Listening to Another Italy
Egisto Macchi’s New Music for Italian Documentaries of the 1960s
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jfm.37320Keywords:
documentary film, modernism, World War II, Egisto Macchi, memoryAbstract
The transition between the 1950s and 1960s is a watershed moment for the construction of the Italian post-war identity through cinema. Not only do feature films of those years reflect this critical point, but also documentaries become a privileged medium for revealing the contradictions of a country that was increasingly divided between tradition and progress. In this article I focus on the production of composer Egisto Macchi, a leading figure in the renewal of Italian music. He worked with significant filmmakers scoring hundreds of non-fiction films during the 1960s. Combining archival sources with historiographical and theoretical discourses of musicology and film studies, I examine some key examples of Macchi’s soundtracks. Macchi’s scores shun widely encoded musical styles in an attempt to investigate the most striking and hidden character of the reality observed by the camera. On the one hand, experimental music is seen as the best way of engaging afresh with the subject matter; on the other, these documentaries establish a viewpoint and a way of hearing rooted in the contemporary music soundscape.
References
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Ruberti, Giorgio. 2016. Forme e stili della canzone napoletana classica. Quaderni del Centro Studi Canzone Napoletana 6. Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana.
Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Random House.
Scheurer, Timothy E. 2007. Music and mythmaking in film: Genre and the role of the composer. Jefferson, NC/London: McFarland.
Schneider, Jane. 1998. Introduction: The dynamics of neo-Orientalism in Italy. In Italy’s “Southern Question”: Orientalism in one country, 1-23, ed. Jane Schneider. Oxford/New York: Berg.
Sciascia, Leonardo. 1963. La Sicilia nel cinema. In Film 1963, 11-34, ed. Vittorio Spinazzola. Milan: Feltrinelli.
———. 2014 [1961]. The day of the owl. Trans. Archibald Colquhoun and Arthur Oliver. London: Granta Books [first English tranlsation 1963].
Tagg, Philip. 1998. Tritonal crime and “music as music.” In Norme con ironie. Scritti per i Settant’anni di Ennio Morricone, 273-312, ed. Sergio Miceli. Milan: Suvini Zerboni.
Termine, Liborio. 2001. Le Sicilie e la “sicilianitudine.” In Storia del cinema italiano, Vol. 10, 238-9, ed. Giorgio De Vincenti. Venice: Marsilio.
Tiby, Ottavio. 1957. Il canto popolare siciliano” In Corpus di musiche popolari siciliane, by Alberto Favara, ed. Ottavio Tiby, Vol. 1. Palermo: Accademia di Scienze Lettere e Arti.
Wittmann, Laura. 2011. The visible, unexposed: Francesco Rosi’s “Salvatore Giuliano.” In Mafia movies: A reader, 211-18, ed. Dana Renga. Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press.
Basile, Giuseppe Domenico. 2017. Said nonostante Said. Il dibattito sull’ “orientalism in one country.” In Identità, migrazioni e postcolonialismo in Italia: A partire da Edward Said, 94-110, ed. Bruno Brunetti and Roberto Derobertis. Bari: Progedit.
Biancorosso, Giorgio. 2013. Memory and the leitmotif in cinema. In Representation in Western Music, 203-23, ed. Joshua S. Walden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bondanella, Peter E. 2009. A history of Italian cinema. New York: Bloomsbury.
Cecchi, Alessandro. 2014. Creative titles: Audiovisual experimentation and self-reflexivity in Italian industrial films of the Economic Miracle and after. Music, Sound and the Moving Image 8, no. 2: 179-94.
Ciment, Michel. 2008. Dossier Rosi. Trans. Lorenzo Codelli. Expanded Italian Edition. Turin, Milan: Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Il Castoro.
Corbella, Maurizio. 2017. Musica e suono ne “I mille di Garibaldi”: Prassi, tecnica e ideologia nella riscrittura sonora di “1860” di Alessandro Blasetti. Quaderni del Centro Studi Cinema Italiano 13: 209-14.
———. 2015. Piccioni, Piero. Dizionario biografico degli italiani. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana. http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/piccioni-piero_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29
Cosci, Marco. 2017. Vancini, Macchi and the Voices for the (Hi)Story of Bronte. Archival Notes 2: 65-81. http://onlinepublishing.cini.it/index.php/arno/article/view/63/188
Del Bravo, Francesco. 2015. The enchanting island: Alberto Favara transcribing Sicily. Mousikos Logos 2 (January): 18-37.
Dickie, John. 1999. Darkest Italy: The nation and stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Fara, Giulio. 1920. L’anima musicale d’Italia: La canzone del popolo. Rome: Ausonia.
