"Vico Signifying Nothing,"
 
Representations, Vol. 154 (2021)

This essay offers a reconsideration of Giambattista Vico’s work for scholars interested in history, sound, and aurality. It takes as its point of departure the chronological table that stands at the opening of The New Science, homing in on its blind spots, raw absences, and tangled claims to objectivity. Vico’s understanding of history relies—this essay goes on to argue—on a lively world of aural metaphors involved in the act of its writing: imaginary sounds, meaningless speech, false listenings, along with invented onomatopoeic etymologies. Such unruly sounds lead us to a crucial paradox of Viconian history, one that must confront all historians invested in retrieving and rewriting the stories of those who are lost, erased, and unrepresented: what role does soni and aural imagination play in the writing of history?

​

Full text available here. 

"A voice that carries"

in Hearing the Crimean War: Wartime Sound and the Unmaking of Sense 
(Oxford University Press, 2019). 

This chapter examines the geopolitical uses of aurality, sketching a history of Italy during the Crimean War “as heard from the outside.” It charts an ideology of the bella voce and considers voice as a means of projecting and disrupting national boundaries in the years before Italy’s unification, concentrating particularly on literary accounts of the Crimean War from the later nineteenth century. It notes the capacity for voices to make (new) sense of geographical distinctions, and interrogates what was at stake in the Sardinian troops’ ability to organize themselves, even to understand one another, amid countless regional dialects in the Crimean campaign. The chapter thus uncovers a telling episode in the history of Italian sound: one in which voice and the capacity for language are fashioned into politicized and even oppositional terms.

​

Full text available here. 

"Sound Evidence, 1969:
Recording a Milanese Riot"

Representations, Vol. 147, Summer 2019

On 19 November 1969, two members of Milan’s neofolk music collective the Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano (NCI) armed themselves with portable sound recorders and wandered amongst a crowd of demonstrators near Milan’s Duomo. The resulting LP, I fatti di Milano (The events of Milan), is a puzzling hybrid of artistic and political intent. As the sleeve note explains, the demonstration degenerated into a riot and resulted in the violent—and to this day legally unresolved—death of a police officer. The NCI members presented the recording as sonic evidence of the day’s events, hoping to help the case of the demonstrators accused of murdering the policeman. The record thus constitutes not only a swerve from ‘‘music’’ to ‘‘sound’’ in the collective’s output but also a move from aesthetic artifact to sound document, indeed, to putative forensic evidence. And yet, the evidence grows inexorably murkier with every listening. This essay homes in on the contradiction between I fatti di Milano’s declared purpose and the sound recording it mobilizes toward that end. Drawing on both sound studies and Italian political philosophy, the essay argues that the record embodies and actively stages idiosyncratic but highly contemporary relationships between music and soundscape, between sound event and its technological reproduction, and ultimately between political event and the act of writing history.

​

Full text available here. 

"Milan’s Studio di Fonologia:
Voice Politics in the City, 1955–8"

Journal of the Royal Musical Association,
Vol. 141. No. 2 (2016)

The Studio di Fonologia Musicale of Milan, Italy's first electronic music studio, opened in 1955. Housed in the national broadcasting (RAI) studios in Milan, the studio was founded by two celebrated Italian composers: Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna. The institution is often remembered nowadays for being the first electronic music studio to focus its activity on the human voice. As I argue, this focus was not only of an aesthetic nature, but rather reflected long-standing political and intellectual conceptions of voice, speech and public space that were rooted in Italy's early days as a republic, and in mid-twentieth-century Milan as the flagship city for this newly achieved political modernity.

​

Full text available here. 

"Orality, Invisibility, and Laughter: Traces of Milan in Bruno Maderna and Virginio Puecher’s Hyperion (1964)"

Opera Quarterly Vol. 30, No. 1 (March 2014)

​

Full text available here. 

Towards a multitudinous voice:
Dario Fo’s adaptation of L’Histoire du soldat

co-authored with Rossella Carbotti
Cambridge Opera Journal, Vol. 24, No. 2 (2012)

Dario Fo worked with La Scala only once, in 1978–79; the occasion was an adaptation of Ramuz and Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat (1918). This brief, pointedly antioperatic work connected the dissident artist and a leading cultural institution at a time when both were re-evaluating their means of addressing the public. For Fo, as well as for the Italian Left at large, 1978 marked the ten-year anniversary of the 1968 riots and a time of deep doubt about the possibility of collective political action. For La Scala, 1978 was not only the tenth year under the bold musical directorship of Claudio Abbado, but also involved celebrations of the theatre’s bicentenary. In this article we weave together the Left’s crisis

with a close reading of Fo’s adaptation, using the notion of vocal address as an interpretative linchpin. By considering the myth of Risorgimento opera as vox populi, the figure of Stravinsky’s songless soldier, the sound of babbling crowds and the recorded speaking voice of Antonio Negri, we offer a new exploration of the cross section of art and left-wing politics in the Italy of 1978.

​

Full text available here.