Twentieth-Century Italian Music

The Twentieth Century: A Comparison of Aesthetics

Here we see why song, in the twentieth century, matters more than the avant-gardes if we want to understand our society.

The Italian musical landscape after Futurism and the First World War is marked by a complex fragmentation that led to a redefinition of musical language, moving toward Theoretical Avant-Garde and Popular Depth.

The generation of composers born around 1880, known as the “Generation of the Eighties,” had promoted a fundamental instrumental renewal, opposing the excesses of both Verismo and Romanticism. Their criticism focused on Puccini’s opera and that of the masters of his generation, in favour of the value of national traditions, especially the instrumental music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, seen as a central point of reference for the renewal of Italian music.

Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936), in this respect, is the one most closely tied to nineteenth-century symphonism. He achieved international fame with the symphonic poems of the Roman Trilogy (Fountains of Rome, Pines of Rome, Roman Festivals).

Franco Alfano (1875-1954) occupies an intermediate position between late Romanticism and emerging modernity. The author of works such as Risurrezione and Sakùntala, he was a refined orchestrator, capable of blending lyrical melodism, late-Romantic chromaticism, and a personal sense of timbre. His international fame is linked above all to the completion of Puccini’s Turandot, yet his original output reveals an autonomous search, suspended between tradition and moderate experimentation, which helped define the many-sided profile of early twentieth-century Italian music.

Alfredo Casella (1883-1947) moved toward Neoclassicism, combining his love of ancient Italian music with clear and disciplined compositional lines.

Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882-1973), by contrast, devoted himself to recovering the music of the past (he edited, for example, the works of Monteverdi and Vivaldi).

Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880-1968) was an eminently vocal composer, committed to the renewal of Italian opera, and developed a style of singing based on declamation and the ancient liturgical modes.

Song

In the global civilisation of the twentieth century, song assumed an importance that no other musical genre had ever known. It conveys feelings, myths, and hopes, fully reflecting the sphere of human life. In this context, Song must be regarded as significant and as part of a renewed tradition that continues. The genre sinks its roots into the arias of melodrama and, more generally, into the whole of Italian vocal production.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, it established itself as a mass genre, initially spread through “mandolini” (cheap, small-format printed sheets, popular scores on which the melody and text of the song were printed, so that music could be distributed to the general public and people could sing or play it at home). The recording made by the tenor Enrico Caruso (1902) was fundamental for the rise of recorded music. The later invention of radio by Guglielmo Marconi (1920) and the foundation of EIAR (1924) made music widely accessible, bringing about an accelerated and continuous mass musical education.

The song Nel blu dipinto di blu (Volare) by Domenico Modugno (1958) marked another turning point, opening the way to the singer-songwriters, who united in themselves the role of lyricist and musician. Their lyrics introduced a fluid tenderness and an attention to the reality of everyday life, raising song texts to the level of genuine poetry (for example, Gino Paoli and Salvatore Di Giacomo, the latter described by Croce as one of the rare genuinely sincere poets of our times). Song continues even today to shape the history of music.

The Avant-Gardes

Twelve-Tone Technique and Serialism

Unlike song, the period after the Second World War marked, for so-called “art” music, a sharp break and an opening to the radical avant-garde, with the adoption of techniques born in Central Europe which do not communicate with the great masses and are instead destined for a few initiates. From a specialist musicological perspective, this phase proves most of the time to be self-referential, being a language created by theorists for theorists.

The twelve-tone system was adopted in Italy by Luigi Dallapiccola (1904-1975). Although Dallapiccola applied a personal form of twelve-tone technique, combining it with lyricism and sonic colour, this music often communicates very little except to devotees, becoming an abstract and weakly incisive language.

From music for the few to music for everyone, below is an example of a musical work of art that was among the most appreciated of the year 1956, when Dallapiccola was composing his Cinque Canti.

Returning, then, to the branch of so-called (with much prejudice) cultivated and experimental music, it is the path of composers such as Dallapiccola that we wish to examine.

Paradoxically, the music of Dallapiccola, focused on constructive aspects, opened the way to the introduction of chance procedures, which granted performers freedom of choice and intervention in the written text. Other composers who emerged in this intensified experimentalism were Luigi Nono (1924-1990), who favoured musical theatre with a presumed strong political force, and Goffredo Petrassi (1904-2002), who gradually moved away from the tonal system.

