The Apeiron Armonies

Chronicles of the Apeiron

  • When the sound becomes color: I Solisti Aquilani at the Festival Respighi di Bologna

    When the sound becomes color: I Solisti Aquilani at the Festival Respighi di Bologna

    From Casella to Liszt, from the new page of Marco Taralli to the Trittico botticelliano: at the Teatro Manzoni an evening built around the memory, with Michele Campanella and the direction of Davide Trolton

    by Marialuisa Veneziano

    13 October 2026

    Bologna has with the past a familiarity that other cities, perhaps more prudent, would call suffering. It keeps it in the arcades, hides it behind a wall, leaves it sharpened by a facade; and when it seems to have put it duly safe in history, that reappears, with a certain stubbornness, to ask to be again interpreted.

    Wednesday, October 7 also happened in music.

    At the Teatro Auditorium Manzoni, the Festival Respighi Bologna has interwoven with another significant event, the forty years of Music Together, entrusting to the Soloists Aquilani, at the piano Michele Campanella and the direction of Davide Trolton a programme which, distractedly observed, could have appeared very heterogeneous: Alfredo Casella, Franz Liszt, Marco Taralli, Ottorino Respighi.

    But music, when a program is thought well, loves to forget appearances.

    The wire existed.

    And it was Time.

    Not the one measured by the metronome, but the most mysterious one through which a composer looks back and decides that the past is not yet finished.

    Casella seeks ancient forms while around him history falls into war. Liszt, on the contrary, writes a page so disturbing that it seems projected forward. Taralli already declares his dialogue with the ancient. Respighi, finally, performs the operation perhaps more dizzying: he looks at three paintings of the fifteenth century and asks the music to get them back to move.

    The concert became so, almost without declaring it, a reflection on an essential question:

    What does it mean to be modern when you own a memory?

    Casella: build while the world breaks

    The Concerto for strings, piano and percussion op. 69 by Alfredo Casella takes a date that prevents him from listening innocently.

    1943.

    Casella writes in Rome between October and November, during the German occupation, while the disease that would lead him to death a few years later has already begun to manifest itself. The composition, intended for Paul Sacher and his orchestra in Basel, was born, therefore, while two instability — that of history and the body — knock at the door of the author.

    Yet Casella does not respond with a disgraced music.

    It's almost the opposite.

    It builds.

    Counterpoint, shape, dance, symmetry.

    As if, while the world lost its coordinates, music could at least continue to draw straight lines.

    TheAllegro quite heavy Initially he has a dense counterpoint writing, in which the piano does not behave according to the romantic model of the sovereign soloist surrounded by orchestral subjects. Instead it enters the mechanism, it opposes you and together it belongs to you.

    It's a substantial difference.

    The piano is not simply front to the bows.

    IS inside the structure.

    Michele Campanella was therefore confronted with a page in which virtuosity cannot become external performance: rhythmic precision, articulation, ability to emerge and immediately after returning to the fabric.

    And the presence of Campanella, historical figure of the Italian piano school, gave this repertoire a particular weight: not the piano as an athletic exercise, but as an intelligence of form. Music Together presented it, not wrongly, as a true institution of the Neapolitan piano school, on the eve of the double finish of the eighty years and sixty years of career.

    Then comes the Saraband.

    And here time changes.

    The ancient dance, already present in the coeva Sonata for harp op. 68 and transported by Casella in the Concert, is not archaeology. There is no eighteenth-century postcard.

    The storm becomes rather memory of an order.

    Serious step, scanning, collecting.

    A form of the past called to speak within one of the most disordered eras of European history.

    It is difficult not to feel something profoundly human: when everything goes, looking for a form does not necessarily mean fleeing from the present.

    It can mean resist him.

    Even the final starts with energy, almost with stubborn confidence in the movement, before reaching a more obscure conclusion, sustained by a serious design of the low instruments that the sources of the time even read as a funeral present.

    It is not necessary to force the biography to understand its weight.

    Just listen to the idea.

    A music that wants to proceed.

    And something, below, that begins to hold it.

    Liszt: the piano before becoming emperor

    Then Malédiction.

    And the title, one must recognize it, does not promise precisely a evening of serena holiday.

    Liszt wrote this unique page for piano and strings in the 1930s; he remained unpublished during his life and saw publication only in 1915. The sources even pose an interesting problem on his own identity: concert for piano and strings or more intimate chamber work with piano strongly concert?

    It is this ambiguity that makes it fascinating.

    The young Liszt is not yet the monument of himself.

    It is not yet entirely the prometeic pianist that the century would learn to worship and, sometimes, to fear.

    He's looking.

    The writing is unstable, nervous, travelled by harmonic tensions that seem to want to continually subtract the ground under the listener’s feet.

    And so, after Casella, the piano suddenly changes nature.

    In the first it was part of a constructive organism.

    In Liszt becomes a perturbing force.

    Here modernity does not seek ancient architecture in which to find shelter.

    It seems to want to burn it from the inside.

    The settlement was therefore much less arbitrary than it could appear: Casella and Liszt both question the relationship between individual and sound collectivity.

    Where does the soloist end?

    Where does the ensemble begin?

    When the piano leads, and when it is absorbed?

    Technical questions, certainly.

    But the great concerting forms are always, in the end, even small social metaphors.

    There is an individual.

    There is a community.

    And you have to find a way to make them speak without one destroying the other.

    Marco Taralli: the ancient after the ancient has already happened

    The Small Suite in Ancient Style by Marco Taralli carried the program directly into the present.

    The composition was very fresh: the first absolute execution had happened the day before the Eagle, always with the Solisti Aquilani, Trolton and Campanella; Bologna immediately collected the following.

    But the title already poses an interesting aesthetic problem.

    What does it mean, in 2026, to write "in ancient style"?

    We can no longer do that gesture with the same innocence with which it would be done two centuries ago.

    Between us and the ancient have passed Stravinsky, Casella, Respighi, neoclassicism, postmodernity, philology, historically informed practice.

    The ancient, today, is never only ancient.

    IS the memory we possess of the ancient.

    Taralli then enters a delicate territory: to use a recognizable grammar without turning it into disguise, to make the memory speak without reducing it to nostalgia.

    And that is precisely why his presence in the program made sense.

    Casella had recovered the raft.

    Respighi would have gradually summoned the Botticellian Renaissance.

    Taralli was among these two worlds remembering that the relationship of Italian music with its history has never been peaceful.

    We Italians have a wonderful and terrible problem: we have so much past that we risk continually being owners instead of interlocutors.

    The best music avoids both extremes.

    It does not destroy what came before to prove modern.

    But he doesn't even polish it until he turns it into an overcoat.

    He interrogates him.

    Replies: When Botticelli starts moving

    Then comes the Trittico botticelliano.

    And all that until then had been a speech about memory suddenly becomes color.

    Respighi composes it in 1927 for an organic surprisingly content: flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, triangle, bells, celesta, harp, piano and strings. A chamber palette, therefore, far from the orchestral mass of the great Roman pages.

    It's a decisive choice.

    Botticelli doesn't need marble.

    It needs transparency.

    Respighi does not want to paint over The paintings. He wants to find their temporal equivalent.

    Because here lies the deep difficulty of music inspired by painting.

    A painting exists at the same time.

    Music is not.

    The Spring by Botticelli is already entirely in front of us at the moment when we look at her: Mercury, thanks, Venus, Flora, Zefiro.

    Respighi must force us to meet her. in time.

    You have to decide which color will come first.

    What figure should emerge.

    What movement should we imagine?

    In other words, he must perform a small miracle:

    to walk what Botticelli had stopped.

    Spring: do not describe the flowers, but let them be born

    In Spring trilli, tremoli, mobile figurations and reminiscences of ancient dances produce a light writing, continually crossed by small inner motions.

    But speaking only of "descripttivism" would be reductive.

    Respighi is not composing a sound catalog of flowers, trees and nymphs.

    He's translating the quality of the Boticellian movement.

    Let's look at the Three Graces.

    The bodies seem to move and however possess the immovable perfection of the image.

    Music must do exactly this contradiction: advance without losing grace, dance without becoming heavy.

    And this is where a complex like The Solisti Aquilani finds a particularly congenial repertoire to its nature.

    The score demands chamber precision before even power.

    I listen to each other.

    Elasticity.

    Ability to pass the color from one tool to another without the phrase losing continuity.

    The merit of the ensemble lies in recalling how Respighi can be refined when freed from the equivocal according to which it would be only the composer of the great orchestral explosions.

    The Respighi of Threesome Don't raise your voice.

    He paints with the tip of the brush.

    The Adoration of the Magi: when the Renaissance recalls the Middle Ages

    The second picture completely changes the light.

    In theAdoration of the Magi a pastoral writing appears; flute and bassoon also introduce the melody of Come, come Emmanuel, while the instrumentation uses colors that suggest the approach of the caravan and a more dreamed than geographical East.

    And here's a magnificent short circuit.

    We listen to a composer of the twentieth century.

    Look at a painter from the fifteenth century.

    That represents an evangelical scene.

    Using a melody from an even older tradition.

    How many times do they exist at the same time in these few jokes?

    This is the reason why simply talking about "ancient music" and "modern music" sometimes serves nothing.

    In musical memory, time does not go straight.

    It folds.

    Come back.

    He survives.

    A medieval fragment can enter the twentieth century and, without cease to belong to its past, become a new matter.

    Respighi understood this possibility with extraordinary intelligence.

    He did not embalm the ancient.

    He made it ring in the present.

    Venus: the sea before the goddess

    Finally, The Birth of Venus.

    And Respighi makes here perhaps the most poetic choice of the entire triptych.

    Before the goddess, she gives us the sea.

    The arches build a wavering movement; trilli, arpeggi and light timbre oscillations transform the orchestral surface into water. Only progressively emerges a wider reason, tied to the figure of Venus and built through arcaizzanti modal references.

    It's an important detail.

    Respighi does not translate the picture saying: "This is Venus".

    He leads us to her.

    Music becomes waiting for the look.

    First we hear water.

    Then the wind.

    Then something gets up.

    And it is precisely on this page that the small orchestra shows how much color does not depend on the number of instruments, but on the quality of their relationships.

    Celesta, harp, piano, breaths and strings do not simply produce a beautiful sound.

    Building depth.

    Respighi orchestra as a painter who knows the value of space between two colors.

    Transparency is not the absence of matter.

    It is perfectly distributed matter.

