Sweet Thunder

"Italian music of the 1960s is one of the most unjustly neglected areas in the arena of twentieth-century classical music. This volume pays tribute to the astounding complexity of the music and libretti of five vocal compositions by leading experimental composers of the decade: Luigi Dallapiccola, Bruno Maderna, Luciano Berio, Giacomo Manzoni, and Armando Gentilucci. It highlights how the 'difficult' and unconventional methods of composition employed by these artists - dodecaphony, total serialism, Webernian minimalist techniques, aleatory and electronic music - displayed a refusal to compete with the market-place values of Italy's new capitalist society. At the same time, the libretti's collage arrangement of a plethora of European and Oriental literary sources dating from the sixteenth century BC onwards, reflected the contemporary Neo-avant-garde rejection of conventional literary practice, and their preference for 'organised disorder', in Umberto Eco's phrase."

Vivienne Suvini-Hand

Introduction 1. Twentieth-Century Italian Music in the Context of European and American Experimentalism from Verismo to the Seventies 2. Luigi Dallapiccola's Ulisse (1960-68) 3. Luciano Berio's Laborintus II (1965) 4. Armando Gentilucci's Strofe di Ungaretti (1967) 5. Giacomo Manzoni's Parole da Beckett (1970) 6. Bruno Maderna's Ausstrahlung (1971) 7. Conclusion