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Delia Casadei

Writer, educator, music historian and critic, sound artist, and translator​

 

Author of Risible: Laughter without Reason and the Reproduction of Sound

(University of California Press, 2024)

Current Projects

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Risible comes out 6 February, 2024!

"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

MASBEDO, Ritratto di Città (20_20.000 Hz), Backstage image, Courtesy the artists, Ph. Beat
"Portrait of a Laugh," commissioned by Masbedo for their upcoming Ritratto di Città, comes out in March 2024

I was thrilled to be a consultant for the sound design of a companion essay for Masbedo's touring installation Ritratto di Città  (ICA Milan, March-May 2024). The installation is a re-enactment of Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna's 1955 Ritratto di città, one of their earliest collaborative efforts at the Studio di Fonologia. My essay re-visits 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. 

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Oral History and Witchcraft in Central Italy

Together with Marina Romani, I have begun a long-term examination 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?

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"Towards an Acoustemology of Witchcraft," Sound Stage Screen Conference, Milan 3-5 November 2023

Marina Roma and I gave our first conference paper about our research findings at the Sound Stage Screen Conference in Milan, 3-5 November 2023. It will be published as part of the conference proceedings in 2024, so watch this space. 

© 2024 by Delia Casadei. Powered and secured by Wix

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