    And here the Solisti Aquilani deserve special recognition: a compagine born on the culture of the ensemble naturally possesses that attention to the inner line that the Threesome requires. One of the chronicles following the evening, although very strict on other aspects of the performance, explicitly recognized the quality of the ensemble.

    Davide Trolton was in front of a task far from elementary. A similar program does not require a single directional gesture, but four different ideas of weight, time and articulation: Casella geometry cannot breathe as Liszt; Taralli archaism cannot be treated as the colorism of Respighi. The value of the wand here is measured first of all in the ability not to uniform.

    And entrusting a program so exposed to a young director also means remembering that tradition is not only preserved by entrusting it to those who have known it for decades.

    Store giving it to someone who will still have to take it elsewhere.

    An Italian evening, but not provincial

    In the end, the most interesting data of the Bologna concert was not the presence of four very different composers.

    It was what happened by putting them next to each other.

    Liszt looked ahead.

    Casella looked back to keep moving.

    Taralli asked the old man if he still had something to say.

    Respighi took Botticelli by hand and led it in the twentieth century.

    None of them considered the past a place in which to return to dwell.

    They considered him an interlocutor.

    And this is perhaps one of the central issues of Italian music.

    We inherited such a vast heritage that we could spend entire seasons celebrating it.

    But celebrating is not enough.

    The task of interpretation is another.

    It is necessary to allow a written page to happen again.

    Don't reproduce it.

    Let her take a chance.

    This is where the work of an orchestra becomes really cultural: not when it properly performs the past, but when it manages to subtract it from the condition of the past.

    The Solisti Aquilani, led by an excellent and sensitive Davide Trolton, have led to Bologna this identity: that of an ensemble in which the Cameroon discipline remains the foundation even when the repertoire assumes orchestral dimension. Campanella gave the evening the weight of a long interpretative history; Trolton that of a generation that that story must receive without being crushed.

    And in the end it was Respighi.

    Or maybe Botticelli.

    It is not easy to determine where one ends and the other begins.

    The Spring He kept dancing.

    I Magi continued their journey.

    Venus still climbed from the water.

    Only for one night they no longer needed to be looked at.

    They found another way to exist.

    They became sound.

    And this is perhaps the most serious prodigy of music when it encounters a work of art: don’t illustrate it, don’t explain it, do not overlap her with a sound caption.

    Give her the time that painting had taken her away.

    Botticelli had stopped a moment.

    Respighi put him back in motion.

    And to Manzoni, almost a century later, that movement still had someone willing to continue it.

    Photo Credit: Paolo Perna

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  • Biennale Musica 2026: what if to listen to the future we should return children?

    From 10 to 24 October Venice hosts "A Child of Sound", the 70th Music Biennial directed by Caterina Barbieri. Not an invitation to naivety, but to something much more difficult: to free your ear for a few moments from what you already think you know.

    by Marialuisa Veneziano

    6 October 2026

    A child doesn't ask if what he's listening to is tonal.

    It does not ask whether it belongs to cultured music, electronics, noise, techno or avant-garde.

    If you hear a ticking door, try to make her claw again.

    If a pot produces an interesting sound, it affects it again.

    If he discovers that his voice changes inside an empty room, he can continue to shout the same syllable until an adult, less interested in acoustics and more to domestic survival, does not intervene.

    Before learning what music is, the child Listen to me.

    And perhaps this is precisely what, growing, we lose.

    We learn names.

    The eras.

    Forms.

    The hierarchy.

    We learn that Beethoven is important, that a symphony possesses movements, that after a dominant we expect a toned, that a violin should produce certain sounds and that, if it starts producing others, someone in the room might think that the time has come to worry.

    We build skills.

    And that's right.

    But together with skills we also build expectations.

    And one day it can happen that instead of listening to what a music is doing, we begin to listen what we think should do.

    It is from this crack that starts the Biennale Musica 2026.

    From 10 to 24 October Venice will host the 70th edition of the International Festival of Contemporary Music, directed by Caterina Barbieri. The title is A Child of Sound: 130 artists, over forty appointments, twenty-three new works, eighteen of which in the first absolute, in a program that openly declares to want to cross epochs, geographies and genres without considering its invaluable boundaries.

    But the title is more interesting than the numbers.

    A child of sound.

    What does that mean?

    And above all, what should an adult listener do with it?

    The adult ear has a problem: he knows too many things

    Caterina Barbieri defines music «the childhood of the spirit» and builds the project of the Biennale around the idea of an original listening: open, not judging, still able to marvel at the sound before classifying it. In his curatorial statement he also recalls Stockhausen, which linked experimentation to the childish ability to play with the sound material.

    Be careful, though.

    We must not transform the child into a mystical creature endowed with a pure hearing that adulthood would inevitably corrupt.

    That's not the point.

    A child also has expectations, memories, preferences. Growing up, learning a musical grammar means acquiring magnificent instruments: recognizing a modulation, perceiving a structure, following a Bach escape or understanding Wagner's harmonic tension greatly expands the experience of listening.

    The problem arises when knowledge stops being a lens and becomes a gate.

    When we say:

    «This is not music.»

    «There is no melody.»

    «I don't know where you want to go.»

    «It's just noise.»

    They are very interesting phrases, because they say much less about the object we are listening to than they say on our system of expectations.

    For centuries Western music has educated the ear to recognize certain relationships: tension and resolution, consonance and dissonance, tonal hierarchies, rhythmic periodicity, thematic development.

    Then the twentieth century began to do something seemingly irritating.

    You asked:

    and if the sound could be organized in other ways?

    If the stamp becomes as important as height?

    If the duration counts more than the melody?

    If a noise had a compositional dignity?

    If the space we listen to was part of the work?

    If the musician doesn't always do something completely established?

    If silence was not a break between two events, but an event itself?

    Contemporary music did not abolish grammar.

    He multiplied the grammars.

    And that is perhaps why it sometimes puts us in trouble.

    We do not yet know which dictionary to use.

    Venice, perfect city to get lost even with ears

    There is then something particularly suitable for all this to happen in Venice.

    Venice is a city that obliges the eye to continually lose the straight line.

    Turn around.

    Go away.

    You cross a bridge convinced to go on one side and you discover, with great dignity, that you were going elsewhere.

    Perhaps even the contemporary ear needs something similar.

    To stop, at least for a while, to claim to know the destination in advance.

    The Biennale has built its own program not as a succession of "newness" opposed to "tradition", but as a network of genealogies.

    And this is one of the most intelligent ideas of the edition.

    On 17 October, in St Mark's Basilica, the Tallis Scholars directed by Peter Phillips will go through almost a millennium of singing: Hildegard von Bingen, Gregorio Allegri, Arvo Pärt and a new commission in Kara-Lis Coverdale. Not four epochs placed politely in four different shelves, but different ways of questioning the relationship between voice, spirituality, memory and acoustic space.

    Let's think.

    Hildegard was born in the 12th century.

    Pärt belongs to our time.

    Coverdale writes today.

    Yet, in St Mark's Basilica, the question can be surprisingly similar:

    what happens to the human voice when it tries to overcome the individual who produces it?

    This is contemporary.

    Not necessarily what was composed yesterday.

    But what can still ask a question today.

    Bach meets Morricone. And neither one needs to ask permission

    One of the most fascinating programs of the Biennale puts in the same space Johann Sebastian Bach, Anton Webern, Ennio Morricone and Sarah Davachi.

    The Park of Contemporary Music Ensemble will propose the Ricercar to six voices of theMusical offer in the famous orchestration of Webern, pages of the Passion according to Matthew, the first public execution Music for an end by Morricone — work for choir and orchestra built around a recording of Pier Paolo Pasolini's voice — and Chanters, new commission of Sarah Davachi for orchestra, chamber choir and organ.

    Looks like a program built by someone who forgot to respect the store departments.

    And that's exactly what makes it interesting.

    Because Webern, when orchestrating Bach, does not "modernize" Bach.

    It does something much thinner.

    It distributes the lines of counterpoint between different stamps, making a structure born from the relationship between the voices also become a structure of colors.

    The melody passes from one instrument to another.

    The counterpoint becomes almost visible.

    Bach remains Bach.

    But the orchestration changes the way our ear enters its architecture.

    It is a perfect example of what a Biennale dedicated to listening should do: not just tell us what to hear, but show us that a same structure can become new when changing the point from which we observe it.

    And next to Bach comes Morricone.

    Not that of the cinematographic melodies now entered the collective imagination, but a Morricone less immediately known, linked to compositional research and to the relationship with Pasolini.

    Then Sarah Davachi.

    His music often works with extended durations, tuning, minimal timbre transformations, psychoacoustic phenomena. This year, the Biennale awarded her the Silver Lion by recognizing a path in which electronics, acoustic instruments, organology and perception coexist.

    Here the "sound child" begins to become understandable.

    We are not asked to forget Bach to be contemporary.

    We are asked to forget, for a moment, the way we're used to listening to him.

    Does the noise have the right to citizenship?

    The Golden Lion for the Career goes to Keiji Haino, a Japanese composer and performer who for over fifty years has crossed noise, free jazz, rock, improvisation, blues, drone and electronics, refusing a stable stylistic position. The Biennale significantly defines it as a «poet of noise».

    Here comes one of the oldest and most entertaining questions of contemporary music:

    When does a noise become music?

    The simplest answer would be: when a composer decides to use it.

    That's not enough.

    Noise becomes musical material when it comes into a relationship.

    When it lasts.

    Intensity.

    Position.

    Stamp.

    Repeat.

    Contrast.

    Memory.

    When what seemed bad is heard as an event.

    It's an extraordinary passage.

    The world doesn't change.

    Change our attention.

    This is what happens when we suddenly realize the rhythm of a train, the intermittent frequency of a siren, the sound of a fan, the resonance of an underpass.

    The child often does this spontaneously.

    The adult immediately asks if all this «Come on.».

    Perhaps because the adult spent many years learning that the value of things must be explained possibly within the end of the meeting.

    Art has the bad vice of not cooperating.

    The sound we can't see

    Also KMRU, Kenyan musician among the central figures of field recording research and electronic composition, will lead to the Biennale ♪, project realized with Nick Verstand and Mareike Bode. The work also uses electromagnetic sounds and builds a multisensory environment in which sound, light and olfactory components participate in a single perceptive experience.

    It is an excellent example of how much the concept itself of "concert" is becoming insufficient to describe some contemporary practices.

    The traditional concert includes something very precise.

    Someone produces music.

    Someone else, sitting, listening.

    The stage indicates where to look.

