For Bruno Maderna, exploration of new musical territory went hand in hand with a rethinking of the past. For one, he was convinced that, whether or not a composer is willing to acknowledge as much, there is always something of the old that lives on in the new in one form or another. Furthermore, in his own work, Maderna actively drew on practices from the past to invent new compositional strategies. In so doing with seemingly limitless imagination, he pioneered a wide range of compositional procedures that had a profound impact on contemporary music in the 1950s and beyond, with many of his inventions and ideas being taken up by other composers as well who had studied or worked with him. This essay examines a number of Maderna's compositional techniques to illuminate how he took inspiration from music and music theories from the past for his own new compositional techniques. The following examples are taken from works written between 1948 and 1955, during which time he developed his own version of (integral) serialism. My focus will be on Maderna's poetics and its sources of influence. I will not go into the impact of Maderna's techniques on other composers.

Like virtually every Italian composer of his generation – given the kind of training one would receive privately or in conservatories at the time – Maderna began writing in neoclassical styles. Following the works of his early maturity, he started to adopt twelve-tone techniques around 1948 within a musical language that remained largely neoclassical for another number of years, with stylistic influences notably from Bartók, Debussy, Hindemith, G.F. Malipiero, and Stravinsky. During these years, and with every work, Maderna rapidly expanded his compositional means, conceiving new techniques that were as much rooted in compositional principles known from the past as they broke new ground in thinking about musical material, within the aesthetic program of the avant-garde.

Three-Dimensional Music

Bruno Maderna's musical production is characterized by a continuous experimentation with compositional techniques that make him an exemplary case in the rich and articulated panorama of the late twentieth century. It moves on multiple levels that intersect each other: from research on a conceptual level to the choice of instrumental formations up to performative solutions. The famous expression “selva foltissima” (thick forest), proposed by Massimo Mila in the aftermath of the composer's premature death to define his catalogue as a whole, reveals labyrinthine undertones if one goes so far as to consider both the close connections that exist between different works, and the specific compositional choices, which often present issues that call for particular theoretical reflection.

Within these processes, his precocious and varied familiarity with different technologies plays a very important role. He was equally at home with traditional composition on paper, electronic and mixed music, radio drama, and also audiovisual products. Even his rich production of functional music – such as radio and television background music and film soundtracks – always became a training ground of primary importance whose results had repercussions on the more specifically creative side. Just as fundamental was his intense activity as a conductor, which began at an early age and continued at a top level right up to the last days of his life; even though, at the time, his conducting was often perceived as a “distraction” from his work as a composer, it instead represented a factor capable of stimulating particular creative activity in certain stages of his full maturity.

His remarkable mastery on a technical level was accompanied by strict control of the compositional phases. In the compositions of the 1950s, which marked the consolidation of his artistic personality, we find an abundance of preparatory materials that reveal extremely meticulous planning; these were gradually modified, sometimes decreasing in number, in the works of the following years (in what constitutes almost a second phase of his production), where procedures of controlled aleatoric music, personal collage techniques, and reuse of the same materials on several occasions were advanced.

Maderna made his debut on the American music scene on 21 February 1965 with the performance of Luigi Nono's Intolleranza 1960 in Boston, four years after its memorable opening in Venice. Prior to this, Maderna's fame as a conductor in the United States was mainly limited to communications from European contemporary music festivals, radio broadcasts, or the few available recordings. Who could remember the reviews in several American newspapers in 1932–33 that talked about a child prodigy, a certain Brunetto Grossato, who was causing quite a stir on the other side of the Atlantic? The child was director of the Diano Marina town band and the seventy-eight-member orchestra at Venice's Teatro La Fenice, often compared to Willy Ferrero and acclaimed as “the coming Toscanini.” And much the same could be said about Maderna the composer. Even in the early 1960s, the chances to hear his works live were few and far between, limited to some electronic music auditions and to the few chamber music pieces performed on tour by European musicians and only rarely by local artists. The fate of some of his important works is, however, bound up with events in America; for example, an early Requiem (1946), presumed lost, which Virgil Thomson speaks of in glowing terms, in an unsuccessful attempt to promote its performance in the United States; or his Tre liriche greche (1948), whose first known performance seems to have taken place in Kansas City on 27 February 1959, conducted by Harold Decker, who then released it on record.

