world in the way that it did in continental Europe. But with the increasing currency of, among other concerns, topic theory, theories of emotion and affect, and studies of musical gesture and metaphor, it might be argued that semiotics – or, rather, an interdisciplinary aggregation of approaches that might be termed ‘post-semiotic’ – has never had a stronger presence in anglophone musicology than at the present time.

After pursuing doctoral studies at the University of York (1968–70), David Osmond-Smith gained two consecutive scholarships, allowing him to research first with Umberto Eco in Milan (1970–71) and then with Roland Barthes in Paris (1971–3). One of the outcomes of his encounters with these highly influential thinkers was a series of articles subjecting musical phenomena to semiotic analysis. The principal concept deployed in these articles is that of the icon or iconism, itself borrowed from the American semiotician and pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce and exhaustively examined, re-examined, and criticized by Eco. This article explains the principles of iconic signification and their use in Osmond-Smith's work. Central to this explanation is a consideration of Eco's work on iconism (Barthes's influence is less apparent) and the somewhat perplexing point that Osmond-Smith embraced iconism despite his awareness – and, at times, apparent endorsement – of Eco's thoroughgoing critique of the concept. Lastly, the recent resurgence of interest in Peircian semiotics will be invoked in order to propose ways of developing Osmond-Smith's application of iconism to music in line with pragmatist (or, to use Peirce's term, pragmaticist) rather than structuralist thought.