After 1950, twelve-tone serialisation, having exhausted its games with pitch, devoted its attention to other elements of sound (rhythm, duration, timbre). Research in electronic music then began with the founding of the Studio di Fonologia Musicale of RAI in Milan (1954), by Bruno Maderna and Luciano Berio.

The Critique of the Avant-Gardes

The first objection that accompanied the musical avant-gardes, from the time of Futurism onward, was always the same: technique is lacking. Traditional music required concrete competence, the ability to compose, and this created a sharp distance between those who could do it and those who could not.

For many, listening to avant-garde music often amounted to thinking: I could have done that too. This reaction does not arise from ignorance, but from an objective fact, because many contemporary compositions renounce recognisable form, emptying the role of the composer. Performance, by contrast, can often require an unconventional skill and even greater difficulty than usual, precisely because of the absence of formal rules on which to rely: noises in place of music, as monochrome canvases stand in place of painting, instructions in place of notes.

The impression is that the medium is abandoned or emptied out, and that competence is no longer necessary. From this arises the conflict: music ceases to be a craft and becomes a gesture, and the public, faced with that gesture, wonders whether that alone is really enough to call it “art.”

From music for the few to music for everyone, what follows is a song that was hugely popular in the very year in which Luigi Russolo invented the arco armonico.

From the Work to the Idea

The radical gesture of Russolo and Futurism, though isolated, marked a profound break with the melodic and harmonic conventions of the time.

In the 1960s, with Conceptual Art and Conceptual Music, a decisive shift took place. The musical work was no longer the aesthetic experience, but the document of a thought. The musical object no longer had to be beautiful, nor complex, nor technically constructed. It simply had to mean something. The result is that many works became mute without explanation. A random noise, a sequence of instructions, an entirely black painting communicates nothing in itself. A text is needed, a critic, a theory. It is a language for initiates.

Music, in short, no longer lives in front of the public, but in discourse about the public, because those who do not know the context do not understand, and those who do know it interpret. From this comes the modern feeling of standing before works that need an instruction sheet.

When Any Object Becomes Art

The avant-garde masters, with their musical ready-mades, take a common sonic object (the noise of a city, the roar of an engine, the cries of some bird), move it elsewhere, sign it, and declare it to be art. From that moment, the distinction between musical work and non-work no longer lies in the object, but in the context.

A nasty noise is a useless object, but if I record it on CD and sign it with a famous name, it becomes a work of art. The object is identical. The change happens entirely around it: in the critical apparatus, in the CD liner notes, in theory, and in the laws of the market. It is institutional consecration that transforms an insignificant object into embodied meaning.

This overturns classical aesthetics: what matters is not what the musical work is, but who legitimises it. Consequently, if everything can be music, then nothing is intrinsically musical. The difference becomes social, not aesthetic. In random sounds, silences, recorded and distorted words, objects change category.

The paradox is obvious. Conceptual art proclaims itself universal, yet to understand it one must know a dense network of ideas, philosophy, museology, and cultural history. Universal? Hardly. It is a private club.

Conceptual music also created the other paradox of cultivated music. Historical Culture is founded on a technical, formal, and rhetorical language which, though evolving, maintains a shared protocol of communication. The moment Conceptualism intentionally negates or destroys this protocol, the music is no longer cultivated but, at best, abstract. The label “cultivated music” becomes, in this context, a critical aberration: if the language is private and incomprehensible outside the narrow circle of those who produce it, culture is dead. Noise, however theorised, remains noise, and musical language regresses to an anarchic and pre-technical phase. Conceptual music, by denying grammatical protocols, effectively places itself outside historical culture and outside the evolution of language, making itself understandable only to the author and to the circle that certifies his intention.

From music for the few to music for everyone, below is a famous song from the year 2002, when Luciano Berio was writing Sequenza XIV.

The work of Luciano Berio, while maintaining a level of technical rigour as high as it is incomprehensible, belongs to that current which, from the second post-war period onward, shifted attention toward the idea and the compositional gesture.

