Bruno Maderna (21 April 1920 – 13 November 1973)
was an
Italian conductor and
composer.
Biography
Maderna
was born in Venice
.
At the age
of four he was taught violin in Chioggia
, and his
grandfather recognized the child's brilliance. So began his
career as a child prodigy. He was known in Italy and abroad as
"Brunetto" (Italian for Little Bruno).
He continued his studies in Milan (1935), Venice (1939) and in Rome
(1940), where he finally took his degree in composition and
musicology at the
Accademia Nazionale di
Santa Cecilia.
At Rome he was instructed by Alessandro Bustini, but he also took a
course of instruction from Antonio
Guarnieri in Siena
in 1941, and
he then studied composition with Gian Francesco Malipiero in Venice
in 1942-43.
During World War II he joined the army, the Partisan Resistance.
After the War, 1947-1950, he taught composition at the
Venice Conservatory at the invitation of
Malipiero. In those years he taught a large class which included
Luigi Nono, who had previously studied
law.
In 1948 (through Malipiero) he met
Hermann Scherchen, and Maderna and Luigi
Nono both attended a course of instruction with him at Venice.
Scherchen set Maderna's direction towards
dodecaphonic method. He was invited to conduct
at the (1951)
Internationale Ferienkurse für
Neue Musik in Darmstadt, where he took a founding initiative in
the Internationales Kranichsteiner Kammer-Ensemble, a chamber-group
which was newly re-convened every year as an ad-hoc-Ensemble. Here
he met (among others)
Boulez,
Messiaen,
Stockhausen,
Cage,
Pousseur and
the most important performers of the
neue Musik, who
inspired him to compose new pieces.
Maderna was a versatile director, capable of switching between
different musical styles. He directed
Purcell's Dido
and Aeneas,
Wagner's
Parsifal, many works by
Debussy and
Ravel, classical and romantic symphonies.
Together
with Luciano Berio, he founded the
Studio di Fonologia
Musicale of the RAI
(Radiotelevisione Italiana
) in 1955: they also organized the Incontri
Musicali ('Musical Encounters') music review and concert
series.
In 1957-58
he taught dodecaphonic technique at the Milan Conservatory: in this period he
also taught composition seminars at the Dartington
's Summer School of Music (UK). From 1967 to 1970 he
taught conducting at the Salzburg Mozarteum
and also at the Rotterdam Conservatory. He
become established at Darmstadt in 1963.
He died in
1973 at Darmstadt
, when he was about to rehearse Debussy's
Pelléas et
Mélisande. Pierre Boulez wrote his
Rituel in Memoriam Bruno
Maderna the following year and Luciano Berio wrote "Calmo"
for voice and orchestra in homage to his friend. His notable
students include
Rocco Di
Pietro.
Works
Among the early works is the
Concerto per due pianoforti e
strumenti (1947-1948), influenced by the music of
Bartók, which has a special approach
towards difficult sonorities. In 1948 he composed his first serial
work, the
Liriche greche. The
Quartetto per archi in
due tempi (of 1955) is an even more intensively
serial piece.
The
flautist Severino Gazzelloni inspired Maderna during the Darmstadt
experience. In 1961 he composed
Honeyreves for flute and piano: this piece was built on
complex flute melodies and on unusual piano sound effects
(clusters, playing on the strings, etc.). In the
Studio di
Fonologia Musicale, with the help of sound technician Marino
Zuccheri, he wrote some electroacoustic works:
Musica su due
dimensioni (
Music on two dimensions, 1958) for flute
and magnetic tape,
Notturno (1956) and
Continuo
(1958) both for magnetic tape.
In 1962-63 Maderna wrote his First Oboe Concerto (Concerto for Oboe
and Chamber Ensemble). In 1967 he wrote his Second Oboe Concerto,
and in 1973 his Third.
One of his works is
Quadrivium for four percussionists and
four orchestral groups (played for the first time at the Royan
Festival in 1969). A recording of this work, coupled with the
composer's
Aura and
Biogramma, was made by the
North German Radio
Symphony Orchestra under
Giuseppe
Sinopoli in 1979 and issued by
Deutsche Grammophon. Among various other
compositions are an electro-acoustic divertimento
Le Rire
(1964), a "work in progress" called
Hyperion, and an opera
Satyricon.
Maderna was versatile: he also produced scores for five Italian
movies released between 1946 and 1968.
Notes
- Dalmonte 2001.
- The thread of information in this article appears to be derived
from the article in Italian Wikipedia.
- Dalmonte 2001 (New Grove).
- IRCAM (Centre Pompidou) Biographie of Maderna (external link):
Short Biography in Madeleine Shapiro's Modernworks website
(external links).
- Stated in the Bach-cantatas Biography (external link).
- Ircam Biographie of Luigi Nono (External links).
- Sitsky 2002, 329.
- Ircam Biographie of Luigi Nono (external links).
- Britannica Online Encyclopedia, see [1]: Sitsky 2002, at p. 329: Ircam Biographie
of Maderna (external links).