    The audience indicates where to stay.

    The beginning and the end are recognizable.

    Applauding among the movements of a symphony instead requires a tactical evaluation that still test entire generations of spectators.

    In many contemporary experiences this pact changes.

    The public walks.

    The sound comes from several directions.

    A work can depend on the space in which it is realized.

    Light enters the composition.

    Even the smell can be involved.

    It does not mean that the traditional concert has become obsolete.

    It means listening is not obliged to always possess the same posture.

    The body also listens.

    We've known that forever, actually.

    Just think about the organ in a cathedral.

    A serious note is not only heard.

    You feel physically in space.

    Maybe some avant-gardes just remind us of something that music already knew much before becoming "contemporaneous".

    And then techno comes

    And this is where the program becomes even more interesting.

    In addition to electroacoustic composition, organ, choral music, noise and improvisation, the Biennale also hosts DJ sets and scenes from global dance: from techno to experiences related to the Portuguese label Príncipe to the Singeli di Dar es Salaam. The same inaugural evening of October 10 will pass from Laraaji to the first solos of Kara-Lis Coverdale and Keiji Haino, to conclude with a DJ set of Livwutang.

    Someone might ask:

    but still Biennale Contemporary music?

    The question is legitimate.

    The answer, however, depends on what we mean by contemporary.

    If we mean a clearly defined stylistic category — specialized ensemble, complex scores, institutional electroacoustics — then the program actually seems to widen the fence a lot.

    But if "contemporaneous" means questioning the forms through which today we organize the sound, the picture changes.

    The club culture has developed its own sophisticated concept of duration.

    Techno works on microvariation within the repetition.

    The ambient music changes the relationship between the first floor and the background.

    The drone dilates the perception of time.

    The noise brings density and saturation to the foreground.

    The electronics allows you to directly compose the stamp, instead of considering it only a property of the instrument.

    They're not interchangeable genres.

    And you don't need to pretend they are.

    But they can live in a festival if what connects them is not a supposed sound similarity, but a common question about how we listen.

    This is the biennial bet.

    And it is a much more radical bet than a simple contamination.

    Hildegard next to a DJ: provocation?

    No.

    Or at least, not necessarily.

    The provocation would be to put them together only to get a curious photograph.

    Here the point is another.

    We're thinking about Hildegard von Bingen.

    A medieval monody is born in a world where the modern distinction between author, interpreter, rite and acoustic space does not work exactly as it works today.

    That music lives in a context.

    In a community.

    In an architecture.

    In a conception of time.

    A DJ set also lives in a relationship between sound, space, duration, body and community.

    The analogies end quickly, and it is good that they end.

    But both experiences remind us that music is not necessarily just an object to be observed frontally.

    It can be a situation in which to enter.

    And this is perhaps one of the most challenging aspects of A Child of Sound: forcing us to question not only what we call music, but the way we believe we should stand in front of her.

    «I don't understand contemporary music»

    Perhaps it is the most important phrase of all this article.

    Because it is often pronounced with some kind of embarrassment.

    As if you do not immediately understand a work was a fault of the listener.

    Or, on the contrary, as if it were automatically a composer's fault.

    We could free both sides of this process.

    Do not understand immediately can be a perfectly legitimate experience.

    In front of a music that does not possess the grammar to which we are accustomed, the ear seeks reference points.

    Where does the sentence begin?

    What is the pulse?

    What do I remember?

    What is important?

    It is the same disorientation that we try to enter an unknown city.

    At first everything seems to be equivalent.

    After a few days we distinguish the streets.

    After a few weeks we recognize a square from a detail.

    Listening also works through familiarity.

    For this reason perhaps we should stop demanding from contemporary music something that we do not ask almost any other complex form of knowledge:

    be understood entirely at the first meeting.

    No one opens a philosophy treaty, reads three pages and concludes that philosophy failed because it did not provide enough emotion.

    No one looks at a game of sport that ignores the rules and claims to immediately understand all the strategy.

    With music, instead, we are convinced that emotion should be instantaneous.

    Sometimes it is.

    And it's wonderful.

    Sometimes you have to attend a language.

    Allow him to slowly build within us his own cardinal points.

    Returning children does not mean becoming ignorant

    This is perhaps the greatest risk of the metaphor chosen by the Biennale.

    We could think that listening as children means giving up competence.

    It's not like that.

    The ideal listener is not the one who knows nothing.

    He is perhaps the one who succeeds in know very much without obliging what he hears to confirm what he already knows.

    It's a very difficult condition.

    The musicologist recognizes.

    The musician analyzes.

    The interpreter anticipates.

    But sometimes the rarest experience is to be able to say:

    I still don't know what it is.

    I'm waiting.

    This aspect is a very serious intellectual act.

    It means suspending judgment long enough to allow the object to reveal its own logic.

    A child can listen to the noise of water without immediately asking what its formal function is.

    A composer like Stockhausen can take that same attitude and transform it, through a gigantic technique, into research.

    Authentic artistic innocence is not lack of knowledge.

    IS the ability not to become prisoners of his knowledge.

    Can music heal?

    Caterina Barbieri also attributes a cathartic function to the sound, describing music as a possibility of transformation and reconnection, and connects this idea both to childhood and to Hildegard von Bingen.

    It's a delicate soil.

    Music is not a medicine in the clinical sense of the term.

    A symphony does not replace therapy.

    A concert does not automatically solve pain.

    And it would be unfair to charge the art of a saving task that no work could guarantee.

    But there is another form of transformation.

    Music can give shape to what was first just confusion.

    It can allow a pain to become shareable experience.

    You can stop the automatism of the day for a few minutes.

    It can change the quality of our attention.

    And sometimes this is a lot.

    It doesn't eliminate what hurts us.

    But it can prevent pain from being completely devoid of language.

    Maybe this is the most credible catarsis.

    Don't be saved from sound.

    Being, for some time, accompanied within it.

    A Golden Lion to Noise, a Silver Lion to Slowness

    The two main awards seem to tell this philosophy well.

    Keiji Haino, Golden Lion, represents the radicality of the gesture, improvisation, the crossing of genres, the sound matter brought to the limit.

    Sarah Davachi, Leone d’Argento, works on durability, stamp, almost imperceptible transformations, tuning and resonance.

    Two seemingly opposite ways.

    Noise and waiting.

    The saturation and concentration.

    The explosion and slowness.

    Yet both ask the same thing to the listener:

    presence.

    Haino can force us not to escape the power of sound.

    Davachi can force us to perceive such a slow transformation that, if we stop paying attention, we no longer know when it happened.

    It is interesting that a Biennale dedicated to the "bambino di suono" awards two artists so different.

    Because a child does not necessarily seek noise.

    It can also be fascinated by something very small.

    A vibration.

    An echo.

    A sound that slowly disappears.

    No wonder depends on the volume.

    It depends on the ability to notice.

    Perhaps the problem is not contemporary music

    Then we come to the most uncomfortable question.

    What if the problem of contemporary music was not just the difficulty of its languages?

    And if it were the speed of our listening?

    We live in a system that we get used to deciding quickly.

    I like it.

    I don't like it.

    Jump.

    Come on.

    Again.

    A song must convince us before the thumb reaches the screen.

    A video is judged in the first seconds.

    Even musical listening has often become a succession of micro-decisions.

    Search music can behave very badly in this system.

    It can take ten minutes before something happens.

    It can make it happen very much without that we immediately know where to look.

    It can build its own form through transformations that require memory.

    He can even refuse to offer us a climax.

    In algorithmic terms, a disaster.

    In human terms, perhaps an opportunity.

    Because it forces us to exercise a faculty that is likely to become rare:

    Stay.

    Not because everything that is difficult is necessarily beautiful.

    It's not.

    There is extraordinary contemporary music and forgetable contemporary music, just as there are nineteenth century sublimation symphonies and others that history had good reasons to attend less.

    Opening does not mean abolishing judgment.

    It means to postpone it enough to be able to base it on experience instead of prejudice.

    And it's a huge difference.

    A Child of Sound

    Perhaps this is the most beautiful provocation of the Biennale Musica 2026.

    Don't ask us to love everything.

    It would be impossible and also terribly boring.

    Don't ask us to pretend to understand.

    Do not turn the avant-garde into a new orthodoxy in which people who do not appreciate enough a forty-minute drone should be expelled from the consession of culturally presentable beings.

    Much more simply:

    try to listen before you decide.

    From 10 to 24 October Venice will put in the same sound landscape Hildegard and techno, Bach and electronics, Morricone and Pasolini, radical improvisation, organs, field recordings, club cultures, renaissance voices, first absolutes and old music of centuries.

    Not because everything is the same.

    On the contrary.

    Because everything is different.

    And listening precisely means learning to distinguish without immediately turning the difference into a hierarchy.

    Maybe growing musically is not just about accumulating repertoire.

    Know more composers.

    Recognize more forms.

    Have more records.

    Knowing finally explaining to friends because that cadence is not exactly what they believe.

    Maybe there's a second kind of maturity.

    Harder.

    What comes when, after learning a lot, we are still able to amaze us.

    When we can get into a hall and don't know in advance what we have to try.

    When a noise can still turn our heads around.

    When a well-maintained note long enough ceases to seem motionless and we begin to hear all the little things that are changing within it.

    When in front of an incomprehensible music we do not immediately say:

    «It's not for me.»

    But:

    «Wait. Let me hear again.»

    Maybe this is the sound child.

    Not someone who doesn't know the world yet.

    Someone who, despite knowing him, did not stop giving him the chance to surprise him.

    And maybe that's what a Biennale should do.

    Don't tell us where the music is going.

    Nobody knows.

    But put us for a few days in the most fertile condition possible:

    in front of something we have not yet learned to call by name.

    And have the courage to listen to him before the name comes.

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  • Can music still unite a world that is not heard?

    Towards the International Music Day of 1 October: from Yehudi Menuhin to Beethoven, from jazz to community choirs, a journey into the deepest meaning of listening. Because playing together doesn’t mean being equal, but learning to give space to the voice of others.

    by Marialuisa Veneziano

    29 September 2026

    In 1974 Yehudi Menuhin had a curious idea.

    To celebrate the music, he proposed to ask the cities a few minutes of silence.

    Not to interrupt urban life. Not to impose a solemn recollection. But to allow the music to resonate in the parks and squares, where it normally passes unnoticed, overwhelmed by traffic, conversations, rush.

    A violin instead of a clacson, we could say. With the advantage that the violin, at least as a rule, does not claim to have precedence.