Music: from technique to concept, from craft to aboutness

The history of music, from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century, rested on concrete skills. A composer had to know counterpoint, partimenti, sight-singing, form, instrumentation, and musical rhetoric thoroughly. Even when styles changed, the principle of music as a technical language that the composer had to master remained alive.

With Futurism and then with the conceptual wave of the second post-war period — which in any case represent only an infinitesimal part of the music actually produced and consumed — the centre of gravity shifted. What matters is no longer how what you play is made, but what your work is about. The idea becomes the protagonist, and thus a piece made of noises or cacophonous effects, full of random dissonances neither prepared nor resolved, enters the museums of music just as Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit entered Tate Modern in London, MoMA in New York, or the Centre Pompidou in Paris. A score made up only of instructions becomes a “work,” and a piece consisting solely of silences acquires theoretical status, to the point that even its score can be sold.

On the aesthetic level, many listeners perceive technical poverty and the total absence of form. And they are right: it is deliberately impoverished music, in which technique serves the composer little or not at all. It must nevertheless be acknowledged that the performer is often called upon to carry out daunting and uncodified tasks, having to reproduce sounds or gestures devoid of any recognisable harmonic or rhythmic logic, and therefore extremely difficult to perform coherently.

On the theoretical level, however, everything rests on a single condition: the work must be about something (aboutness). It does not matter how it is made; what matters is what it means within a broader discourse.

This has created a sharp division between Academic Music — which continues the technical tradition, including songs, film music, and dance music — and Conceptual Music, which declares that tradition finished. The problem is that the latter has imposed its language as the true face of modernity, generating total confusion. Many people believe that modern music is only conceptual music. In reality, it is only one possible branch: a minority one, but theoretically more smug and overbearing.

With the end of historical direction, music enters Pluralism

For centuries, the history of music followed a trajectory: styles are born, mature, decay, and are replaced. Futurism broke this mechanism, yet it still represented a “classical” avant-garde, one that destroys in order to build a new protocol of noises, speed, and anti-tradition.

The real turning point came later: the avant-garde music of the later twentieth century, conceptual music included, no longer wants to create a new language, but to declare the end of all languages.

The result is that, in the avant-garde field, there is no longer a dominant form, no master path, no recognisable evolution. This condition is called by some Post-Historical Music or Pluralism.

The consequences are profound: everything is possible, everything is permitted to the famous composer, everything can be art; no style guides the others, technique is no longer a criterion, and form is no longer an obligation. Art no longer develops as it once did, but turns inward: it becomes philosophy applied to sonic objects and to the gestures of performers.

The real question is no longer “how does one compose?”, but “what is art music?”, “How did you become a famous composer?”, “Who is it that says you are a composer?”

From music for the few to music for everyone, here is a famous song from the year in which Scelsi was writing Ygghur II.

The approach of Giacinto Scelsi, with his obsessive investigation of the single sound, represents the extreme individual attempt to push music beyond traditional parameters and toward a purely philosophical, self-referential dimension.

This is why the rhetoric of music as a universal language has come back into fashion. It serves to justify a system, like Scelsi’s, that has lost its technical parameters and keeps everything together by claiming that everything is valid. In this scenario, presenting four helicopters descending from the sky while string instruments scrape their strings no longer has any special meaning. These are not avant-gardes. They are the normal condition of a system that has stopped evolving. The point of arrival is music as the negation of music.

Once all the radical gestures of the twentieth century have been burnt out, what remains? The final idea, the truly definitive one: It is music because I say so. The composer’s intention, or the consecration granted by the system, becomes the only criterion. From this comes the most extreme extreme: not to add something, but to remove everything.

Post-historical radicalism does not create new forms: it demolishes them until it brings music to the edge of non-existence. Here are the three models that embody this phase:

• Work as Absence: there is no longer any object or sound, only emptiness — a quartet enters, remains silent, and leaves; an empty hall declared to be a “musical piece”; air as the only material.
• Work as Instruction: the score is a sentence, a mental command: Imagine a Symphony, Think of a sound that does not exist, Listen to your own listening.
• Work as Unstructured Time: the music disappears entirely and social interaction remains: the performer speaks instead of playing, improvises meaningless noises, entertains, fills time without form or direction — like a university professor chatting for an hour without teaching and still expecting to be paid.

