CURRENT PROJECTS
new translation alert!
Luca Zoppelli, Donizetti: Life and Works (Cambridge University Press, 2027).
I translated a new major monograph on Gaetano Donizetti, entitled Donizetti: Life and Works, to be published by Cambridge University Press in April 2027! It was been an honour to work with Luca Zoppelli's gorgeous, broad-minded, and deeply researched prose. Here is a summary of book from the publisher's website:
"Cultured and cosmopolitan, active in many countries and genres, Gaetano Donizetti was deeply engaged with the cultural and intellectual currents of his time and conveyed those ideas in his popular music theatre, where the music underpins the drama itself rather than simply allowing performers to shine. Performances and recordings are increasing today as his work attracts renewed critical attention. This study provides a chronological survey of Donizetti's extensive operatic oeuvre, drawing on recent research to explore the relationship between each work and its intended purpose, original performers, and audience expectations. It showcases the amazing variety of Donizetti's creative work, giving new insights into his most renowned operas as well as those on the periphery of the canon. Up-to-date, accessible, and fully contextualised, this acclaimed new study, originally published in Italian, invites opera enthusiasts, scholars, and performers alike to a compelling critical revaluation of a leading figure in European Romantic culture."
Pre-order and find out more here!
A new, open-access essay in the volume Fonti orali: archivi, digitalizzazione, ricerche (Anteferma Edizioni, 2025)
This essay considers the taped lectures of a highly celebrated architecture historian at the University of Venice, Manfredo Tafuri (1935-1994), in the early 1990s. Rather than focus on content, I consider these tapes as recordings and artefacts. What can these tapes, their kinks and flaws, their background noises, tell us about the spaces where the lectures occurred, the technologies used to record, and the particular value placed (particularly in the French-Italian intellectual tradition) on recording the lectures of a "great intellectual" in the late twentieth-century? I combine my observations with some recent musicological interventions about extractivism, sound, and politics by Dylan Robinson, Marie Thompson, and Gavin Williams. You can read the essay -- and the whole fabulous volume -- here.
Love Bomb: An Experiment in Heightened Listening
Love Bomb is conceived as an experiment in heightened listening. By this we mean that the performance invites our participants to be fully present in body, mind and soul in the act of listening; to be open to being sounded through from head to heart; to sense the shock of the live in a context of music’s increasing mediatisation; and to experience the deeply human (and potentially alarming) intimacy of close musical encounter. The performance centres on Claudio Monteverdi’s celebrated Lamento della Ninfa (1638), paired with Heinrich Ignaz Biber’s Passacaglia for solo violin, which riffs on the same descending lament bass, as well as Henry Purcell’s song O Solitude, with its own mesmerically repeating bassline. Framed by a sound installation that draws us into a space of altered reality and sharpened anticipation, the performance bids its participants to empathise viscerally with the nymph’s lament, while savouring its musical pleasures in all its multisensory richness.
È scherzo o è follia?
A new, 7-part programme on Rete Toscana Classica about the unexpected relationship of music and laughter, based (but only in part!) on my 2024 book, Risible. Listen here!
A new, limited series podcast for the Serantini Library and Institute
Between May 2025 and July 2025 I launched, designed, scripted and edited the Serantini library's first ever podcast, promoting the important work they do to document local political histories and fights for social justice; it is a wild ride taking us from the memory of Franco Serantini's assassination in 1972, to the history of the Giglioli family in Pisa during the second world war, to the stories of anti-militarist resistance in Livorno before the outbreak of world war 1, including interviews and snippets of gorgeous, thematic music. Curious? Have a listen here!
New Critical Edition of Puccini's Turandot for Ricordi (forthcoming)
I have been asked by Ricordi to curate the new critical edition of Giacomo Puccini's last, unfinished, and epoch-defining opera, Turandot. The work, which has been ongoing since January 2025, is sort of like creating a director's cut of a film, only, the director has long passed away.
In the case of Puccini's unfinished masterpiece, many have focussed on trying to reconstruct the opera's finale from Puccini's sketches. This is a valiant and wonderful effort. But in my edition, I take the opposite approach: to take to the letter the opera's incompleteness not only with regards to the finale, but opening up new uncertainties and variants about the so-called "finished" part of the score.
As I argue, Puccini was experimenting with a new musical language in Turandot, and left a lot of important decisions still to be made about the main score: phrasing, orchestration, pitch content and dramaturgy differ starkly between autograph and published score at various points. Most of these variants have never been heard in performance. My job is to offer musicians a series of intelligent options for how to interpret that which Puccini left open-ended, unclear, or contradictory, Rather than papering over the uncertainty, Turandot's disquiet as an operatic character and as a score must be made into a point of strength and agency for artists.
Risible is out 6 February, 2024!
