Crowded Voice: Speech, Music and Community in Milan, 1955-1974
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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. What is at stake in the musical and vocal production of 1950s and 1970s Milan, then, is a potential philosophy of the voice as neither aesthetic excess nor as carrier of language, but as an unresolved multiplicity of articulations, languages, and political subjectivities. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Music First Advisor Jairo Moreno Subject Categories Music This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1636 CROWDED VOICE: SPEECH, MUSIC AND COMMUNITY IN MILAN, 1955-1974 Delia Casadei A DISSERTATION in Music Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2015 Supervisor of Dissertation ______________ Jairo Moreno Associate Professor of Music Graduate Group Chairperson _______________ Jairo Moreno Associate Professor of Music Dissertation Committee Carolyn Abbate, Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser Professor, Harvard University Christine Poggi, Professor of History of Art, University of Pennsylvania ! ! ! ii! ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indebted to Jairo Moreno, in conversation with whom this project was first imagined, and who has been an adviser and teacher to me over the past five years. A fearless, dark-minded thinker of the junction of sound and politics, he kept his faith in the project through the highs and lows. He provided constant telegraphic, and often oracular, commentary, much of which I am still dwelling on as I prepare to leave my work here to set. My second reader, Carolyn Abbate was a key interlocutor throughout, and especially during the delicate first months of the writing process, which she generously enabled me to spend as a visiting student at her workplace, Harvard University. Many thanks also go to my third reader Christine Poggi in the Art History Department at Penn who allowed me to attend her seminar on abstract expressionism and has since encouraged me to think more deeply about the relation between the visual and sonorous. I was lucky to be able to share my work with scholars who have offered their feedback and friendship to me over the years. First among them Roger Parker—a thinker of the operatic repertoire which often lurks like a ghost behind my musings—has read nearly every page of this thesis with care and insight. His intelligence, honesty and legendary editorial skills have profoundly shaped my writing and thinking over the years. Arman Schwartz, editor of the article version of what became my second chapter, offered his feedback generously as a mercilessly sharp fellow explorer of Italian musical modernism. The University of Pennsylvania Music Department provided support and inspiration throughout, and I am especially indebted to its staff (Margie, Maryellen and ! iii! Alfreda) for their warmth and help. Prof. Tim Rommen guided my early readings in early Italian ethnomusicology, Naomi Waltham-Smith was an incisive and generous interlocutor regarding the politics of urban sound, and allowed me to present some of my work to her talented students at various points; Guthrie Ramsay was a huge help in— simultaneously—focussing my listening and finding the intellectual coordinates for my fourth chapter. Many others have provided advice at key points in the process of research: two Milan-based scholars, Emilio Sala and Nicola Scaldaferri, offered advice and encouragement at key turns in the research process. Angela Ida De Benedictis guided me through the depths of the Maderna fund at the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, as did Nicola Verzina at the Maderna archive in Bologna, Maddalena Novati at the archive of the Studio di Fonologia in Milan, and Stefano Arrighetti and his staff at the Istituto Ernesto de Martino in Sesto Fiorentino. Friendships formed during my years at Penn provided both sheer joy and powerful anesthetics to the growing pains that accompany the process of writing: Daniel Villegas, Lee Veeraraghavan, Stephan Hammel and Neil Crimes have, in different ways and at different times, laughed to tears with me and opened the way to new thoughts. Carlo Lanfossi and Maria Murphy have shared their sense of intellectual wonder at times when I was too tired to summon my own. Marina Romani, who started at Berkeley as I started at Penn, always felt close although she was far. Cristina Pardini, oldest and best of friends, helped me keep my sanity and taught me much about the magic of rogue names and languages, laughter, and sisterhood. Last, but far from least, Gavin Williams, who dragged me to learn Russian in the dead of Boston’s bitter winter three years ago just as I ! iv! was gearing up to write about misheard speech. He has since become what I long hoped to find: a true (and slightly devilish) accomplice in both thought and deed. And finally I must thank my family: my father, a rare and wondrous modernist melomaniac whose private late-night listening sessions awakened my fascination with strange sounds; my hugely talented and kind younger brother, a Roman by adoption, who briefly decamped to Milan—his city’s loathed northern rival—so as to accompany me on my first trip there three years ago; and my mother, whose creativity and protean philosophical mind, unwavering love and support, and first-hand accounts of 1970s student life and politics, delivered with her unique flair for storytelling, were conditiones sine quibus non for whatever good bits are contained in what follows. To them I dedicate this dissertation, with gratitude and love. v ABSTRACT CROWDED VOICE: SPEECH, MUSIC, AND COMMUNITY IN MILAN, 1955-1974 Delia Casadei Jairo Moreno 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, neo- folk 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 five- century-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 a site of ineffective policies and underdeveloped language faculties. What is at stake in the musical and vocal production of 1950s and 1970s Milan, then, is a potential philosophy of the voice as neither aesthetic excess nor as carrier of language, but as an unresolved multiplicity of articulations, languages, and political subjectivities. vi! Table of Contents Acknowledgements (to follow) iii Abstract vi List of Illustrations vii Introduction 1-17 Chapter 1: Milan’s Studio di Fonologia: Voice Politics in the City, 1955-1958 18-79 Chapter 2: Orality, Invisibility, and Laughter: Traces of Milan in Bruno Maderna and Virginio Puecher’s Hyperion (1964) 80-126 Chapter 3: Sound Evidence: Negotiations of Unintelligibility In the Sound Recording of a Milanese Riot 127-169 Chapter 4: The