The research aims to study the public image and social role of the musician in different cultures as the result of negotiated socio-constructivism. To this purpose the project will be divided into two intermingling sections:
1) study of films, theatre, novels, the subject of which is a musician (classical, ethnic, jazz, rock, pop);
2) production of new short and medium-length films on living musicians of varied cultures and genres.
In both sections strategies of ¿enriched remediation¿ will be investigated and applied; the concept of ¿remediation¿ (Bolter-Grusin 1999) indicates the reintegration of past media (i.e. live operas and concerts) into new media (i.e. films), with the activation of new meanings.
The first section, dealing with these types of ¿extended biography¿, will investigate how a society considers musicians and how their figures are socially constructed; it won¿t focus on aesthetic qualities or historical truthfulness of these films, theatre and novels that have neither realistic aims nor scholarly purposes.
The same attention will be given to composers, interpreters and performers: from films on Mozart (Forman¿s "Amadeus") to the docu-film on the pianist Glenn Gould or Zeffirelli¿s "Toscanini", up to biopics on icons like Bob Dylan ("I¿m not there" 2007), Freddy Mercury ("Bohemian Rhapsody" 2018) or Edith Piaf ("La vie en rose" 2007).
The second section will be devoted to producing new audio-visual portraits of living musicians active in different musical genres, with update technical means and will be managed mainly by ethnomusicologists. The use of audio-visual support is consolidated in all areas of historical research; thus this project fits into a very active trend. High-quality tools will permit the creation of a multimedia archive that can also be used by the general public.
All research results will flow onto an IT platform, to make it open-access.
The width of objectives and activities is in a line with the number of researchers involved.
The research could fill a dual gap:
- in musicology, up to now very sporadically interested in the critical interpretation of this type of cultural testimony (films, plays and novels on musicians)
- in the production of audiovisual ethnographies (documentaries) about living musicians, hitherto lacking portraits.
This production and the assembling of a database will promote a in-field action by experimenting narrative strategies in keeping with critical studies of biopics. The integrated collaboration between musicologists, ethnomusicologists and historians of cinema, theater and literature, never realized in the few research on the sector in recent years, will make it possible to correctly contextualize musicians. The research potential is based on integrating skills and is further implemented by up-to-date technical and technological knowledge, which ethnomusicologists have as a necessary professional background.
Integrating the two sections, the research may clarify certain types of influence of film genre conventions (biography as love film, as psychoanalytic film, as historical film, as investigative film) and theatrical-novelistic (monodrama, theater/novel-inquiry for Mengelberg and Mahler, conceptual theater for Schönberg, experimental avant-garde), with effects on Film- and Theater-Studies. In brief, the investigation will produce two types of objects, which may be useful for future research:
1) a meticulously indexed database of all the cinematographic, theatrical, literary and documentary texts devoted to musicians of every field, age and genre;
2) a multimedia archive of short- and medium-length films made by the ethnomusicological group, with first-hand accounts of living musicians from different cultures.
The potential for innovative research input is broken down into different levels:
- the study of biopic, theater and novel on musicians investigates the processes through which a culture has reactivated or interpreted repertoires of the past through "remediation" processes (Grusin)
- remediation also includes a phenomenon that will be a subject of research: when a biopic uses canonic music, the traditional repertoire encounters a new level of listening, an expanded audience that is not familiar with these works and places them in a different epistemic framework. The study of this kind of remediation leads to significant contributions to knowledge
- this intercultural openness makes it possible to study historical dialogue with new tools, i.e. how different twentieth century periods have "intentioned" certain moments in the history of music and certain authors: biopics, plays or novels are testimonies not of the biographed figure (not "truthful"), but of the culture whose bearer is the producer
- hence the project contributes in an essential way to studying the processes of the "invention of tradition" (Hobsbawm) and the "genealogy of culture" (Foucault) by studying how a musician is narrated by these forms of "extended biography"
- a different point of view will be offered for the study of how commonplaces are formed, still in the framework of the genealogy of the episteme. The part concerning popular music opens up considerable potential for understanding market strategies and political-economic exploitation in the rock-pop world
- in this framework, the production of audiovisual portraits of living musicians is an essential element of the entire project; with a step beyond theoretical study, the research will thus produce new material to be left to the archives of memory
- last but not least, this type of audio-visual research and production can have direct repercussions on political historiography, as well as on social studies, not only on the society of the biographed figure, but even more on the culture that produced the film, theatrical or narrative biography.
Publications, conferences, reviews: a series of results is expected that will remain available for subsequent developments:
1) a great final conference, with international guests, on the topics investigated during the project
2) the organization of intermediate workshops, in which scholars from abroad and from Italy will discuss the work of the two sections in progress. One of them will be devoted to audiovisual production (design and editing) for researchers participating in the project
3) one or more volumes, for which scholars involved in seminars and in the international conference will be invited to contribute
4) database of theater-film-novel production on musicians
5) database of audio-visual biographies of ethnomusicological field
6) audio-visual documentary production on living musicians (in collaboration with Nuova Consonanza, IUC, Istituto per i beni sonori e audiovisivi, Cineteca di Bologna)
7) Public reviews and seminars on research biographies
To harmonize these different activities, some participants in the project will be present in both sections, organized in an integrated way and pursuing common objectives.