The FMJ Research Project is delighted to present its official logo.
The FMJ Logo elaborates graphically on the capital letters of three keywords – Film, Music, and Journalism – which sum up the project’s main topic.
The FMJ official logo is created by Maura Marinozzi Art Director, Graphic & Communication, Bologna.
Francesco Finocchiaro on air at RAI Radio3 Suite, conversating with Francesco Antonioni on Musical Modernism and Cinema. On May 31st, 2017.
At the recent conference When Jazz Meets Cinema (Lovere, May 5-7, 2017), Francesco Finocchiaro and Leo Izzo held a lecture on jazz numbers in Gottfried Huppertz’s score for Metropolis (1927) by Fritz Lang. The paper gave rise to a lively discussion that addressed many issues concerning the reception of the jazz music in Europe between the two world wars.
Francesco Finocchiaro & Leo Izzo, ‘Metropolis’ di Fritz Lang: la città del futuro nell’età del jazz, International Conference “When Jazz Meets Cinema”, May 5-7, 2017, Lovere (BG)
At the forthcoming International Conference When Jazz Meets Cinema, May 5-7, Lovere (BG), Project Leader Francesco Finocchiaro, together with jazz scholar Leo Izzo, will give a lecture on Gottfried Huppertz’s original score for Metropolis (1927) by Fritz Lang.
In their four-hand paper, Finocchiaro and Izzo will deal with two remarkable film scenes accompanied by jazz music. The analysis will focus on the symbolical meaning associated with jazzy sound and language in the music accompaniment for silent movies.
PI Francesco Finocchiaro has recently released an interview with composer Daniele Furlati, who authored a new accompaniment music for Augusto Genina’s silent movie Addio, giovinezza! (1918).
The new score, which elaborates on musical themes derived from an operetta by Giuseppe Pietri, will premiere in Bologna, at the Festival Il Cinema Ritrovato.
The interview with Daniele Furlati will appear soon in the Italian magazine Amadeus.
The discussion on music’s mechanization exploded in German print journalism between the two World Wars, when a series of technological innovations (radio, phonograph, cinematograph and sound cinema) caught the attention of the public and swept through the music world, shaking its very foundations.
In this sharply polemical debate, the metaphorical antithesis “organism-mechanism” reflected the contraposition between different thought systems and structured a generational opposition.
In other words, “organic music” was the music of the Nineteenth Century and that of the followers of the Classical-Romantic tradition; by contrast, “mechanical music” was the music of radiophonic, electro-acoustic and cinematic experiments, carried out by the new generation of composers at the Baden-Baden Festival.
In the framework of this ideological debate, the organic-mechanical metaphors constitute the point of connection between compositional structures, music analytical categories, and exegetical processes. Metaphors represent the hinge, the element of mediation between the categorization of the compositional structures and the hermeneutic processes that forge the aesthetic discourse. They mediate between the territories of poetics and aesthetics, where the verbal discourse has the central role, and the immanent structures.
Francesco Finocchiaro, “Musica organica versus musica meccanica”. Un’antitesi metaforica nel dibattito musicale fra le due guerre, in Musica e metafora: storia analisi ermeneutica, edited by F. Finocchiaro and M. Giani, Torino, Accademia University Press, 2016, pp. 117-154 (Biblioteca di Athena Musica, 1) (Read it on Academia.edu).
The research project on Film Music as a Problem in German Print Journalism will be presented at the University of Vienna, on 23 March 2017.
Project leader Dr. Francesco Finocchiaro will introduce the main issues of the ongoing project.
From 1919 to 1934, the Viennese publishing house Universal-Edition (UE) released the earliest journal specifically devoted to modern music: the Musikblätter des Anbruch, as of 1929 simply called Anbruch. The (Musikblätter des) Anbruch was connected to the eponymous expressionist group, whose periodical Der Anbruch. Flugblätter aus der Zeit (1917–1922) represented the mouthpiece of literary expressionism. Otto Schneider, later artistic director of the Neue Musikgesellschaft “Der Anbruch” in Berlin, was (co-)founder and chief editor of both the Flugblätter and the Musikblätter until 1922, being also responsible for Der Anbruch. Ein Jahrbuch neuer Jugend (1920).
Focusing on modern music and culture, the journal’s establishment also correlated with the establishment of Melos in Berlin (1920–1934) and Der Auftakt in Prague (1920–1938). Furthermore, it came along with the foundation of Arnold Schönberg’s Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen (1918), the Salzburger Festspiele (1920), and the Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik (IGNM, 1922), whose leading figures regularly contributed to the (Musikblätter des) Anbruch: In 1922, critic Paul Stefan, co-founder of the IGNM, succeeded Schneider as chief editor until the journal’s demise in 1937. The editorial board also included names such as Alfred Kalmus, Paul Amadeus Pisk, Hans Heinsheimer, and Theodor W. Adorno. Progressive composers and writers—critics as well as musicologists—were among the journal’s contributors, e. g. Ernst Křenek, Franz Schreker, Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg, Kurt Weill, Béla Bartók, Egon Wellesz, Paul Bekker, and Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt. Moreover, several authors studied with Arnold Schönberg (Alban Berg, Paul Amadeus Pisk, Paul Stefan, Erwin Stein, Egon Wellesz, Alexander Jemnitz), Franz Schreker (Ernst Křenek, Paul Amadeus Pisk, Karol Rathaus), or Alban Berg (Theodor W. Adorno). Therefore, the (Musikblätter des) Anbruch represented the most important platform for contemporary critical, aesthetical, and theoretical discourses in the German-speaking countries.
