The ‘Day of Wrath’ as Musico-Political Statement in Dallapiccola's Canti di Prigionia
One of the most interesting modern ‘borrowings’ of the famous ‘Dies irae’ chant comes within the Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola's Canti di Prigionia of 1938–1941. Written at a time of extreme political tension, the Canti were—from the composer's own testimony—a protest against Mussolini's introduction of the infamous racial laws in 1938. But while the composer's own hermeneutic proposes the ‘Dies irae’ as a symbolic representation of oppression overlaid onto a ‘purely’ dodecaphonic work, one senses that this will not do: politically, this viewpoint is problematic, and musically, it is simply not borne out by analysis. In this article, I offer a new reading of this work as a ‘confessional’ piece, and in interrogating the relationship between the very old (plainchant) and the very new (a natal serialism), suggest that the Canti evince a sophisticated type of musical ‘paradox’.
All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing
Ive's uses of existing music emulating models and learning musical styles the art of paraphrase modeling and paraphrase in the First and Second Symphonies cumulative settings the development and significance of cumulative settings modelling and stylistic allusion to evoke a style orgenre patchwork and extended paraphrase programmatic quotation quodlibet and collage the significance of Ive's uses of existing music.
The Fascist Mentality after Fascism
More than 50 years after the fall of Fascism, historiography has surprisingly failed to cope with the issue of cultural continuity in Italy and thus with the question of the survival of a Fascist mentality in the Republic.1 In practice, however, the (somewhat diverse) roads away from Fascism taken by high culture and by ‘everyday life’ are worthy of study by anyone interested in the history of Italians since 1945.