Contemporary Music, Unofficial Languages, Subaltern Voices: Composing Musical Pieces on Sicilian Texts

Marcello Messina (1)

1 UFAC - Universidade Federal do Acre

This paper documents the composition and performance of two rare examples of pieces that use Sicilian poetry as their textual material, namely, Emanuele Casale’s Composizione per voce (1997), written on a contemporary poem by Catanian poet Biagio Guerrera, who also premiered the piece in 1998; and my own composition Senza cialoma, on a selection of 19th century Sicilian street poems, premiered in 2013 by the Gnu ensemble. A variety of materials, ranging from interviews with the musical composers to programme notes, weblogs and personal correspondence, is used as evidence alongside the content of the musical works, in order to explore the political implications of composing music in Sicilian

Keywords: Sicilian language; Composition; Contemporary music

Domains: Linguistics; Musicology and performing arts; Literature; Gender studies; History; History, Philosophy and Sociology of Sciences

Marcello Messina. Contemporary Music, Unofficial Languages, Subaltern Voices: Composing Musical Pieces on Sicilian Texts. PERFORMA’15: Proceedings of the International Conference on Musical Performance, Jun 2015, Aveiro, Portugal. ⟨hprints-01967993⟩