- Hans Zender,
in Interview with Roland Diry and Suzanne Laurentius, 'Neue Musik
erwartet Selbstandigkeit,' Ensemble Modern Newsletter no.
24 (01/2007), see external link.
- Ircam Biographie (external link), according to which it was in
1954.
- Britannica Online Encyclopedia article.
- Ircam Biographie of Maderna, external link.
- Dalmonte 2001.
- Dalmonte 2001.
- (CD catalogue number 423 246-2 GC).
Bibliography
- Baroni, Mario (2003). "The Macroform in Post-tonal Music:
Listening and Analysis". Musicæ Scientiæ: The Journal of the
European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music 7, no. 2
(Fall): 219–40.
- Dalmonte, Rossana (2001). "Maderna [Grossato], Bruno
[Brunetto]". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and
Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London:
Macmillan.
- Dalmonte, Rossana, and Mario Baroni (1985). "Bruno Maderna,
Documenti". Milan: Edizioni Suvini Zerboni.
- Dalmonte, Rossana, and Mario Baroni (1989). Studi su Bruno
Maderna. Milan: Edizioni Suvini Zerboni.
- Dalmonte, Rossana, and Marco Russo (2004). Bruno Maderna
Studi e Testimonianze. Lucca: LIM.
- Drees, Stefan (2003). "Renaissance-Musik als Inspirationsquelle
für das Komponieren Bruno Madernas und Luigi Nonos". In The
Past in the Present: Papers Read at the IMS Intercongressional
Symposium and the 10th Meeting of the Cantus Planus, Budapest &
Visegrád, 2000, 2 vols., edited by László Dobszay, 1: 545-558.
Budapest: Liszt Ferenc Zeneművészeti Egyetem. ISBN
963-7181-34-2
- Fearn, Raymond (1990). "Bruno Maderna". [Chur]: Harwood
Academic Publishers.
- Fearn, Raymond (2003). "'Luft von anderem Planeten...': The
presence of the Epitaph of Seikilos in Bruno Maderna's Composizione
no. 2 (1950)". In The Past in the Present: Papers Read at the
IMS Intercongressional Symposium and the 10th Meeting of the Cantus
Planus, Budapest & Visegrád, 2000, 2 vols., edited by
László Dobszay, 1:559–68. Budapest: Liszt Ferenc Zeneművészeti
Egyetem. ISBN 963-7181-34-2
- Luzio, Claudia di (2006). "Traumnahe Welten—weltnahe Träume:
Zum Verhältnis von Traum und Wirklichkeit im Musiktheater von
Luciano Berio und Bruno Maderna". In Traum und Wirklichkeit in
Theater und Musiktheater: Vorträge und Gespräche des Salzburger
Symposions 2004, edited by Peter Csobádi, Gernot Gruber, and
Jürgen Kühnel, 342-356. Wort und Musik: Salzburger akademische
Beiträge 62. Salzburg: Mueller-Speiser. ISBN 3-85145-099-X
- Mathon, Geneviève (2003). "À propos du Satyricon de
Bruno Moderna". In Musique et dramaturgie: Esthétique de la
représentation au XXème siècle, edited by Laurent Feneyrou,
571–93. Esthétique 7. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. ISBN
2-85944-472-6
- Mila, Massimo (1999). Maderna musicista europeo, nuova
edizione. Piccola biblioteca Einaudi, nuova serie 17. Turin:
Einaudi Editore. ISBN 8806150596
- Neidhofer, Christoph (2005a). "'Blues' through the Serial Lens:
Transformational Process in a Fragment by Bruno Maderna".
Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung, no. 18 (March):
14–20.
- Neidhofer, Christoph (2005b). "Bruno Madernas flexibler
Materialbegriff: Eine Analyse des Divertimento in due tempi
(1953)". Musik & Ästhetik 9, no. 33 (January):
30-47.
- Neidhofer, Christoph (2007). " Bruno Maderna's Serial Arrays". Music
Theory Online 13, no. 1 (March).
- Poel, Piet Hein van de (2003). "Bruno Maderna sur le
Satyricon: Pop art en musique". In Musique et
dramaturgie: Esthétique de la représentation au XXème siècle,
edited by Laurent Feneyrou, 599–601. Paris: Publications de la
Sorbonne.
- Sitsky, Larry (Ed.) (2002). Music of the Twentieth-Century
Avant-Garde: A Biographical Sourcebook (Greenwood Press,
Westport Connecticut and London).
- Suvini-Hand, Vivienne (2006). 'Bruno Maderna's
Ausstrahlung,' in Sweet thunder: music and libretti in
1960s Italy Legenda Italian Perspectives Vol. 16 (Modern
Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing, London), p.
151-178. ISBN 1904350607, 9781904350606 (See extracts at [86050])
- Verzina, Nicola (2003). Bruno Maderna: Etude historique et
critique. Paris: L'Harmattan. ISBN 2747544095
External links