    The proposal appeared in the letter with which the violinist, then president of the International Music Council, announced the first International Music Day, set for 1 October 1975. The anniversary was born of a resolution adopted in Lausanne in 1973 and pursued precise objectives: to spread musical art in all layers of society, to foster exchange between cultures and to contribute to the ideals of peace and friendship among peoples.

    Fifty-one years later, while we are preparing to celebrate that day again, the Menuhin proposal seems even more unusual.

    We have music everywhere today.

    In supermarkets. At airports. Cars. In the headphones of those who run, work, kitchen or try to ignore the neighbor on the train.

    We can listen to a symphony registered in Berlin while we walk on a provincial road. A Georgian song while waiting for the bus. A Beethoven quartet as we respond to a message that, in all probability, did not require immediate response.

    Music has never had so much chance to reach us.

    Yet a question remains open: did we become as capable of listening to each other?

    Because having access to millions of songs doesn't necessarily mean meeting millions of worlds.

    Sometimes it just means bringing our little world everywhere, protected by two earphones.

    And perhaps the International Music Day, before even inviting us to listen to something, should ask us to make a more difficult gesture.

    Remove the headphones from our certainties for a few moments.

    A violinist who wanted to listen to the world

    Menuhin could have been limited to celebrating its own tradition.

    He was one of the great violinists of the twentieth century, heir to an interpretative culture in which the solo concert represented one of the highest expressions of Western art. He had crossed the repertoire of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Bartók. His career would have allowed him to talk about music from the reassuring position of those who occupy the center of the stage.

    He chose instead to broaden his horizon.

    In 1966 he recorded with Ravi Shankar, a master of the Indian sitar, the project that would become West Meets East, published in 1967. It was not only a meeting between two instruments: Menuhin confronted Shankar’s music, entering a system in which the melodic organization, intonation, rhythm and improvisation obey principles different from those of European tradition.

    And this is the most interesting point.

    To really meet another culture, Menuhin could not simply continue to play as he had always done.

    He had to listen before he answered.

    He had to recognize that his knowledge, immense in his area, did not coincide with all possible musical knowledge.

    The rāga is not an exotic scale on which to freely improvise some phrase. It is a melodic universe with characteristic behaviors, hierarchies among sounds, recognizable movements and expressive associations. In the same way, the tāla is not a generic pulsation to accompany by beating the foot: it is a cyclic organization of time, articulated by accents, subdivisions and shared reference points.

    Entering that world requires study.

    And above all it requires a particular form of humility.

    Musical dialogue begins when we stop considering our grammar the only possible.

    It is a much more demanding lesson of the usual affirmation that music would be a universal language.

    That phrase is beautiful.

    But he's gonna make us forget something.

    Music does not necessarily speak to everyone in the same way. A sound can have different cultural meanings; a rhythm that for someone belongs to a party, for another can have a ritual value. What a listener perceives as distension can be unresolved for another.

    We do not automatically understand why we listen to the same sounds.

    Music can allow us to meet because we are not obliged to understand it all the same way.

    Menuhin seemed to have understood this possibility: the meeting does not require the cancellation of differences, but the availability to attend them.

    A counterpoint lesson for our time

    There is a musical idea that could offer us a small theory of coexistence.

    The counterpoint.

    Let's imagine two voices.

    The first proposes a melodic line. The second one enters, not to repeat it servely, but to develop its own path. The two lines can proceed together, move in opposite directions, approach, move away, produce tensions.

    None of them, however, should lose their identity.

    This is the beauty of counterpoint: unity is not born from the renunciation of difference, but from the organization of relationships between autonomous elements.

    Let's think of Bach's escape.

    A subject appears in one voice, then it is resumed by another. Meanwhile the first does not disappear: he continues his speech, woven with the one just entered.

    The listener must perform an extraordinary exercise.

    Follow a voice without forgetting the others.

    Recognize a theme while changing registry.

    Perceiving the overall form without sacrificing the life of individual paths.

    Of course an escape is not a political model, nor Bach was writing a civic education manual.

    But his music makes something sensitive that we in our daily lives do not necessarily interrupt our voice. It can give you a new meaning.

    And you don't have to get to Bach to experiment with it.

    Just think of a string quartet.

    Four people sit close and try to build a common form. Each has its own instrument, its stamp, its own gesture. The first violin cannot play instead of the cello; the viola cannot decide independently the breath of the entire ensemble.

    You must listen to the duration of a note, recognize the moment when another part takes relief, change its volume, wait for a sentence to be concluded.

    Sometimes you have to advance.

    Sometimes it's back.

    Sometimes having the courage to support a dissonance without rushing towards a premature consonance.

    And here music suggests an uncomfortable truth.

    Harmony is not to have conflicts. It consists in knowing what to do with it.

    Jazz and art of not knowing everything

    Jazz brings this reflection even further.

    In a formation that improvises collectively, music also arises from what no one has decided entirely in advance.

    The pianist proposes an agreement with a particular arrangement of notes. The smuggler can change the bass trend. The drummer moves an accent, opens a space, suggests a new articulation of time.

    The soloist listens.

    Come in.

    Give it back.

    He can even change the direction of his sentence because something, in the execution of another, showed him an unexpected possibility.

    This is one of the reasons why a great jazz improvisation does not coincide with a succession of individual solos.

    His quality comes from the relationship.

    In swing, then, time is not only the one indicated by the metronome. It is a shared experience, built through the position of accents, phrasing, interaction between pulsation and rhythmic microvariations.

    Two musicians can know perfectly the harmonious structure of a song and, however, fail to make it live together.

    Because knowing what to play is not like knowing how to be musically with someone.

    We think of a passage from John Coltrane, a response from the Miles Davis trumpet or the way a rhythm section can change the perception of a phrase.

    There is no authentic dialogue if everyone waits only their turn to demonstrate what they can do.

    And perhaps this is one of the great diseases of our time: we learned to take the word with extraordinary speed, but not always to let the word of others change what we were about to say.

    Jazz reminds us that an answer can be technically prepared, but must remain open to the unexpected.

    In the end, improvising together means accepting something very simple:

    the result does not belong entirely to anyone.

    Beethoven, joy and brotherhood still to be built

    No speech on music as a chance of encounter can avoid Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

    His final, built around the hymn to the joy of Schiller, became one of the most recognizable symbols of aspiration to human brotherhood.

    But it's worth listening to how Beethoven gets to that melody.

    The fourth movement does not begin with the triumphant chorus.

    Start with a violent orchestral raid.

    Then the cellos and smugglers introduce some kind of instrumental recitative. They appeal to the previous movements, as if the symphony was examining its history, looking for something that has not yet found.

    Only after this research emerges the theme of joy.

    At first it is very simple.

    A mainly joint melody, exposed by serious instruments, far from the rhetoric of triumph.

    Then it passes to other sections, it enriches, grows, until it becomes a collective song.

    The fraternity, in the musical construction of Beethoven, does not appear as a fact already acquired.

    It is the result of a process.

    Joy must be sought, recognized, shared.

    And this, perhaps, is the particular that we should remember more often.

    A crowd singing together is not necessarily a right community. History has shown us how easily collective music can also be used to exclude, intimidate and celebrate power.

    Music does not possess, by nature, a guaranteed morality.

    It can accompany a gesture of solidarity and, in other circumstances, be bent to propaganda.

    It can help recognize another human being, but also strengthen an identity built against someone.

    It is not enough, therefore, to sing the brotherhood.

    You have to give her a form in life.

    And that's where the Ninth continues to question us.

    It does not give us proof that human beings are already brothers.

    It puts us in front of the possibility — and responsibility — to try to become it.

    The music is of all. But can everyone really be part of it?

    There is a question that cultural celebrations are likely to evade.

    Who can afford to study music?

    Not just listening.

    To do it.

    A child who wants to learn the violin needs a tool, a teacher, time, of someone who encourages it when the first notes look more like the chigolio of a door than a sonata.

    A boy who wants to sing needs to find a place where his voice is not judged before being educated.

    An adult who wishes to return to play after many years needs to feel authorized to start over.

    Accessibility is not only an economic question.

    It is also psychological, geographical, educational.

    It is not enough to put a piano in a room and announce that everyone can use it. Someone must have taught people not to be afraid of it.

    The International Music Council translated this attention into five musical rights, proclaimed in 2001: the freedom to express itself musically, the possibility to learn the languages of music, access to participation and listening; for artists, the possibility to develop and communicate their art and obtain recognition and fair remuneration.

    It is important that the two dimensions be together.

    Music must be able to reach everyone.

    But those who produce it must be able to live their work.

    The gratuitousness of a public concert, for example, can be a precious cultural choice. It should not become the pretext to consider the work of interpreters free of charge.

    Similarly, bringing music to schools does not simply mean organizing a show at the end of the year.

    It means recognizing that musical education offers children a rare experience: learning to express themselves while exercising to recognize the presence of others.

    Let's think of a school choir.

    It doesn't matter that everyone has the same vocal extension. It doesn't matter that everyone learns at the same speed.

    The work begins when each guy finds a part to which to contribute.

    When you understand that your entrance also depends on the breath of those who are next to him.

    When he discovers that singing stronger than others does not necessarily mean singing better.

    And maybe, for once, the usually quieter companion becomes the reference point of the entire group.

    They're small experiences.

    But a community is also built like this.

    Not through great statements on the importance of cohabitation, but through gestures in which that cohabitation is concretely exercised.

    What if the music doesn't make us better?

    However, one must be wary of temptation: attributing to music an almost miraculous virtue.

    Music does not automatically make good.

    A great interpreter can be a bad listener in everyday life. An audience can move in front of a work and return, five minutes later, to behave exactly as before.

    Esthetic emotion is not a moral certification.

    And there is no symphony capable of replacing individual responsibility.

    This does not decrease the value of music.

    On the contrary, it makes it more interesting.

    Because music doesn't make us better.

    It offers us an experience in which some human qualities can be exercised.

    Careful.

    Patience.

    Memory.

    Ability to wait.

    Availability to change your position.

    Awareness that the meaning of one voice can change when another enters.

    It's not very small.

    In a world that tends to turn every conversation into a competition for the last word, listen to an escape or participate in an ensemble can remind us that not all meetings must end with a winner.

    There are reports in which the most important result is not to be right.

    It is able to build something that, on its own, would not have existed.

    Yet it would be naive to think that a concert is enough to produce peace.

    Menuhin did not need this naivety.

