DISUM, Università del Piemonte Orientale, Vercelli

June 5, 2025 – Palazzo Tartara, Via Galileo Ferraris 107, 109

Room: sala riunioni 2 (1st floor).

Click here for logistical info

Call for papers

 Programme 

10:30 – 10:45 Welcome

10:45 – 11:15 Elisa Caldarola, Music and Subject Matter

11:15 – 11:45 Martino Manca, Countercultured Alice: Re-Signifying a Fictional Character. 

12:45 – 12:15 Niccolò Galliano, Casa Ricordi in Fascist Italy: The Impact of International Economic Sanctions on the Opera Industry. 

12:30 – 14:00 Lunch Break 

14:00 – 14:30 Michela Garda, Aesthetic Autonomy and Musical Antagonism in Luigi Nono’s Vocal Works.

14:30 – 15:00 Elsa Saliba, Prototypes, Heresy and the Ontology of Pioneering Artworks.

15:00 – 15:30 Coffee break 

15:30 – 16:15 Christopher Earley, Intellectual Transgression, Epistemic Community, and Inquiry in the Arts.

Final discussion 

Abstracts

Elisa Caldarola

Music and Subject Matter

Some artworks have representational content. They are about their content, they address it, they are directed towards it. Sometimes, that content is political. For instance, Delacroix’ painting Liberty Leading the People (1830) is about the July 1830 Revolution in Paris, and Beyonce’s Black Parade (2019) is about celebrating Black identity, heritage, and activism. Instrumental music typically does not have representational content. Still, it might be used to comment on some topic and, thus, be directed towards such topic. Chopin’s Heroic Polonaise (1842), for instance, celebrates the spirit of Warsaw’s November 1831 Uprising, as well as of other revolutionary movements of the time. Instrumental music, however, need not comment on anything, need not be directed towards anything. Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 7 (1835) is a case in point – a case of pure music. What is it to understand a piece of pure music? Does this question even make sense? Philosophers of music have long debated the issues whether understanding a piece of pure music is, centrally, a matter of understanding its expressive character and how we should conceive of the expressivity of music. In this talk, I would like to begin exploring a different, more general, (and compatible) way of looking deeper into pure music, by defending the claim that works of pure music, like all artworks, have subject matters, and that understanding a piece of pure music is, centrally, understanding that it addresses a certain subject matter. I shall argue that: (i) a subject matter is a set of alternatives; (ii) addressing a subject matter is selecting one alternative out of a pool of alternatives; (iii) the subject matter of an artwork is the set of alternative ways the work could have been configured in, based on the courses of action available to its maker in its context of production. I shall submit that understanding a work of music is, in the first place, understanding that its maker chose a course of action as an alternative to other courses of action that were available to her. To conclude, I shall distinguish between three questions one might ask when seeking to understand a work of pure music: (1) what is its subject matter? (2) why did the composer select this subject matter and address it in this way? (3) how can I use this work to address a certain subject matter? I shall suggest that questions (2) and (3) can help us reveal how even a work of pure music might be intertwined with politics.

Niccolò Galliano

Casa Ricordi in Fascist Italy: The Impact of International Economic Sanctions on the Opera Industry. 

In November 1935, following Italy’s undeclared invasion of Ethiopia, the League of Nations voted to impose economic sanctions against the country, thus triggering significant political, financial, and cultural upheaval. In response, the fascist regime implemented a series of countermeasures aimed at mitigating the effects of international sanctions. Such measures extended beyond the mere economic sphere, influencing various aspects of political and social life. In the realm of arts and culture, the Ministry of Press and Propaganda introduced so-called “intellectual countersanctions” (controsanzioni intellettuali), which, in the music field, banned public performances of works by musicians and composers from sanctioning countries. This policy forced a reorganization of concert programs and theater seasons and, in the long term, encouraged the development of new international collaborations with non-sanctioning nations. The present paper focuses on the specific actions taken by Casa Ricordi, Italy’s leading music publishing house, in response to these new political conditions. Government control over the opera industry had become especially pronounced following the establishment of the Theater Inspectorate (Ispettorato del Teatro) in 1935. As a result, operatic seasons were increasingly shaped by official directives, while also opening new economic opportunities for publishers and impresarios willing to align their work with broader political transformations. Drawing on Carlo Ginzburg’s microhistory and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, I will explore the complex interplay between large-scale geopolitical forces and the more localized dynamics of cultural production, in a period of heightened control and shifting international movements. Through a detailed analysis of two intertwined case studies—Il Guarany by Antônio Carlos Gomes and Die Tote Stadt by Erich Wolfgang Korngold—I will examine the roles played by industrial, artistic, and political actors and how their respective agencies contributed to the success or failure of these performance projects.

