ResearchWorks: “Capir sentendo”: Sounding out Dante, first round

This presentation by Alessandro Timossi examines aspects of a project devised for the celebration in 2021 of 700 years of Dante’s death. The main impetus was the reading of canti 27-33 of Dante’s Purgatory, and transforming it into a music theatre event that includes short newly created dialogues and the embedding of various musical elements. Public readings of Dante’s poetry are often accompanied by musical commentaries, and the music here is based on what the poet quotes and what he might have known, and it is woven into the fabric of the poetry and the narration, where the boundaries between reading and singing are at times momentarily blurred. Dante himself, while addressing his audience as ‘readers’, compels them often to be also ‘listeners’. Through working around the adaptation of music to the text and its delivery, the musical presences and references both in plain view and hidden, and balancing in many ways the impossible and the fictional, the actualisation of this ‘listening’ seems to afford glimpses of possible realities.

Speaker

Alessandro Timossi (Guildhall School of Music & Drama) graduated in Italy in piano and composition and took a postgraduate composition course at Guildhall School, subsequently completing his DPhil at the University of Oxford, where he explored music theory and cognition in composition. He is the Head of Music Programmes and Academic Studies at Guildhall School, and while this position, and his family, take up beautifully most of his time, he has slowly purused compositional projects over the years, most recently the “Dal tramonto all’alba” project on Dante, for the 700-year celebration in 2021, that was performed in Italy and in London in April 2022 with the support of Guildhall School and the Italian Cultural Institute.

Guildhall School’s ResearchWorks is a programme of events centred around the School’s research activity, bringing together staff, students and guests of international standing. We run regular events throughout the term intended to share the innovative research findings of the School and its guests with students, staff and the public.