    His project asked instead to create concrete occasions of encounter: concerts, conferences, exchanges between artists, activities in schools, universities, factories, churches, public spaces. The music had to go out of the places where he was already loved to reach those in which he had not yet heard.

    Not a magic formula.

    Cultural work.

    Constant.

    Sometimes slow.

    And that's why it's necessary.

    Coda. A city that listens for a few minutes

    Let’s return to that idea of 1974.

    A city that interrupts its noise for a few minutes.

    Not just to shut up.

    To listen.

    Let's try to imagine it today.

    In a square someone starts playing.

    It does not matter, for the moment, whether it is Bach, a traditional melody, a jazz track or a contemporary song.

    Someone stops.

    Someone else keeps walking.

    A child asks what instrument it is.

    An elderly person recognizes a melody.

    A passer-by discovers a sound he never sought.

    No one is obliged to feel the same emotion.

    No one must pretend to understand what he doesn't know.

    But for a few minutes different people share an experience to which each can attribute its own meaning.

    It is a hypothetical image, of course.

    But perhaps it contains the deepest sense of the Menuhin proposal.

    Music does not unite us because it erases what distinguishes us.

    It offers us the possibility to stay close without claiming to become identical.

    Like the voices of an escape.

    Like the tools of a quartet.

    Like musicians who improvise and must continually decide whether to advance, respond or leave room.

    And perhaps, at a time when each has a means to be heard, we should worry a little more about finding opportunities to listen.

    On 1 October we will celebrate the International Music Day.

    We will publish photos, share songs, remember composers and interpreters. Someone will organize concerts, others will dedicate a thought to the song that accompanied an important moment of his life.

    All beautiful.

    But we could do something less striking.

    Listen to a music we wouldn't have chosen.

    Ask someone what song you represent, and listen to it without interrupting it after thirty seconds.

    Going to a concert of a kind we believe doesn't belong to us.

    Or let a child make us feel what he is learning, even when the melody is still uncertain and the hand tires the right key.

    Because the value of music is not only measured in the works performed.

    There is also the moment when someone finds the courage to begin.

    And another human being decides to listen to him.

    Maybe music won't save the world.

    It will not stop violence alone, it will not eliminate injustice, it will not prevent us from hurting each other.

    But you can remember something that the noise of our days tends to make us forget.

    That we are not the only voices of the score.

    That the silence of the other is not always a void to fill.

    That a dissonance does not necessarily require the destruction of one of the two notes.

    And that there are forms of beauty to which we can only come together.

    Perhaps this is today the deepest meaning of an International Music Day.

    Do not celebrate a language that everyone already understands.

    But to defend the possibility of continuing to learn from each other.

    Menuhin imagined a city that, for a few minutes, stopped making noise.

    Fifty-one years later, we could collect that proposal and give it an even wider meaning.

    Maybe we don't need a world where everyone sings the same melody.

    We need a world where no one should stop singing to allow others to exist.

    And in which, before we raise our voice once again, we finally get the time to listen to someone else's.

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  • La Scala free: when the opera comes out from the theatre

    From September 1st LaScalaTv opens its archive for free to the public. A revolution of access that poses a less simple question than it seems: if culture is not paid, it is worth less — or can it finally be worth for everyone?

    by Marialuisa Veneziano

    22 September 2026

    There is something slightly subversive in the idea of entering the Scala in slippers.

    No red velvet. No foyer. No ladies who, after identifying their place, discovers with dismay that someone else has already sat there and starts that ancient Italian recitative that always begins with: «Excuse me, I think this is mine.».

    No evening dress.

    No Milan.

    Not even a note.

    From 1st September 2026, a free screen and registration is enough to enter LaScalaTv, the digital platform of the Teatro alla Scala. The service, born in 2023 and initially paid, has changed model: thanks to the support of Intesa Sanpaolo, the catalogue is now accessible free of charge after registration. No more purchase of the single content, no more compulsory subscription.

    It's apparently simple news.

    It actually contains a small cultural revolution.

    Because when the most famous Italian opera house decides that a substantial part of its audiovisual memory can be reached without paying an entrance fee, it is not simply changing a list.

    He is speaking on one of the most delicate words of contemporary culture: access.

    And immediately another one appears. Value.

    Because we're still oddly convinced that the two things are tied up.

    If something is expensive, it must be important.

    If it is free, somewhere in our brain begins to appear the suspicion worth less.

    It is the same brain that considers a bottle of wine worth a hundred euros before even tasting it and looks with moderate skepticism a free conference on Kant.

    The market has educated us well.

    The music, fortunately, is a little more complicated.

    The work has always been a question of doors

    Since the melodrama exists, someone had to decide who could come.

    At first they were short.

    Then came public theatres for a fee: Venice, in the 17th century, transformed the aristocratic play into a theatrical work open to those who could buy access.

    It was a revolution.

    The work became public, market, subscription, success, fiasco, impresario, singers’ whim and composers’ concern.

    In other words, he became very modern.

    For centuries the opera house has been at the same time the place of art and place of social distinction. Going to the theatre didn't just mean listening to music.

    It meant being seen.

    Have a stage.

    To belong to a city.

    Participate in a rite.

    The room itself told a society: audience, orders of poles, logging. Architecture and hierarchy looked at the show next to each other.

    Then the record, the radio, the television.

    And every time someone announced that the theater would die.

    He has shown, so far, some stubbornness.

    But seeing the Ladder on the screen means being at La Scala?

    No.

    And it's important to say it.

    Otherwise, in an attempt to celebrate digital accessibility, we will end up devaluing just what we are trying to spread.

    A recovery of Traviata It is not Traviata in the theatre.

    IS another experience of Traviata.

    In the room, the eye chooses.

    We can watch Violetta or the director. We can lose for a few seconds the protagonist and observe a real appearance on the bottom. We can really feel the orchestra coming from the hole, perceiving sound pressure, space, breath of the room, cough of the neighbor at the least opportune moment.

    The video shoot chooses for us.

    It offers us the first floor.

    He shows us his hand.

    He leads us behind a scenic detail that we might have ignored from the audience.

    Audiovisual assembly is not neutral.

    It is already an interpretation.

    The same goes for sound. In the hall the balance between voice and orchestra arises from the acoustics, the body of the singer, the position of the viewer. In streaming it passes through microphones, sound direction, compression and loudspeakers.

    The theater is presence.

    Streaming is mediation.

    But "mediate" does not necessarily mean "lower".

    It means different.

    Walter Benjamin would probably open an account

    When Walter Benjamin wrote about the work of art in the era of his technical reproducibility, he reflected on the loss ofaura: that uniqueness linked to the unrepeatable presence of the work in its own place and time.

    The question comes back with a surprising precision.

    What happens at the aura of La Scala when the Scala enters our computer?

    A superficial answer would be: you lose.

    But maybe something more interesting happens.

    The aura does not necessarily disappear.

    Move.

    Streaming can even increase the desire for real presence.

    Seeing from home the room of Piermarini, listening to a singer, knowing a work, understanding the plot can transform a perceived place as a stranger into something we finally want to cross.

    A 2022 work on streaming work consumption found that certain values of digital experience — especially the cognitive one — can also be linked to the intention to attend the opera in the theatre. (Taylor & Francis Online)

    It is not necessarily:

    stream or theater.

    Could be:

    streaming before the theatre.

    Streaming after the theatre.

    Streaming because the theatre is far away.

    Streaming because that title won't be back for years.

    Streaming because we have thirteen years and no one, until yesterday, had ever shown us a work from the beginning to the end.

    But be careful: "gratis" is a lying word

    LaScalaTv is free to watch.

    It doesn't mean that producing what we see is free.

    This distinction is fundamental.

    There are orchestras, choirs, singers, dancers, conductors, master collaborators, technicians, sarte, stage designers, lighting engineers, engineers, directors, audiovisual staff.

    There are also nine fixed cameras installed in Piermarini, recovery systems, assembly, storage and digital management. The platform is economically supported by a sponsor.

    Free culture is not expensive culture.

    It is culture whose cost is sustained at another point in the chain.

    Someone always pays.

    The state.

    A foundation.

    A sponsor.

    A patron.

    A subscriber.

    A taxpayer.

    In the 17th century he paid the prince.

    In 2026 you can also pay a bank.

    History changes suit, but the account comes with remarkable punctuality.

    And it's good that the audience knows.

    Because making cultural content accessible for free does not mean that content has no economic value.

    It means making a choice on who should bear the cost.

    It's very different.

    The most difficult question: just open the door?

    Here we get to the most interesting sociological problem.

    If we make the free work online, will new publics arrive automatically?

    Not necessarily.

    And it's a very important point.

    A research presented in 2026 on the use of the OperaVision platform, based on 3.125 responses, has found a high added value of streaming especially for the already regular and faithful audience of the work; for users less interested or occasional, the simple digital availability is not always enough to change associations and attitudes existing towards the genre.

    Translated:

    opening a door doesn't necessarily mean you want to cross it.

    If a person thinks that the work is incomprehensible, old, elitist and as long as a particularly complex income statement, being able to see it for free does not solve the problem alone. Cultural mediation is needed. We need to tell. Explain without childishness. Create curiosity. Give listening keys.

    To make it clear that Verdi was not born to intimidate students and that Mozart did not spend his life knowing that one day he would appear in school programs under the threatening heading "Classicism".

    Economic accessibility is a condition.

    Cultural accessibility is a job. And maybe it's even the hardest job.

    The work must not become easier. It must become less foreign

    It's two very different things.

    Every time we talk about new publics, the temptation to "simplify" appears.

    Come in.

    Let's modernize.

    Let's make everything faster.

    Let's put some contemporary light.

    Maybe we add a projection in doubt.

    But not always the problem is the work.

    Sometimes it’s the way we presented it.

    No one scandalizes if to understand a football game you have to know the out game.

    No one claims to understand chess by randomly observing three minutes of a game.

    With cultured music, instead, we have developed a strange claim: either immediately excites or failed.

    It's not like that.

    Some beauties require apprenticeship.

    And there is nothing helitar in saying it, provided that apprenticeship is offered to all.

    Streaming can be terrific right here.

    I can stop.

    Listen up.

    Read.

    Compare two productions.

    Listen Götterdämmerung in more evenings without having to explain to my family that Wagner needs some logistic adaptation.

    I can slowly build familiarity.

    And familiarity is the opposite of the elite.

    The screen can even teach us to see

    There is also a musicologically interesting effect.

    The audiovisual revival makes visible details that the traditional theatre distributes in space.