Gesù, Sebastiano. 2008. Banditi, briganti. In La Sicilia tra schermo e storia, 95-117, ed. Sebastiano Gesù. Catania: Giuseppe Aimone Editore.
Gieri, Manuela. 1992. Character and discourse from Pirandello to Fellini: Defining countertradition in an Italian context. Quaderni d’Italianistica 13, no. 1: 43-55.
Ginsborg, Paul. 2003. A history of contemporary Italy: Society and politics, 1943–1988. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gribaudi, Gabriella. 1996. Images of the South. In Italian cultural studies: An introduction, 72-87, ed. David Forgacs and Robert Lumley. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
London, Justin. 2000. Leitmotifs and musical reference in the classical film score. In Music and Cinema, 85-98, ed. James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer. Hanover, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Lumley, Robert and Jonathan Morris, eds. 1997. The new history of the Italian South: The Mezzogiorno revisited. Reed Hall: University of Exeter Press.
Moe, Nelson J. 1992. “Altro che Italia!”: Il Sud dei piemontesi (1860–61). Meridiana: Rivista di storia e scienze sociali, no. 15: 53-89.
———. 2011. Modernity, Mafia style: Alberto Lattuada’s “Il Mafioso.” In Mafia movies: A reader, 219-25, ed. Dana Renga. Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press.
———. 2002. The view from Vesuvius: Italian culture and the southern question. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press.
Niceforo, Alfredo. 1898. L’Italia barbara contemporanea: Studi ed appunti. Milan/Palermo: Sandron.
Petraccone, Claudia. 2005. Le “due Italie”: La questione meridionale tra realtà e rappresentazione. Bari/Rome: Laterza.
Pirandello, Luigi. 1965. The art of humor (1908). Trans. John Patrick Pattinson. The Massachusetts Review 6, no. 3 (Spring–Summer): 515-20.
Romagnoli, Ettore. 1959. I canti popolari siciliani e la musica greca (1920). In Favara, Alberto: Scritti sulla musica popolare siciliana, 130-49, ed. Teresa Samonà Favara. Rome: De Santis.
Rosengarten, Frank. 1998. Homo Siculus: Essentialism in the writing of Giovanni Verga, Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa, and Leonardo Sciascia. In Italy’s “Southern Question”: Orientalism in one country, 117-31, ed. Jane Schneider. Oxford/New York: Berg.
Rosi, Francesco. 1975. The audience should not be just passive spectators: An interview with Francesco Rosi. Cinéaste 7, no. 1: 2-8.
Ruberti, Giorgio. 2016. Forme e stili della canzone napoletana classica. Quaderni del Centro Studi Canzone Napoletana 6. Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana.
Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Random House.
Scheurer, Timothy E. 2007. Music and mythmaking in film: Genre and the role of the composer. Jefferson, NC/London: McFarland.
Schneider, Jane. 1998. Introduction: The dynamics of neo-Orientalism in Italy. In Italy’s “Southern Question”: Orientalism in one country, 1-23, ed. Jane Schneider. Oxford/New York: Berg.
Sciascia, Leonardo. 1963. La Sicilia nel cinema. In Film 1963, 11-34, ed. Vittorio Spinazzola. Milan: Feltrinelli.
———. 2014 [1961]. The day of the owl. Trans. Archibald Colquhoun and Arthur Oliver. London: Granta Books [first English tranlsation 1963].
Tagg, Philip. 1998. Tritonal crime and “music as music.” In Norme con ironie. Scritti per i Settant’anni di Ennio Morricone, 273-312, ed. Sergio Miceli. Milan: Suvini Zerboni.
Termine, Liborio. 2001. Le Sicilie e la “sicilianitudine.” In Storia del cinema italiano, Vol. 10, 238-9, ed. Giorgio De Vincenti. Venice: Marsilio.
Tiby, Ottavio. 1957. Il canto popolare siciliano” In Corpus di musiche popolari siciliane, by Alberto Favara, ed. Ottavio Tiby, Vol. 1. Palermo: Accademia di Scienze Lettere e Arti.
Wittmann, Laura. 2011. The visible, unexposed: Francesco Rosi’s “Salvatore Giuliano.” In Mafia movies: A reader, 211-18, ed. Dana Renga. Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press.
Published
2019-09-09
How to Cite
Cosci, M. (2019). Listening to Another Italy: Egisto Macchi’s New Music for Italian Documentaries of the 1960s. Journal of Film Music, 8(1-2), 109-125. https://doi.org/10.1558/jfm.37320
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