University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2015 Crowded Voice: Speech, Music and Community in Milan, 1955-1974 Delia Casadei University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Music Commons Recommended Citation Casadei, Delia, "Crowded Voice: Speech, Music and Community in Milan, 1955-1974" (2015). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1636. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1636 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1636 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Crowded Voice: Speech, Music and Community in Milan, 1955-1974 Abstract This thesis explores the relationship of voice, language, and politics in Italian musical history. I do this through a double geographical and chronological lens: first, the city of Milan, a powerful political and cultural interface between Italy and Central Europe; secondly, the years 1955-1974, key decades in the constitution of Italy’s first democratic government and years of vertiginous anthropological changes across the peninsula.Across the four chapters of my thesis, I sketch a heterogeneous and thickly populated network of musical activities—ranging from high-modernist tape music to opera, neofolk records, to pop hits. I argue the musical production for voice of this time expresses long-standing anxieties about speech and communication through the recurring use of nonsense languages, distorted recorded speech, and para-linguistic phenomena such as laughter as musical materials. The root of these anxieties lies in a version of Italy’s fivecentury-old language question—the question of Italy’s absent common tongue—and at the same time, a European Enlightenment tradition that sets Italy as the southern land of the beautiful voice, and yet also ineffective policies and underdeveloped language faculties.