    A first floor can show us how a singer prepares a breath.

    How to change the articulation.

    As a word is physically produced.

    We can observe the director's gesture.

    The relationship between hole and stage.

    The attack of an orchestral section.

    The expression of a character from the gallery would just be perceptible.

    This produces a different form of spectators' competence.

    It does not replace the acoustics of the room.

    But he can train his eye.

    The Metropolitan Opera has been working for twenty years on this transformation of operatic spectacle through Live in HD: in the 2026-27 season his film productions reach thousands of venues in about sixty countries.

    The opera house is not simply going online.

    He's learning a according to language.

    And the sacredness of the theatre?

    Someone could object to losing the rite.

    Part of it is true.

    Watching O on the sofa is not equivalent to entering the Scala.

    Especially when God, you could have thrown me away. Someone interrupts to ask if we want a herbal tea.

    But be careful not to turn the rite into fetish.

    The theatre must be special.

    It doesn't have to be intimidating.

    There is a huge difference between protecting solemnity and safeguarding exclusion.

    The work does not become less important because it can reach someone who lives far from Milan, who cannot afford a trip, who has motor difficulties, who is very young or who simply wants to understand if this world does for him before buying a ticket.

    On the contrary.

    Cultural heritage acquires strength when it can be known without being banalized.

    It is not the gratuitousness to devalue art

    The devaluation begins elsewhere.

    Start when we consider music a background noise.

    When we stop giving her attention.

    When we imagine that, as we can easily reach it, it does not require work.

    A public library does not devalue Dante because it lends free Comedy.

    The public school does not devalue Pythagoras because it does not issue an invoice after the theorem.

    A free museum makes no less important Caravaggio.

    Access and value are not synonymous.

    Sometimes they are even inversely proportional: making something valuable accessible is one of the highest forms with which a society recognizes its collective value.

    This, however, involves a responsibility for those who receive it.

    The gratuitousness should eliminate the price.

    Not attention.

    La Scala without Milan

    There is finally something symbolically beautiful in this operation.

    La Scala is one of the most popular places in Western musical culture.

    Milan.

    Piazza della Scala.

    Piermarini.

    The stakes.

    The story.

    Toscanini.

    Down.

    Move.

    Callas.

    Memorys that seem to belong indissolubly to those walls.

    Yet now a part of that heritage can cross them.

    Recent productions and historical materials live in the catalogue; the project also continues with new publications and direct streaming. Among the events already announced, the concert of 25 September directed by Daniele Rustioni, with Brahms and Schumann's Second Symphony, will be broadcast free of charge and will remain available on demand for a few days.

    La Scala remains in Milan.

    But it is no longer necessary to be in Milan because a part of La Scala arrives to us.

    It's a huge cultural difference.

    The real luxury

    Maybe, then, we misformed the question.

    We should not ask ourselves:

    "If the work is free, will it lose value? "

    We should ask ourselves:

    "What will we do with the privilege of listening to her? "

    Because for centuries millions of people had no chance to hear a great orchestra, see an important production, compare interpretations, access the archives of the great theatres.

    Today we can do it from a screen.

    It's not the theater.

    He doesn't want to be.

    It is another door.

    And perhaps the real risk is that the work, becoming accessible, loses its aura.

    The risk is much more contemporary:

    finally have the door open and no longer find the time to enter.

    Having access to Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini, ballet, symphony, archives, great directors and great interpreters — and continue to distract the screen because something shorter has just sent us a notification.

    Technology can lower the price.

    It can abolish the distance.

    He can take La Scala to a house he could never afford to get to La Scala.

    But one thing can't give us yet.

    Attention.

    We have to put that on.

    And perhaps, in the age of infinite abundance, it is precisely the focus of becoming the most expensive ticket.

    LaScalaTv is free today.

    The music, fortunately, keeps asking us a price.

    Not in euro.

    In time.

    In curiosity.

    In readiness to let us be surprised by something we do not yet know.

    And this is perhaps the most beautiful way of understanding a truly public culture:

    not a culture that is worth little because it costs nothing,

    but a culture that is precious enough to decide no one should be excluded before even having had the opportunity to meet her.

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  • An impossible interview with Silence

    An impossible interview with Silence

    «You accuse me of being empty. Yet without me music would not breathe»

    by Marialuisa Veneziano

    15 September 2026

    He showed up in writing without knocking.

    Besides, it would have been inconsistent.

    He sat in front of me, and for a few seconds, he didn't say anything. I waited. He will. After a while I began to feel uncomfortable, as it often happens to humans when no one immediately fills the space with words, notifications, ambient music or at least a respectable background noise.

    «Is that your way of putting me in trouble?»

    Silence smiled.

    «No. It is your way of being afraid of me.»

    It started well.

    You have a bad reputation.

    «I know. I am associated with embarrassment, loneliness, empty rooms, phone calls that do not arrive. When a conversation is silent, say: "What a silence!" As if an unwanted guest appeared.»

    What about music?

    «In music, curiously, you treat me with more respect. You even invented signs to call me.»

    Semi-minimum, minimal, semi-breve. Multiple pauses. Cesure. Corone. Generalpause.

    Silence has a notation.

    It is therefore not absence of music. It is music to which it was forbidden, momentarily, to produce sound.

    And the difference is huge.

    A semi-minimum break is not equal to nothing. It has a precise duration. It takes time. It must be counted, thought, breathed.

    «It's funny.»Look. «Musicians spend years learning when they don't have to play. The others spend a life avoiding it.»

    Point for him.

    So a break is already music?

    «Of course. Try to remove them all.»

    The result would be terrifying.

    Music would become a pronounced speech without commas, without points, without inspirations. A person who tells you his whole life from elementary schools to retirement.

    Mozart, after a while, would also ask for help.

    The pause organizes the musical speech because it separates, articulates, prepares, surprises. It can be breath or abyss. It may conclude a sentence or deliberately prevent it from closing.

    In the language of baroque musical rhetoric there was even the Suspirate: the fragmentation of a line through small breaks that can evoke the sigh.

    Silence became a rhetorical figure.

    He did not interrupt the expression.

    It was the expression.

    But we think about music as a sound.

    «It's your first mistake.»

    He almost looks at me with compassion.

    «Confuse the material with the shape. Also a cathedral is made of stone, but no one would say that its size depends on the number of bricks.»

    In music the sound acquires meaning because there are separation, duration, distance.

    Think about the range.

    Two notes do not form a range only for what they are, but for the relationship between them.

    Even a melody needs something that is not materially present.

    Edmund Husserl, reflecting on the consciousness of time, had observed that we perceive a melody because the newly passed note continues to be held in memory as we wait for the next one.

    In other words, we listen to the present by bringing us behind what does not sound anymore and prolonging us to what does not sound yet.

    Silence seems to have fun.

    «See? It's always me.»

    Beethoven used it a lot.

    «Beethoven treated me very seriously. Sometimes even with brutality.»

    Just think about the attack of the Fifth Symphony.

    Even before the famous reason, Beethoven inserts a tiny rhythmic space. Then those four notes are blocked by a crown.

    The gesture seems elementary.

    It's not.

    Those interruptions transform a few heights into an event.

    Playing only the notes without understanding what happens around them means saying a question by eliminating the question mark.

    Beethoven understands very well that energy is not born only from sound.

    Born fromwaiting for sound.

    In his mature language, the cracks can become almost dramaturgy: a fracture, a suspension of thought, something that obliges the listener to complete interiorly what the orchestra has momentarily abandoned.

    «Beethoven», sigh my interlocutor, «He had at least the good education to let me work.»

    Haydn loved to play with her, too.

    «Oh, Haydn! A man who understood that the audience, to be surprised, must first feel safe.»

    Haydn's musical humor is often built precisely through manipulated expectations: prolonged expectations, false conclusions, caesures, unexpected returns.

    Silence can be comic.

    It's important to remember.

    It is not always death, metaphysics and fog on the abyss.

    Sometimes it's just timing.

    A comedian knows very well: a joke called half a second too soon can die; half a second break can blow it off.

    Music and comedy share something essential: both govern expectation.

    BOX IRONIC

    What about Debussy?

    Silence changes expression.

    «Finally someone who wasn't always trying to fill me.»

    In Debussy the space between the sounds often becomes part of the timbre matter. The agreement is not only valid during the attack: it applies in its resonance, in its decay, in the way it leaves the air modified after itself.

    The piano, above all, teaches an interesting truth.

    After the hammer hit the rope, the pianist can no longer "make" that note.

    Can only Listen to her die.

    This is one of the most severe lessons of interpretation.

    Control is not always about acting.

    Sometimes it is not to interfere.

    A good pianist must know when to let a deal continue without adding anything.

    «Surprisingly applicable concept also to conversations», observe the Silence.

    I can't blame him.

    And Mahler?

    «Mahler knew I could be frightened.»

    In Mahler's music, silence is almost never neutral. It can arrive after immense orchestral masses and, precisely by contrast, become louder than the orchestra.

    Particularly in the tarde pages, the rarefaction of the sound tissue assumes an almost existential meaning.

    The final of the Ninth Symphony seems to gradually subtract matter to sound.

    Dynamics lower.

    The phrases are fragmented.

    The orchestra seems to lose weight.

    The final gesture does not have the character of the theatrical conclusion.

    It's quite a progressive leave.

    And then something extraordinary happens: when the instruments stop playing, the listener does not immediately perceive the end.

    For a few seconds he continues to listen to something that is no longer there.

    «That's it.», says the Silence, «It's one of my best moments.»

    But at some point John Cage arrived and made her the protagonist.

    «Ah. Someone finally gave me the lead role.»

    In 1952 John Cage presents 4’33”.

    The pianist David Tudor sits on the instrument and, in the three movements of the opera, does not intentionally produce notes on the piano.

    Popular legend often says that 4’33” be "four minutes and thirty seconds of silence."

    But it's an imprecise definition.

    The point of the work is that absolute silence does not exist in the experience of listening.

    During the execution remain the cough blows, the movements of the public, the breath, the noise of the room, what happens outside.

    Cage therefore changes the boundary of the work.

    He does not ask us to listen to what the musician produces.

    He asks us to notice what was already playing around us.

    «Ammetta however»I tell him, «that you had an exceptional print office.»

    «Seventy years later, you are still talking about it.»

    Touché.

    But many people consider 4’33” a provocation.

    «Why would it be a problem? The history of art is full of very useful provocations.»

    In fact Cage does not force us to love 4’33”.

    He forces us to ask a question.