The staging of Intolleranza 1960 at the Opera Company in Boston under the direction of Sarah Caldwell may have been beset by numerous technical difficulties and political protests, but it was, as the set designer Josef Svoboda recalls, a “sensational” production. Maderna's conducting played a crucial role in this. Joseph Silverstein, the concertmaster of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1962, remembers that “he was highly respected by the Boston Symphony musicians who worked with him.”

Introduction

The numerous occasions in Bruno Maderna's artistic life when he composed so-called musica funzionale for film and radio are spread over many years, parallel to his activity as an art music composer. Although this music was initially little appreciated and scarcely known, seminal essays and articles on certain aspects, or indeed on single works, have gradually brought his production of music for film and radio to light. It goes without saying that a fundamental difficulty underlies any discussion of this topic, since radio and cinema have different linguistic specificities, require particular analytical perspectives, and, whatever their interconnections, boast their very own traditions, genres, and production processes. Added to this, we also have the noticeable fact that Maderna only worked intermittently on music for radio and cinema productions. Nevertheless, a number of constant features can be identified, and the proper degree of historical distance allows us to recognize the value and peculiarity of some of his most successful collaborations, in which the sound and/or musical component becomes crucial for the narration. In these cases, the composer's contribution goes beyond the routine of consolidated narrative genres and manages to introduce novel elements, albeit within the boundaries of well-defined linguistic codes.

The wealth of music for film and radio composed by Maderna might seem rather unusual for a post-war avant-garde composer. Moreover, from the perspective of now-outdated categorization, all this music enshrines the limits of a system of values that continues to favor a distinction between “high” and “low” cultural products, between intellectual elite and the general public. However, Maderna's vast and varied work in these fields deserves instead to be approached with an open mind, in which the shared social and cultural divide between art music and popular music is envisaged as a sort of polarized continuum, within which intermediate positions and various forms of mediation coexist. This proves to be an essential concept for radio and/or audiovisual media, where the work is the result of the synergistic action of different forms of expression and professionalism.

One can easily get an idea of just how many variables come into play in this field of production by considering Maderna's very first radio and film collaborations in the immediate post-war period.

This is how Ian Strasfogel presented Maderna's latest stage work in the program notes printed for the Dutch premiere on 16 March 1973 (→ EX. 1). His words are the starting point for what is meant to be a round trip through the history of Satyricon, in an attempt to find answers not only to questions that are still open today, but also to new doubts that have never been raised before. In the first stages, which look back, we will dwell on the re-reading of some interpretive facts that are well-rooted in the work's history and then try, through the filter of new awareness and recently unearthed documents, to establish some fixed points in a timeline that still requires clear definition. The need for a temporal (re)orientation stems from the analysis of the various ambiguities and inconsistencies surrounding the data and circumstances of some of the developmental stages in its genesis; the hectic days that accompanied its first staging and the performances that immediately followed; and, again, the editorial history of the work. The resulting misunderstandings have, in turn, had a tangible impact on concepts that often prove tricky when applied to Maderna and his works: those of “authorship” and “version” (within the field of the performance).

One essential aspect of European post-WWII serialism was the postulate of the reciprocal conditioning of material and form, that is to say, the privileged relation between micro- and macrostructure. This interaction between the different levels of musical structure also directed composers to use studio facilities in synthetic sound production, since these devices seemed to offer them the means to structurally inform sound from the inside, to “compose” it in the most emphatic sense of the word, according to the same determinations as the other acoustic dimensions and further aspects of the music. Among the instrumental scores displaying an almost literal correspondence between the micro- and macrolevels, one of the earliest examples is John Cage's First Construction in Metal (1939), where this reciprocity determines the relation between the inner articulation of the first unit of sixteen bars and the whole form of 16 × 16 bars. This model helped Pierre Boulez to complete his strategies of integral serial composition as realized in his Structure Ia (1951), where the intervals within the series are projected onto the level of the series’ transpositions (including furthermore a principle of inversion responsible for the linking of the different levels of the structuration). In Karlheinz Stockhausen's Studie I (1953), the first electronic music realized by superimposed sine waves in an effort to “compose timbre,” the proportion series organizes all the levels, from the number of components per sound and the number of sounds per structure up to the number of sections within the piece. Considering the serial repertoire of the 1950s globally, such linear implications from the basic material to the formal development are typical of the initial attempts, and there exist, according to present knowledge, only a few later examples supporting the idea of an almost “algorithmic” strategy. Indeed, in most cases, supplementary decisions were taken that disrupt any kind of linearity between the levels. Nevertheless, such decisions do not suspend the general idea of reciprocity, since the procedures at the different levels act according to similar strategies, which seemed, for many of these composers, sufficient to ensure coherence. Let us consider a few examples within the mature serial style, addressing either the possible margin of independent decisions or the presence of micro/macro relations even in aleatoric works, as well as the gap between theoretical formulations by composers and the proper reality in the composed music.