Michela Garda

Aesthetic Autonomy and Musical Antagonism in Luigi Nono’s Vocal Works

Luigi Nono’s works from the 1960s to the 1970s make a compelling case for investigating the complex relationship of music and politics. Nono’s compositional and cultural trajectory led him to test his music against some of the most heated conflicts of the time, that between the culture of the European intellectual and the working-class experience, between Europe aligned with American Imperialism and Third World countries. This trajectory ultimately resulted in Nono’s progressive isolation from his colleagues composers and fellow party members, set against a cultural backdrop torn between politics and culture, and between ethics and aesthetics.

When viewed through a contemporary lens, it is Nono’s focus on vocal work in compositions such as La fabbrica illuminata (1964), A floresta é jovem e cheja de vida (1966), Contrappunto dialettico alla mente (1968), Y entonces comprendiò (1970), and Voci destroying muros (1970) that reveal an indissoluble intertwining between the ‘pre-political’ level of vocal work identified by Kristeva and that of explicit political engagement. By reinterpreting these two dimensions through Jacques Rancière’s concept of the “re-distribution of the sensible” we can perceive continuity in Nono’s oeuvre both in his political engaged phase and in the subsequent detachment from politics from 1980 onwards, a period marked by the imposing project of Prometeo (1984). Moreover, the troubled reception of Nono’s engaged works, as well as those after the post-ideological turn of the 1980s underscore the contradictions inherent in political aesthetics.

Martino Manca

Countercultured Alice: Re-Signifying a Fictional Character

“Alice is everywhere” writes Gianni Celati in 1977 at the beginning of Alice Disambientata, in a Bologna torn apart from political conflicts. Alice is still everywhere, and yet her centrality in the counterculture of the Seventies remains unique. Born as the main character of a Victorian children’s novel, often described and “solved” through the lenses of biographism (the fictional Alice corresponds to the real Alice Liddell) and psychoanalysis (Alice is searching for her identity and escaping social norms), she underwent a radical process of resignification in the Seventies, becoming a living figure of the counterculture, embodying the feeling of not being understood and of being lost, shared by thousands of young people, her trip becoming the psychedelic “trip” of drugs, her personal anger when engaging in nonsensical conversation with Wonderland characters transforming into political anger. Starting from the snapshot of Bologna in 1977, my talk aims to discuss the versatility of this fictional character (and her annexed fictional world) and to argue that certain literature (specifically, the kind Calvino in 1967 defined as a “new horizon” for the relationship between philosophy and literature) bears a sort of hermeneutical plasticity, capable of responding to different needs (even practical and political ones) in different ages. In the case of Alice, I will show that this is due specifically to the nonsensical language characterising her world and its revolutionary power, which continuously demands from readers a non-trivial and ludic intervention over the (mostly) absent meaning of a text considered a classic of the nonsense genre in children’s literature. Alice then ceases to be a static metaphor and instead becomes the prop for a game of fiction, opening up all the doors of “counter-” (feminism, pornography, recreational drug use, …), ultimately showing that, in the end, practices always precede theories.

Elsa Saliba

Prototypes, Heresy and the Ontology of Pioneering Artworks

Throughout history, some art pieces were labeled as rule-breaking or pioneering. Such artworks elicited strong reactions and rejection at first, but they ultimately broke conventional rules in art and introduced new art movements. Although revolutionary artworks play a key role in art history and society, established theories in philosophy of art have left this central topic unattended. To address the gap in the literature, this paper offers an analysis of pioneering artworks by drawing on tools from the ontology of artifacts while introducing new concepts. I present two examples from modern art, The Luncheon on the Grass (1863) by Edouard Manet and Fountain (1917) by Marcel Duchamp, both pioneering artworks that sparked controversy in their times. I argue that the emergence of pioneering artworks is comparable to the emergence of prototypes in artifacts. These artworks enable the creation of new art kinds (Impressionism and ready-made), much like prototypes provoke the emergence of new kinds through the introduction of a new function. Furthermore, such artworks do not merely introduce a new function, as prototypes do, but rather one perceived as heretical—challenging established artistic norms and provoking strong audience reactions. Art kinds are regulated by conventions that were established with time following historical practices. Artworks that have features that differ drastically from conventional artworks are seen as heretical by institutions that exercise conventional power. Pioneering artworks are therefore heretic-artworks causing a clash within the world of art by introducing heretic-functions, a type of idiosyncratic functions that are not only unique but also controversial. Audiences that choose to appreciate such artworks are practicing a heretic-use, in accordance with the heretic-function of the artwork until the artwork’s wider acceptance by art institutions. I conclude that a functional understanding of pioneering artworks that takes into consideration their disruptive force reveals their unique nature.