These three models reveal the heart of the new paradigm: the radical gesture is no longer to create an extreme work, but to erase the very idea of the work. Today the avant-garde no longer wants to redefine what music is: it wants to undermine the very need to listen to it, attacking music dismissively labelled commercial and presenting itself as the only alternative to the Sanremo Festival.

The paradox of copyright protecting the idea that cannot be protected

Conceptual Music pushes everything to the extreme except copyright: there it suddenly becomes extremely traditional again. Why? Because copyright does not protect ideas, but only their concrete form. And since the conceptual lives on ideas, not on forms, the paradox is born.

I may remain silent whenever and for however long I wish, but I cannot sell a score of Walter Marchetti’s silence claiming it is mine; I may embroider a Map identical to one by Alighiero Boetti, but it will never become a Boetti; I may replicate a conceptual musical installation, but I cannot replicate its certified aura.

The more conceptual and replicable the work is, the more its value depends on authentication. The market does not sell the musical object — often ugly, irrelevant, annoying, simple, industrial, reproducible — but sells the signature, the story, the certification, the original gesture. Aura is the only non-duplicable value.

The system demands two opposite things: on the one hand, the work is universal because anyone can make it; on the other, it is unique because only the artist can sell it. This coexistence between the universality of the idea and the venality of the object is possible only thanks to the legal trick of copyright — the first piece of a much larger mechanism, exploded in the art world with the Hirst case.

From music for the few to music for everyone, here is a song that was sung more or less by everyone in the year when Luciano Berio was writing La lontananza nostalgica.

According to certain critics, the political and even ethical commitment of Luigi Nono would, unlike Venditti’s, manifest itself through the extreme abstraction of electronic technique, raising doubts about the communicative value of the work of art, which, in the case of La lontananza, is indeed far from being understandable, so distant is it from traditional protocols.

When Money Becomes the Work

Why do many radical artists become enormously rich דווקא by criticising consumerism and commodification? Because they do not sell works: they sell brands. The provocation is the product, and the object is only a pretext.

The most emblematic case is Damien Hirst. The 100-million-dollar skull is not a work, but a story. For the Love of God, studded with diamonds, was presented as the most sensational sale in contemporary art. It was said to have been paid for at 100 million dollars. Years later, Hirst admitted that the sale was a bluff: not a fraud, but a conceptual act perfectly coherent with his poetics.

In conceptual art, as in much avant-garde music, the price is part of the work: fictitious value is the meaning. Venality is not a side effect; it is the language itself. The work is not the skull: the work is the story of the skull, and the system — museums, critics, media, dealers — took part in it without batting an eyelid.

The skull today is in storage, because it was never really sold. For the public, it is a scandal; for aesthetic theory, it is confirmation that venality is the very material of conceptual art. Value is the economic performance; the gesture is financial, not aesthetic.

And for that reason, paradoxically, Hirst proves right those who dismiss this art as smoke and mirrors. It is not the end of the work: it is its purest realisation.

The Rule of the Instruction Manual

If, in order to understand why a composition sounds the way it does (or to interpret its meaning), an instruction manual, a theoretical text, or a historical analysis external to the listening experience is necessary, then the work is conceptual. This rule highlights the crucial passage from aesthetics to epistemology — from beauty to knowledge — that defines conceptual art.

In harmonic traditions, the protocol (tonality, form) is implicit and historical: no manual is needed to understand that music obeys certain rules of tension and resolution. Communication takes place through the sonic experience itself. When, by contrast, the composer creates a new protocol or an anti-protocol for each work — abstract series, random choices, philosophical gestures of rupture — the work becomes opaque. Sound is no longer the explanation, but the thing to be explained.

In works such as Musica senza suono by Walter Marchetti (where the manual explains that the work is not the sound, but the idea of silence placed within a musical context), or in the complex serial scores of Bruno Maderna, the manual — theoretical text, programme notes — is not a supplement, but an essential component that certifies the meaning and even the existence of the work as art. If the work does not stand on its own medium (sound), but on the discourse surrounding it, then it is conceptual.

