Seminario di Andrea Bombi (Universidad de Valencia)
29/05/2025 ore 11 Via Divisi, 81, 90133 Palermo PA
The term urban musicology identifies a series of methodologically eclectic music-historical research practices, which since the 1990s have differentiated themselves from a historiographical paradigm centered on the author/work binomial and the concept of influence, as well as an emphatic conception of art as a transcendent individual creation. Starting from the interest in artistic objects of the past, urban musicology assumes that these are the testimony of past communicative processes, at least as a first approximation. The understanding, even artistic, of the testimonies requires the reconstruction of the processes. Without excluding other analytical perspectives, it is assumed that the urban scale allows the most nuanced approach to the complex network of relations in which this communication takes place. This, after having noted the growing cultural, economic and political centrality of cities in early modern Europe. The musical institutions of the ancien régime were consolidated in response to the needs of representation of the urban
classes: lay and ecclesiastical municipal elites, religious orders, corporations,
fraternities and parish communities. For all these actors, music was an essential component of ceremonial activities,
particularly in processions, where it symbolized the rank of the celebration and contributed
to the ritual appropriation of space. Over the last thirty years, research has focused on three
main, interconnected areas: (1) the social structures of musical production (R. Strohm, G. Peters); (2)
the urban soundscape (e.g. R. Kendrick, M.A. Marín); (3) the symbolic role of musical
participation in social experience (e.g. I. Fenlon, A.J. Fischer).
It is R. Strohm – in the introduction to his influential monograph on Bruges entitled Townscape/soundscape – the
first to annex the term soundscape (soundscape) to the fields of musicological research. As is
known, the concept had been popularized by another highly influential book, The Tuning of the World, by
Murray Schafer, significantly translated into Italian as Il paesaggio sonoro. Following Strohm, the
term is used extensively (an example of the heuristic validity of this research can be found, for
example, on websites such as https://www.historicalsoundscapes.com).
The extensive use of the term soundscape has however considerably distorted its denotation – as Yari Kelman (2010) observes,
from the perspective of sound studies – and tends to conceal the normative function that
it assumes for Schafer. From a historical perspective, applying it to eras without sound recordings is misleading:
written sources provide access to the necessarily subjective sound experiences of witnesses, in contrast
with the desire for technical objectification inherent to the concept. The term « phonosphere » – proposed by the
Russian composer and musicologist Mikhail Evgenevich Tarakanov as part of Vernadskij’s « noosphere »,
cf. Volniansky 2021), refers precisely to this mental and cultural dimension of the perception of
sound and its narratives. Its application to historical research promises a more
accurate interpretation of the sources, with attention to the historical semantics of the terms (cf. Caputo 2023),