The journal was divided into three main sections: 1) comprehensive articles on music theory and aesthetics; 2) discussions and analyses of the latest compositions and performances; 3) commentaries on recently published music and on musical life. Despite an astonishing range of topics, also including non-European (musical) cultures, the journal’s focus lay on contemporary music. Special issues were devoted to Soviet Russia, jazz music, dance, singing, contemporary opera, music and mechanics, or particular composers; sections on music automatons discussed innovative instruments and sound generators. As each issue closed with an extensive advertisement section, the journal further functioned as self-promotion for the young Viennese publishing house, which had been releasing contemporary music since 1908.
As of September 1930, the Anbruch incorporated Pult und Taktstock. Fachzeitschrift für Dirigenten. In 1935, the journal was taken over by the Vorwärts-Verlag and renamed Anbruch. Österreichische Zeitschrift für Musik, gradually neglecting its former leading figures and thus, its principles, which used to be modernism and internationalism.
Special issues: Musik und Maschine (October/November 1926); Leichte Musik (March 1929); Probleme der Kompositionstechnik (September/October 1929); Wo stehen wir? (June 1930).
In 1901, composer Bernhard Schuster (1870–1934) established the illustrated music journal Die Musik that was published semimonthly by Schuster & Loeffler (Berlin–Leipzig) until 1915. After an interruption of seven years, the publisher merged with the Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt (Stuttgart), also known for its music books by important writers and critics. In 1929, the journal was taken over by Max Hesses Verlag (Berlin). Schuster remained editor-in-chief until 1933, when the journal became a propaganda organ of the Nazi regime. In 1943, the consolidation of Die Musik, the (Neue) Zeitschrift für Musik, the Allgemeine Musikzeitung, and the Neues Musikblatt (formerly Melos) led to the Musik im Kriege.
Die Musik reached a wide readership by virtue of its music supplements and iconographic documents, its special issues, and its variety of topics—including copyright questions and the social status of musicians, pedagogical issues, jazz and film music as well as reviews of concert and opera performances, conferences and festivals, books and sheet music, and international newspaper articles. Thus, it became the most successful and prestigious German-language music journal of the first half of the twentieth century.
See for instance: Guido Bagier (Musikalische Probleme des Films, 1925; Probleme des Tonfilms, 1927), Paul Marsop (Lichtspiel und Lichtspielmusik, 1924), Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt (Die Musik zum Film, 1926), Robert Beyer (Musik und Film, 1929; Tonfilm, 1929).
Section: Mechanische Musik (from 1927 to 1930).
Special Issue: Funk, Phono und Tonfilm (January 1932).
Interrogare i rapporti tra il modernismo musicale e il cinema tedesco significa additare una via di ricerca non ortodossa: non una delle direttrici principali, certo, ma un sentiero finora poco esplorato. In realtà, i rappresentanti del modernismo musicale, da Alban Berg a Paul Hindemith, da Kurt Weill a Hanns Eisler, un rapporto con il cinema lo ebbero, eccome. Fu, sì, un rapporto complesso e contraddittorio, nel quale il cinema figura talora più come riferimento estetico che come realtà fattuale: in ogni caso, ricca di conseguenze fu la recezione in ambito musicale del linguaggio e dell’estetica del medium cinematografico. La scoperta del cinema assume in ciò la pregnanza e la coerenza di un vero e proprio paradigma estetico, che sostiene il progetto modernista nella sua intima essenza. Il confronto con il medium d’avanguardia per eccellenza rappresenta un vettore del modernismo musicale: un nuovo paradigma estetico per quel processo di travisamento volontario, di revisionismo creativo, quando non di deliberata sovversione della tradizione musicale classico-romantica, in cui si realizzò storicamente il “sogno dell’Alterità” della generazione modernista.
Francesco Finocchiaro, Modernismo musicale e cinema tedesco nel Primo Novecento, Lucca, LIM, 2017.
The Vindobona series by Universal Edition is a unique case among mood music collections for “silent” film accompaniment. It is a collection that, starting in 1927, published salon orchestra adaptations of music by, to name but a few, Strauss, Mahler, Schreker, Janácek, Bartók, Křenek, Weill, and Zemlinsky. This list by itself is enough to make it a document of undoubted historical value—a document that helps us understand the specificities, as well as the limitations, of musical Modernism’s reception in the practice of the musical accompaniment for moving pictures in German-speaking countries.
When it was launched in 1927, the Vindobona was emphatically introduced by its publisher as the first collection of modern music by modern composers for film use. Its importance is limited as far as actual musical practice is concerned on account of evident miscalculations in its editorial design. Nonetheless, the Vindobona Collection has much to tell us. Its analysis allows us to infer, at least indirectly, important information about the routine of music for cinema. The Vindobona project reflects, at least in its approach, a series of significant changes in the aesthetics of cinema presentation and, in general, of the social dimension of cinema.
This essay considers first of all the structure of the collection and its genesis, on the basis of unpublished archive materials from the Department of Music of the Austrian National Library and the Historical Archive of the Universal Edition. It then moves on to analyze the collection’s editorial goals, before finally evaluating its particularly problematic relationship with the contemporary practices and aesthetics of cinematic music.
Francesco Finocchiaro, The ‘Vindobona-Collection’ of the Universal Edition, “Music and the Moving Image”, IX n. 3, Fall 2016, pp. 38-56 (Read it on Academia.edu).
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