Berio and Maderna both belong to the current that makes music dependent on a theoretical context. Maderna tends toward Pure Conceptual Music (the phase of Instructions and Total Serialism, where the Idea is primary). Berio is closer to Experimental/Post-Serial Conceptual Music, in which the conceptual aspect — the deconstruction of protocols — is a means of obtaining a new form of complex expression.

From music for the few to music for everyone, here is a song, still known by people today, composed in the year when Luciano Berio was writing Sequenza III.

The use that Luciano Berio makes of the voice in Sequenza III is the extreme deconstruction of that language, pushing the elements of vocality to the limit of pure noise, highly unpleasant, yet justified, so they say, by a rigorous structural intention.

Seriality

Both the strict application of seriality and its freely anti-traditional use inevitably lead music into the sphere of the conceptual, although for different reasons.

Strict seriality and twelve-tone technique: here music is conceptual because the Idea (the Structure) prevails over the aesthetic experience. In Total Serialism — from Maderna to the early phase of Luigi Nono — the composer creates an abstract law (a series or algorithm), and the work becomes the impersonal application of that law. There is no expectation that the listener should “hear” or love the work, but rather that he should understand the logical structure that generates it. The musical object is the documentation of an intellectual process.

Free and anti-traditional seriality (the Gesture): when serial schemes are used arbitrarily — notes thrown down at random, unresolved dissonances for the mere pleasure of rupture — music becomes conceptual for another reason. Here Intention (the Gesture) prevails over form. By moving away both from tonal tradition and from serial rigour, the work becomes incomprehensible without an external narrative. It is no longer composition: it is declaration. The manual is needed not to explain the rule (as in strict serialism), but to explain the philosophical meaning of the gesture.

In both cases — especially the second — the music is conceptual because what matters is not the sonic experience, but the discourse it generates. The explanation becomes an integral part of the work, feeding that “private club” of initiates who know why a certain noise was chosen and what it symbolises (aboutness).

In short: strict seriality is conceptual because of its Hyper-Structure; free seriality is conceptual because of its Hyper-Intention. Both abandon traditional aesthetics — audible form, direct expression — and without a manual they become insignificant. They fully belong to the critique of the primacy of the idea over the object.

From music for the few to music for everyone, here is a film score, still enormously famous today, from the year in which Luciano Berio was writing Sequenza III, unknown to most people.

By contrast, the music of Franco Donatoni (like the serial current he represents) is based on abstract compositional processes, in which the logic is entirely internal to the theoretical structure and is not intended for understanding.

Judging, Criticising, Insulting: What Is Permissible in These Conditions, and What Really Carries Weight

In the world of conceptual music and art — including the serial and post-serial branches — where traditional technique is no longer a criterion, the whole range of reactions is permissible: astonishment, rejection, indifference, even insult. If it is art without fixed form, one should expect discourse about it to be equally informal. Paradoxically, it is the very nature of this music that guarantees such freedom: if you reject every form, you cannot demand formal respect.

Emotional judgment is always legitimate

To say it’s rubbish is a subjective aesthetic judgment, and an absolute right. It is the spontaneous reaction of the receiver. The Futurists knew this well and actively sought the hostility of the public, convinced that scandal was part of the work. In art of rupture, disgust is not a failure: it is an expected outcome.

What actually makes the system tremble is reasoned criticism, because it weighs far more than insult: it’s rubbish because it is pure financial speculation, it’s rubbish because it adds nothing to a debate closed for decades, it’s rubbish because it lives only by its price, not by its form, it’s rubbish because it exists only in the head of the person who wrote it. These statements are dangerous because they damage the theoretical and, above all, the economic aura of the musical work. And that is what the system cannot afford.

Welcoming Insults, Rejecting Ideas

Theatres, journals, and critics tend to dismiss the spontaneous and informal judgment of the public as “populism.” This serves to protect the value of the works and, by reflection, their own role. Insults are tolerated as background noise.

Structured criticism, by contrast, is attacked or silenced, because it directly undermines the credibility of the system and the market that sustains it.

The Elite of the Incomprehensible

Here sociology enters with a flying tackle. A single ironic rational objection on a blog devoted to the avant-garde is enough to provoke reactions of the kind “we understand, you do not.” This art is not a shared territory, but a device of social distinction.