    Where does the noise end and the music begins?

    The answer is not purely acoustic.

    It depends on the attention.

    A clacson heard as a disturbance remains noise.

    The same clacson consciously inserted into a composition becomes musical material.

    The sound physically has not changed.

    It has changed our way of organizing it mentally.

    And that means listening is not a passive gesture.

    It's a creative act.

    So the real theme is not silence. It’s listening.

    «We finally get there.»

    Contemporary society has a curious relationship with silence.

    We're constantly trying to eliminate him.

    We enter a store: music.

    Let's get in the car: music.

    Let's run: headphones.

    Let's study: playlist.

    We cook: podcast.

    We wait five minutes: phone.

    Even the elevator, poor man, had to equip itself with a soundtrack to prevent two humans spending twelve seconds together without a diversion.

    It's not necessarily bad.

    Democratization of listening is a huge achievement.

    But there is a less reassuring question:

    What are we trying not to hear?

    Henri Bergson distinguished the measurable time of watches from the lived duration of consciousness.

    Silence gives us that duration.

    Without external events that segment it, we suddenly feel the time.

    And hearing time also means listening to ourselves in time.

    Maybe that's what bothers us.

    In the end pop music also uses a lot of silence.

    «Sure. I've never signed an exclusive contract with classical music.»

    A break before the chorus can make it immensely more effective.

    One stop Suddenly the accompaniment brings the voice to the foreground.

    In the funk the relationship between attack and space is essential.

    In jazz a musician can create tension just avoiding filling each line.

    In rock, a suspension before the sound explosion prepares the listener’s body.

    In electronic music, break prepares the drop also through subtraction and rarefaction.

    Even in the rap silence can have metric weight: a word isolated from a break can acquire more strength than a burst of syllables.

    The principle is always the same.

    The ear desires what is temporarily denied to him.

    Silence smiles.

    «I don't want to brag, but I have a decent transversal career.»

    What does the interpreter represent?

    This is serious.

    «Responsibility.»

    A written pause does not allow the musician to stop playing.

    On the contrary.

    During silence the musical tension must continue.

    It's one of the hardest things to teach.

    The beginner student thinks:

    note = music;
    pause = nothing.

    The mature musician includes:

    note = gesture;
    break = other gesture.

    A crown doesn't mean "let's stop for a while."

    It means deciding how much time can expand without losing shape.

    A crack is not a hole.

    It's a threshold.

    And in the ensemble the break is even a social act.

    You have to breathe together.

    Feeling when the others are coming in.

    Stay in time even when no sound is produced.

    It is almost a philosophy of cohabitation.

    I mean?

    «Being present without occupying space.»

    Shut up.

    He looks at me.

    I figured out the lesson for once.

    Perhaps we have confused too often the presence with production.

    If we don't talk, we believe we don't contribute.

    If we don't intervene, we're afraid to disappear.

    If we don't publish, we don't comment, we don't answer, we don't fill, it almost seems that we cease to exist.

    Music offers a different possibility.

    A voice can silent for many jokes and stay perfectly inside the composition.

    His momentary absence is not equivalent to irrelevantness.

    In fact, he can make his return decisive.

    Let's also think about relationships.

    Listening to someone does not mean to wait politely for it to end up being able to finally tell something more interesting about us.

    It means, at least for a few moments, give up our solo.

    It's not very small.

    So the silence between two people can also be musical?

    «Depends.»

    There are different silences as there are different agreements.

    There is silence of intimacy.

    The one where nothing needs to be filled.

    There is silence of embarrassment.

    The punishment.

    Who doesn't find words.

    Who would have too many.

    There is silence after a serious news, when any phrase would sound insignificant.

    And there is the very rare of those who can stay next to a pain without immediately trying to correct it.

    In music not all tensions require instant resolution.

    Some need to stay.

    Maybe people should learn the same principle.

    We have an almost harmonic smania to solve others:

    "You must react.”

    "It will pass. "

    "Positive thought. "

    They're all toned too soon.

    Sometimes the only musically correct answer is a suspension.

    So you are not always peaceful.

    «Absolutely not.»

    Silence can be violent.

    We think of the silence imposed, censorship, omerity, indifference.

    Not everything silent is deep.

    Sometimes he just shuts up because he didn't have the courage to talk.

    It is important not to romanticize it.

    The music itself shows it.

    A break only works if there is a context that gives it meaning.

    Otherwise it's not a break.

    It is lack of structure.

    «See? Even I need grammar.»

    What is the most difficult silence for a musician?

    Think about it.

    «The one after the last note.»

    She's right.

    The interpreter arrives at the end of a track and has to face a very delicate moment.

    Technically the execution is finished.

    Musically, often, no.

    A great performer does not immediately abandon the keyboard, arch or gesture.

    Let the resonance die.

    Store for a few seconds the shape in space.

    The public perceives it.

    There are endings after which an immediate applause seems almost a violation.

    Not because there is an aristocratic code of the concert.

    But because the body understands intuitively that something is still happening.

    Music has ceased.

    Listening is not.

    And this is perhaps the point where silence reaches its maximum intensity.

    If he should give advice to music listeners?

    «One.»

    I'm waiting.

    Of course.

    «Sometimes you don't do anything while you listen.»

    Nothing.

    Don't drive.

    No images.

    Don't answer the messages.

    Don't order your shopping.

    Do not use Bach to increase productivity, Chopin to fall asleep or Mozart to convince your brain to get results that Mozart himself had never promised.

    Put a song.

    Sit down.

    And leave him the scandalous right to be the only thing that is happening.

    Perhaps we will find that listening to music is one of the most radical forms of attention that have remained there.

    Last question. What then is Silence?

    For the first time it seems to hesitate.

    Then he answers.

    «They are the place where the sound includes not being eternal.»

    And suddenly the whole music story seems to be in that sentence.

    A note has value because it ends.

    A phrase can move us because it doesn't last forever.

    A whole symphony is only possible because each sound accepts to leave room for the next.

    Perhaps this is the reason why music speaks so deeply about life.

    We are also temporal creatures.

    Let's go in.

    We stay for a few jokes.

    Let's change shades.

    We meet other voices.

    Sometimes we find harmony.

    Sometimes a dissonance.

    Then, inevitably, we have to shut up.

    But music gives us a less naive consolation of eternity.

    He teaches us end doesn't necessarily mean you haven't been.

    The last note of a symphony disappears.

    Yet the symphony happened.

    One voice shut.

    Yet he can continue to resonate in the memory of those who listened to it.

    Maybe that's what Silence keeps.

    Not nothing.

    The trace of what has passed.

    I get up to take him to the door.

    «Can I ask you at least how you prefer to be quoted?»

    Look at me.

    He's not answering.

    And for once, the answer is perfect.

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  • Falls of deception

    A musicological reading of ties, absences and what remains

    by Marialuisa Veneziano

    8 September 2026

    There are friendships ending with a banged door.

    They're almost lucky.

    They have a date, a cause, maybe even a guilty one. We can tell you: "this happened," "that said," "we haven't spoken since then."

    Then there are others.

    The ones that don't end at all.

    They decrease.

    First call every day. Then once a week. Then a distracted message, some birthdays, a promise to see itself formulated with the same conviction that certain governments announce epochal reforms.

    Finally silence.

    No fights.

    No death.

    And yet something is dead.

    Perhaps this is one of the most unique forms of adult pain: losing someone who quietly continues to exist.

    Music knows this kind of disappearance.

    Because in music not everything that is silent is over.

    Aristotle had already understood the problem

    Much before social networks, Aristotle had distinguished three fundamental forms of friendship: the one founded on utility, the one founded on pleasure and that, much more rare, based on mutual recognition of good.

    The first two last as long as it lasts.

    If the interest changes, the utility ends.

    If you change your pleasure, you end up dating.

    The third is more difficult because it does not use the other for something: see the other.

    Two thousand years later we have sophisticated tools to keep in touch and continue to have exactly the same problem.

    It's not hard to have relationships.

    It is difficult to meet someone in front of whom it is not necessary to be continually interesting, useful, efficient, cheerful.

    The contemporary society rewards the performance.

    Even in relationships.

    We must be available but not too needy, sensitive but not heavy, present but not intrusive, fragile but preferably in times compatible with the commitments of others.

    The pain, above all, has very little networking skills.

    When life begins to hit seriously — disease, loss, failure, separation, fear — We discover that some people were fond of our version in greater shades.

    At the first modulation towards the minor ask politely the account.

    And right here music begins to become interesting.

    The counterpoint of friendship

    A good friendship does not look like unison.

    The unison is reassuring: two voices follow the same note.

    But two human beings who always thought the same way would probably be unbearable after twenty minutes.

    True friendship rather resembles the counterpoint.

    In the counterpoint the voices remain autonomous.

    They don't have to coincide.

    They have different directions, profiles and rhythms, and yet they build together an intelligible form.

    This is one of the deepest insights that the history of music can offer to the philosophy of relationships.

    The second voice is not important because it repeats the first.

    Maybe because we don't always look for someone who eliminates pain.

    It's important because he answers them without cancelling.

    Bach knew that perfectly.

    In one escape the subject is pronounced by one voice and then delivered to another. While one speaks, others do not cease to exist. They continue, comment, support, contradict.

    No good escape works if all parties claim to be the soprano at the same time.

    Social life, too.

    It's just that the problem is called a meeting.

    Friendship requires this counterpoint ability: continue to be oneself while leaving room for the existence of the other.

    Not fusion.

    Report.

    Dissonance is not the opposite of harmony

    We have done a serious wrong to the word "harmony".

    We use it as a synonym for lack of conflict.

    A harmonious family.

    A harmonious couple.

    A harmonious friendship.

    As if musical harmony consisted of an endless succession of consonances.

    It would be unbearable.

    The history of Western music is a history of tension management.

    Sustainability.

    Ritardi.

    Passage notes.

    Prepared dissonances.

    Changed agreements.

    Chromatisms.

    Dominants who promise resolutions and then, with some perfidy, go elsewhere.

    Music does not eliminate tension.

    It gives you a sense.

    It's a huge difference.

    A seventh dominant is not beautiful despite its instability.

    It is beautiful also thanks to it.

    A delay acquires strength just because a voice remains momentarily where it should no longer be.

    Curious definition, if we think about it, even some people in our lives.

    The musical maturity consists in understanding that dissonance is not necessarily error.

    The emotional maturity should probably learn the same thing.

    A friend is not the one who never contradicts us.

    He is the one with whom even dissent keeps a relationship.

