What ItalianOpera articles are
ItalianOpera articles are not current affairs posts
or occasional reviews.
They are research contributions designed
to clarify historical issues, theoretical concepts,
and methodological questions in the history of Italian music.
Their aim is not to “summarize” what is already known,
but to reorganize the broader picture:
periods, languages, roles,
social functions of music,
and the relationships between word, sound, and gesture.
When categories stop working
Many problems in musicology do not arise from a lack of data,
but from the automatic use of categories inherited
from nineteenth-century scholarship.
Periods, genres, and definitions originally created
for ideological or national purposes
are often applied to the Italian context without verification,
producing distortions that only rigorous historical analysis can correct.
ARTICLES
Periodization and History
Articles devoted to the periodization of Italian music, to the definition of historical periods, and to the revision of traditional chronological categories.
Baroque, Arcadia, Enlightenment
Problems of chronology
Rethinking the historical periods of Italian music.
The Myth of Classicism
History and ideology
Origins and limits of a nineteenth-century category.
The Myth of Instrumental Decline
A historiographical prejudice
The story according to which Italy abandoned instrumental music in favor of opera.
Song as the True Avant-Garde
Historical continuity
After melodrama, song becomes the language that tells the story of twentieth-century society and culture.
Periodization is not a neutral fact.
Marking where an era begins or ends means
deciding how history is to be interpreted
and which phenomena become visible or invisible.
© Collezione Varrone & Romano (Tutti i diritti riservati).
Works do not emerge in a vacuum. Discover how ItalianOpera organizes musical history through an alternative periodization based on the Italian context.
Go to historical periodization →