Traditional art is accessible: you understand it, you like it or you do not. Conceptual art, by contrast, requires a theoretical baggage: you have to know who Maderna is, who Chiari is, who Donatoni is, who Manzoni is, where he exhibited, what he represents. It is not “universal” art: it is a code, and whoever possesses it belongs to the club. This dependence on theory excludes the work from the domain of culture understood as a shared language, and relegates it to pure intellectual speculation.

From music for the few to music for everyone, here is a song, still known today, written in the year when Giuseppe Chiari was striking his piano.

The difficult work as an identity badge

To say “I understand aleatory music” is not only an aesthetic judgment: it is a social declaration. It means asserting that one has the time, cultural tools, economic freedom, and status required to understand what appears absurd to the uninitiated. The incomprehensible work becomes an entrance test.

Like the Latin of the medieval Church, it serves not to communicate, but to distinguish the clergy. When you use irony, you break the game and throw open the door of the club. This threatens those who have built their identity precisely on that closed door.

The psychological trap of investment weighs heavily: if you have devoted years to studying difficult but hideous music and to convincing yourself, by sheer repeated listening, that it is a masterpiece; if you have spent money on tickets and CDs; if you have built your prestige on that taste, then admitting that “perhaps it is rubbish” is like confessing that you have wasted time, money, and status. It is easier to convince yourself that the work is intelligent and that those who do not understand it are obtuse. It is cognitive dissonance in its pure state.

The sacred language of the initiates

The world of radical music uses a vague, nebulous, high-sounding language. In the visual arts it has already been baptised International Art English. In music too the liturgy is the same: a jargon that gives theoretical dignity to works that otherwise would not have it, and keeps the profane at a distance.

When you arrive with irony, you break the liturgy, stripping the work of its priestly aura. You are not offending the artist: you are threatening the code that holds the community together. Indignant reactions do not defend avant-garde music, but the social position that it allows one to occupy.

Radical Conceptual Music has become, despite its libertarian rhetoric, a new ritual of belonging, a way of demonstrating cultural sophistication and imagining oneself superior to others.

Conclusions

Irony shows that the emperor has no clothes, and at this point the picture is clear. Conceptual Music does not represent a new beginning, but the terminal point of a path begun a century ago: the dematerialisation of the work, the death of music, and its replacement by instruction manuals.

The innovative gesture no longer lies in the object, in technique, or in form — all of this has already been consumed and repeated a thousand times — but in absence, in mental instruction, in empty time, in the negation of the very need to listen. This is post-historical art: pluralist, indifferent to itself, deprived of direction. There is no longer an evolutionary line, nor a canon left to break.

Anything can be music. Any gesture can be sold as music. The market does not buy works, but certifications. The public does not listen: it interprets the context.

In this theoretical desert, popular criticism — even the bluntest kind — has paradoxically regained dignity. Insults do not scratch the system. Grounded criticism does.

This extreme art is not universal, but tribal, identitarian, exclusive. A private language disguised as a cosmic one. Conceptual Music proclaims freedom and universality, but functions as a ritual of belonging for the few. The rest is background noise which, fortunately, has been filled by real music — that of songs, film scores, and so forth, any music at all, provided it does not need instruction manuals in order to work. You listen to it and you like it.

While concerts of so-called classical music have become almost museum-like and religious events, in which one must remain silent as in church and submit to certain rituals, including the rules of applause, those of the world of songs and singer-songwriters attract ever greater masses of young people, and concerts are even held in stadiums and arenas that can barely contain the enthusiasm and participation of the audience. This is the music that best represents our society, and for which we will be remembered by future historians.

On the one hand there is the rigid repetition of music from the past; on the other, improvisation and the race to create ever new works. Classical music, popular music, singer-songwriter music, jazz, opera, rock, metal, rap — these are often commercial categories, used to divide the market, rationalise it, and intensify sales. The taste for musical collecting comes from there, and is encouraged by the new merchants. The twentieth century in particular saw the rise of two expressive forms competing with one another for relevance and depth: song on the one hand, and twelve-tone technique and serialism on the other.