Bruno Maderna's extensive connections with the U.S. music scene have received much less attention than the American careers of many other European composers, for example Luciano Berio and Pierre Boulez. Yet Maderna spent a lot of time in the United States, where during the last few years of his life he gained increasing respect as a conductor and composer, working with top ensembles including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic.

As Maderna the conductor became better known in the U.S., Maderna the composer also received increasing recognition. Especially his late works, with their timbral richness and gestural expressivity, as well as their zany humor and high-energy theatricality, were eagerly received by many Americans as a welcome change from the increasingly academic new music culture in the U.S. At the same time, Maderna's use of controlled aleatoric techniques resonated with similar efforts by many American composers at the time, especially Earle Brown, with whom Maderna enjoyed a close friendship.

This essay will focus on the role of American patronage networks in the origins and reception of two works that Maderna composed within the last two years of his life. The monodrama Venetian Journal (1972), for solo tenor, instrumental ensemble, and tape, was commissioned and performed by the American tenor Paul Sperry, to a libretto by the American playwright Jonathan Levy. The opera Satyricon (1972–73), commissioned by the Netherlands Opera, was based on a multilingual libretto drawn in large part from an idiomatic American translation of the Latin text from the late first century by Petronius Arbiter, and staged by the young American director Ian Strasfogel, who had already worked with Berio in the U.S. The opera was preceded by a workshop experiment on the subject of “Trimalchio's Feast,” an episode in Petronius’ The Satyricon, scheduled within Strasfogel's Music Theater Project at Tanglewood during the summer of 1971. Maderna's opera received its American premiere in the summer of 1973 at Tanglewood, again staged by Strasfogel.

In an interview with Aldo Maranca in August 1964, Bruno Maderna spoke of the relationship between music and poetry in ancient Greece:

These words are much more than a mere reflection on the artistic legacy of a remote era; in light of Maderna's musical production, they seem to contain a genuine creative manifesto which may have come to its greatest fruition in his last works.

Just seven years after the interview with Maranca, Maderna began composing the central nucleus of Satyricon, his last work for musical theater and a modern transposition of the homonymous Latin novel by Petronius Arbiter. He completed the work two years later, in March 1973. The opera is a mixture of languages, styles, genres, and musical quotations, and has until now been ascribed the status of “fragmentation au carre “ (fragmentation squared). Poised between the concepts of open work, pop-art, and an early postmodernism, Maderna's premature death in November of the same year also played a role in affecting the reading of Satyricon, further implanting the idea of it being an unfinished composition.

There is no doubt that Satyricon defies any analysis that tends to attribute the entire composition to a unitary compositional process or a univocal formal principle. As is known, Maderna makes use of several languages, styles, and compositional methods in the composition of the opera: alongside the massive use of quotations from popular classics, there are stylistic loans from the nineteenth-century operatic tradition, from cabaret, from operetta, and from twentieth-century musical theater (in particular Berg and Weill). And there is more: the stylistic imitations also contemplate the use of acoustic instruments to reproduce the typical sounds of early electronic music, and there is no shortage of parts (such as La Matrona di Efeso and Trimalchio e le flatulenze) where Maderna takes up dodecaphonic and serial composition again, in order to emphasize specific dramatic situations. In terms of dramatic structure and compositional choices, each of the episodes that make up the work seems to be an autonomous organism in its own right.