Available as a free e-book via Open Access here
Purchase in hard copy here and here
"A virtuoso meditation on laughter, music, and sound reproduction, moving from transfixing insights drawn from philosophical texts and recorded sound objects to a bold vision of laughter as a sonorous force that troubles our conceptions of humanity and rationality. How sounds acquire meaning, how they make sense or nonsense or lie somewhere between the two: Delia Casadei's Risible considers these fundamental issues in startling and thought-provoking ways."
— Carolyn Abbate, coauthor of A History of Opera
"There is something thrillingly unclassifiable about this book. While it indexes music studies, it is clearly a profound work of cultural theory. Casadei reveals how laughter—a deceptively minor though ubiquitous phenomenon—holds relevance for every dimension of life and its biopolitical regulation via gender, race, labor, and reproduction. She also reminds us that there is much genealogical work yet to be done on mediatized, electrified soundworlds of the twentieth century and offers a powerful, welcoming push in new directions."
— Amy Cimini, author of Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life
My own monthly radio show with Rete Toscana Classica starting October 2024:
Senti qui: bollettino di informazione musicale
I have just started working for one of my favorite radio stations in the world, Rete Toscana Classica, a classical radio funded by the Tuscan Ministry of Culture that has been making waves since 2002! The show I conduct is called Senti qui: bollettino di informazione musicale. It combines updates on cool concerts and musical events in Tuscany with at least one musicological publication that I think is exciting and cool. You can listen live on Rete Toscana Classica (91.3 Hz) every second wednesday at 15.40, or tune in digitally on Rete Toscana Classica's website, or stream it whenever you like on Spotify, or Amazon music, Youtube, and Apple Podcasts!
It has been exciting and incredibly fun to teach this 6-week music and politics course in my home language (Italian) and home town (Pisa)! Il Canto politico is offered as part of the pioneering Open University initiative at the Istituto Franco Serantini (an institute dedicated to the history and research of anarchist and left-wing political activism in Pisa). The courses of the Istituto Serantini, which are proving extremely well-received and attended, are free of charge, are university-level classes on underserved intellectual topics regarding politics, art, the environment, and local and global history. My contribution is a starter course on critical listening to political music across four key genres of the mid twentieth century: Blues, Folk, Rock, Pop, and Hip Hop. Pisa has a small musicology faculty and university-level musicology is often inaccessible to a general audience, so this course is an occasion for people of different backgrounds to come together and examine their own relationship to various repertoires associated, in different and contrasting ways, with political activism.
New opera review out in Sound Stage Screen, July 2024:
"Opera and the Art of Anesthetics"
Review-essay of the opera Il diluvio universale. Music by Gaetano Donizetti, libretto by Domenico Gilardoni. Riccardo Frizza (Conductor), Masbedo (Project, directors, live directors and costumes), Mariano Furlani (Visual dramaturgy), 2050+ (Scenography). Teatro Donizetti, Bergamo (November–December 2023).
New article out in Sound Stage Screen:
"The Acoustemology of the Witch:
Hearsay, Sound Recording, and the Zaccheo Tapes"
This article is the first output of a long-term collaborative examination (with Marina Romani) of oral histories from the 1950s-70s of magical practices, and specifically witchcraft, in Central italy. Our first site of examination is Villa Zaccheo, in the province of Teramo, Abruzzo, which was documented by Cesare Bermani between 1959-1976 as a site where witches were said to be present and active. By working jointly on the tapes in the Archivio Cesare Bermani in Orta San Giulio, and interviewing people in Villa Zaccheo, Marina and I are asking what sound recordings can tell us about the way witches were conceived, understood, perceived and warded off in the twentieth-century. What changes when the documents of witchcraft become aural rather than written, as was the case with the infamous witch-hunts of the counter-reformation? What does economic and industrial development have to do with the way witches were known at the times of these oral histories? In the twentieth-century, what does it mean to know a witch and be known by a witch by ear?
"I WANT TO FEEL WHEN I PLAY THE PIANO, LIKE I DO WHEN I LOOK AT TWOMBLY'S WORK"
A conversation between Delia Casadei and Myra Melford about Cy Twombly, yearning, gesture, and sound
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"Portrait of a Laugh/Ritratto di una risata" is out in Ritratto di Città 20/20.000 Hz (Marsilio, 2024)
I was thrilled to be a consultant, contributing writer and featured participant in Masbedo's touring video-installation Ritratto di Città 20/20.000Hz, winner of the 2022 Italian Council Art prize from the Italian Ministry of Culture, and on show at Milan's Museo del Novecento April-July 2024. This work, featuring interview, performances, sound and video art, and a bespoke art book, is a creative re-enactment of Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna's 1955 Ritratto di città, one of their earliest works, and produced in Italy's first electronic music studio, the Studio di Fonologia. My essay re-visits and re-imagines the atmosphere of the Studio and the significance of the experimentations on the voice in those years through an examination of a sound that haunts the production of those years: Cathy Berberian's voice, and particularly her laughter.