Trauer, Leidenschaft, Verzweiflung: Aufgabe der Kinomusik der Stummfilmära war es, das ganze Spektrum menschlicher Gefühle abzubilden. Am Donnerstag, 13. Juni 2019, präsentiert Francesco Finocchiaro im Rahmen eines Lecture-Recitals den umfangreichen Stummfilm-Musikbestand der FB Musikwissenschaft.
Rediscovering the pleasure of a warm, joyful, and respectful educational relationship… Some pictures from Francesco Finocchiaro’s Erasmus Teaching Leaving at the University of Catania (15–26 April 2019).
Die Fachbereichsbibliothek Musikwissenschaft der Universität Wien verwahrt seit 2018 den Nachlass des deutschen Komponisten und Kinokapellmeisters Edgar Haase (1901–1967).
Der Musikbestand enthält über 500 Orchestersets aus deutschen, englischen und amerikanischen Kinomusik-Repertoires der Stummfilm-Epoche (bspw. Kinothek, Preis-Kino-Bibliothek, Boheme Kino-Lexikon, Sam Fox Film-Gebrauchs-Musik, Bosworth’s Internationales Kino-Orchester, J. S. Zamecnik’s Photoplay-Edition, Universal-Film-Musik, Robbins Red Seal Concert Series, Filmharmonie und vielen anderen). Ein solch umfangreiches Kompendium erlaubt einen historischen Einblick in die alltägliche Praxis der Stummfilm-Musik und kann Filmmusikforschern bei der Rekonstruktion der zeitgenössischen Technik und Ästhetik der Filmkomposition helfen.
Dr. Francesco Finocchiaro, Leiter des FWF-Forschungsprojekts Filmmusik als Problem im deutschsprachigen Journalismus (1907–1930), hat diesen Musikbestand im Rahmen eines Lecture-Recitals vorgestellt: Der Vortrag wurde von der Live-Musikaufführung ausgewählter Kinomusikstücke durch ein Kammerensemble flankiert.
Die Filmmusik von gestern, a lecture-recital of Francesco Finocchiaro at Campus aktuell 2019, University of Vienna, June 13th, 2019. With the participation of Daniele De Vecchi, Anna Tonini Bossi, and Tiziana Columbro.
Italian cinema of the fascist Ventennio (1922–43) used music and, more generally, the acoustic component in an anything but naive way: on the contrary, it focused on the most subliminal component of the filmic text so as to convey constellations of meaning that were useful to the regime’s cultural politics.
The musical component proves to be a strategic ideological tool especially in films with declared propaganda content. Fascist ideology translates into a pervasive musical polarization. On the one hand, music enhances fascism’s propagandistic myths, such as Latinity, Risorgimento, family, peasant land, war, etc. On the other, music is put in the service of anti-Communist, anti-Jewish, as well as anti-Ethiopian iconography, connoting spaces and environments, criminalizing the regime’s enemies (Africans, Marxists, Jews, etc.) through dissonances, cacophonic clusters, as well as the deformation of ethnic and jazz music.
The musical component of fascist cinema contributed toward structuring the regime’s rhetoric for all intents and purposes. Analysing the musical construction of spaces and places in the regime’s cinema can help reconstruct a fundamental chapter, so far neglected, of fascism’s cultural encyclopaedia.
Film Music as Propaganda: The Musical Construction of Space in Fascist Cinema was the title of an interdisciplinary panel conducted by Francesco Finocchiaro together with colleagues Leo Izzo and Elena Mosconi at the international conference Mapping Spaces, Sounding Places. Geographies of Sounds in Audiovisual Media, at the University of Pavia-Cremona (19-22 March 2019).
Our workshop on silent film music at the IULM University Milan started right today with a class on film music restorations. (A breath of fresh air against stupididy and evilness!)
From March 11th to 15th, Francesco Finocchiaro will give a workshop on film music composition in the early 20th century, in the framework of an Erasmus Teaching Assingnment at the IULM University Milan.
At the Musicological Department’s “Semesterfrüchte 2019”, Marlene Penninger, Marie Huber, and Chiara Schmidt performed “Notturno amoroso”, a film music piece drawn from Giuseppe Becce’s Kinothek (1919-26).
