Study

The third and last step of the research project — carried out through the grant of three yearly post-doc fellowships — consisted in studying some of the most interesting uncovered scores and writing critical essays to outline their importance and analyse film music from different methodological perspectives.

Marco Targa examined the repertoires used in the musical accompaniment of Italian silent cinema, focusing on the important role of the so-called “musica per orchestrina”: a repertoire largely documented in music publishing (in Piedmont, too), which drew as much from the transcriptions of famous opera and instrumental pieces as from dance tunes, popular songs and original pieces composed by lesser authors. At the same time, he studied the cinema transpositions of operas in the Silent Age, closely examining the films based on a plot from an opera story, the transformation of the libretti into screenplays and the debate this kind of enjoyment of opera show arose.

Alessandro Cecchi’s research dealt with the role of sound and music in Italian industrial documentaries in the 1960s, marked by an audiovisual experimentation and made in collaboration with composers ascribable to musical avant-garde: a study conducted taking into account different theoretical and methodological viewpoints and applying to composition of film music the semiotic perspective known in musicology as topic theory.

Finally, Ilario Meandri followed a twofold course of examination. The former centred on the American film sound post-production process from an ethnomusicological perspective (research already partially published in La fabbrica dei sogni. Un’introduzione etnomusicologica al mainstream musicale hollywoodiano, Torino, Kaplan, 2012). The latter on the praxes, techniques and technologies of music recording in Italy: a field research which took place in Rome and aimed at tracing the industrial processes of sound post-production and at analysing the relationship between the composer and the professionals taking part in the process.

The results of this stage of Cabiria Project are illustrated in Italy and abroad in many conferences and are disclosed in the book Film Music: Practices, Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives. Studies around Cabiria Research Project, edited by Annarita Colturato, Torino, Kaplan, 2014.