    And then the deception cadences arrive

    Who studies harmony knows well that small cruelty called cadence of deception.

    Everything seems to prepare the conclusion.

    The dominant tends clearly towards tonic.

    Our ear already knows where it's going.

    But not.

    The agreement deviates.

    Waiting resolution is denied and music takes another path.

    If there is a musical process that describes adult life well, here it is.

    We prepare for a conclusion.

    There's a deviation coming.

    We thought he was that person.

    That work, that house, that future, that friendship.

    Dominant.

    Then life puts another deal.

    We have no wrong theory.

    A deception cadence has simply arrived.

    The extraordinary thing is that in music a cadence of deceit does not necessarily destroy the composition.

    Prolong it.

    It compels the phrase to seek another solution.

    How many times does the same happen to us?

    The bat doesn't make life beautiful. It would be foolish to support him.

    But it can change the shape.

    Schubert and the art of changing light without changing room

    Few composers know the feeling of precariousness as Schubert.

    In his music something mysterious happens frequently: we have not yet come out of a sentence and already the harmonious landscape has changed.

    A modulation, a third relationship, an improvised far-off tonal region, and what until an instant seemed familiar acquires another light.

    It is a music that knows how little it is because what we know becomes foreign.

    People do that, too.

    Someone who knew our way of laughing, our fears, details that no one else could understand, one day speaks to us with the courtesy reserved to an acquaintance.

    And maybe that's what hurts.

    Not the distance.

    The transformation of intimacy into extraneity.

    An old friendship does not become painful because we have forgotten.

    It becomes painful because we remember very well.

    Music has memory

    Philosophy has discussed the relationship between time, identity and memory for centuries.

    Music offers a concrete demonstration.

    We cannot understand a melody by listening only to the present note.

    Each note acquires meaning because we remember the previous one and imagine the next one.

    Without memory there is no musical phrase.

    There are only later sounds.

    When Beethoven presents a theme and much later makes it back transformed, emotion also arises from recognition.

    We've heard it before.

    But it's not the same anymore.

    Just like us.

    Maybe that's why a song associated with a person possesses almost brutal power.

    It's not just autobiographical memory.

    The very structure of music forces us to live at the same time present and past.

    A photograph says:

    You were there.

    A music can say:

    For a few minutes, you're still there.

    And it's an almost metaphysical difference.

    Why do we listen to music when we're sick?

    Not necessarily because we want to be comforted.

    Sometimes we do something seemingly absurd.

    We are sad and choose sad music.

    We're alone and listen to Schubert.

    We have the cheerfully devastated heart and decide it is the ideal time for Mahler.

    From the point of view of emotional efficiency would seem a questionable strategy.

    And yet it works.

    Why?

    We're looking for something I know.

    Schopenhauer attributed the music a very unique position between the arts, because it felt that it reached the deep structure of our will, without passing through the representation of objects.

    We can discuss his metaphysics.

    But intuition remains very powerful.

    Music doesn't need to tell us:

    "I know you're sad."

    It can simply build a form in which sadness becomes habitable.

    This makes some great works.

    They don't eliminate pain.

    They give it walls.

    Music doesn't say: "You must react"

    Here it has a remarkable advantage over many human beings.

    A sonata doesn't ask us when we finally decide to move on.

    A quartet doesn't suggest that "time fixes everything."

    Mahler does not send very good motivational days.

    Music does not claim that our pain has a socially acceptable deadline.

    It stays.

    And perhaps his ability to remain explains why, in the most difficult times, we can perceive it almost as a presence.

    Be careful, though.

    Music does not replace friendship. You can't take us to the hospital. He can't help us. You can't tell us we're wrong. He cannot do that terrible and wonderful thing that makes a real friend: to contradict us when it would be much easier to indulge.

    But he can teach us something about the quality of the presence.

    The string quartet as a small political theory of friendship

    Let's get a quartet.

    Two violins, purple, cello.

    Four stamp identity.

    No one is self-sufficient.

    The first violin can lead, but without viola and cello would lose harmonic depth; without the second violin, much of the internal structure would become unthinkable.

    In the great quartetistic tradition — Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Bartók — the four parts become interlocutors.

    Goethe defined the quartet as a conversation between four reasonable people: the image is famous because it catches something essential.

    In chamber music it is not enough to play your part well.

    You have to listen to what others do while playing your own.

    This could be one of the best definitions of friendship.

    Do not stop to exist to listen to each other.

    Do not stop listening to each other while we exist.

    Mozart and Haydn: the greatness of recognizing the greatness of others

    There is then a kind of friendship particularly rare in the artistic world: the one capable of surviving the talent of the other.

    Mozart dedicated six quartets to Haydn after a very long and severe compositional work.

    Haydn, listening to Mozart, openly recognized the extraordinary greatness of the young colleague.

    It's less trivial than it looks.

    Recognising the superiority or talent of the other without feeling diminished is one of the most mature forms of friendship.

    Envy says:

    If you shine, I disappear.

    Friendship says:

    I can see your light without losing mine.

    This is also polyphony.

    Schumann and Brahms: When believing in the other comes first of itself

    In 1853 Robert Schumann welcomed the young Brahms and dedicated him an article destined to change his career, presenting him as a new great voice of German music.

    Then life rushed.

    Schumann's psychic crisis, attempted suicide, shelter.

    Brahms remained close to Clara and the family.

    Here the history of music stops being a catalog of works and returns to be history of human beings.

    Behind the scores we find people who were afraid, who protected, betrayed, supported, admired.

    Genius does not immune from fragility.

    In fact, sometimes it amplifies it.

    Lennon and McCartney: friendship is not always consonance

    And we can get out of concert halls quietly.

    Lennon and McCartney show another kind of creative relationship.

    Collaboration.

    Competition.

    Compliance.

    Irritation.

    Move away.

    Their relationship shows that a fruitful bond must not necessarily be peaceful.

    Sometimes we need someone who doesn't say "brave."

    We need someone who can say:

    You can do better.

    The other becomes the limit against which we measure ourselves.

    This is also friendship.

    Not the most comfortable.

    Sometimes the most fertile.

    When does friendship end?

    Here music has an amazing answer.

    In a composition, a voice can disappear long before the last line and however have changed everything that comes after.

    It doesn't have to come to the conclusion to make sense.

    Perhaps we should give the same dignity to some relationships.

    Not all people encountered in life are destined to remain until the end.

    Some belong to a movement.

    A few more jokes.

    Some enter only to change shades.

    Pain arises when we confuse importance and duration.

    One short thing can be decisive.

    A very long thing can be irrelevant.

    Music always knows.

    The problem of contemporary loneliness

    Our age has an impressive amount of media and an amazing difficulty in the relationship.

    It is not necessarily a contradiction.

    Communication requires connection.

    Intimacy requires exposure.

    It's different.

    We can talk to dozens of people every day without being really known by anyone.

    We can continually produce a presentable version of ourselves.

    Then comes a bullshit of life.

    And that construction becomes too tiring to maintain.

    That's when we discover the difference between public and friendship.

    The public may want a good performance.

    The true friend can also witness the evidence.

    Breaks.

    The wrong jokes.

    The days when we don't even know which piece we're playing.

    Perhaps the true friend is this:

    someone in front of whom we can stop performing.

    Silence is part of music

    Don't forget it.

    A break is not lack of music.

    It has duration.

    Position.

    Function.

    It can prepare an attack, suspend a sentence, create wait, make huge what comes after.

    There are also different silences in friendship.

    The respectful one.

    The embarrassed one.

    The punitive one.

    The distance.

    The one where two people don't need to talk.

    The quality of a relationship is perhaps also measured in the quality of its silences.

    There are people with whom twenty seconds of silence seem a diplomatic catastrophe.

    With others we can cross an entire evening without feeling the need to fill anything.

    It's a rare privilege.

    Music would be called breathing.

    What music can teach us about friends

    Maybe we don't have to look for people who always play our same note.

    We have to look for those capable of entering our hue without claiming to possess it.

    People who know how to accompany without submerge.

    That they can take the theme when we have no more breath.

    That they can even leave us alone for a few jokes without leaving the piece.

    People with whom dissonance does not immediately mean breaking.

    And especially people who are not afraid of our minor hues.

    Because the true proof of friendship rarely arrives on bright days.

    It comes when we get less easy.

    Less fun.

    Less helpful.

    When we don't have a brilliant solution.

    When we can't return.

    When the only thing we can offer is our tired presence.

    That's where you find out who was listening to music and who only expected their turn to sing.

    Coda

    Life is not a well-built symphony.

    It does not necessarily have exposure, development and recapitulation.

    Sometimes it even forgets the main theme.

    He lets people in without explanation and lets them out without cadence.

    Promises resolutions and offers modulations.

    It suddenly gives us shades that we would not have chosen.

    And yet we continue.

    Perhaps because, as in music, the sense does not reside only in the final agreement.

    It resides in relations between what happened.

    Growing up we find that some friendships were only easy consonances.

    Others were necessary dissonances.

    Some people accompanied us.

    Others taught us to walk without accompaniment.

    Some have become silent.

    But silence, music taught us, does not always coincide with nothing.

    Sometimes that's what remains after a voice stopped singing.

    And perhaps true friendship does not consist in promising:

    "I'll always be here."

    The lives are too fragile for such absolute promises.

    Perhaps it consists of something more humble and much more difficult:

    "When I'm here, I'll really listen to you. "

    Because music doesn't teach us that all dissonances will solve.

    He does not teach us that every theme will return.

    It does not guarantee that what we love will arrive with us at the last line.

    He teaches us something more serious:

    that even a voice destined to silence may have changed harmony definitively.

    And that certain people, when they were really listened to and really loved, do not necessarily keep walking next to us.

    But they keep ringing.

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  • The concert lasts two hours. To build it takes a life

    The concert lasts two hours. To build it takes a life

    From symphonic to pop, from small clubs to streaming: we listen to more music than ever. But do we still have any idea how much it costs to make it exist?

    by Marialuisa Veneziano

    1 September 2026

    At nine o'clock in the evening, the audience takes place.

    Someone turns off the phone, someone already keeps it up, ready to prove to hundreds of people that he was also present. It is one of the great mysteries of our time: we pay to see something live and, as soon as it begins, we look at it through a glass rectangle.

    In a theatre the orchestra accords.

    In one stage the lights are switched off.

    In a small club a singer controls for the last time the microphone and guitarist leans on the pedalboard with the devotion that an organist of the 17th century would have reserved to the registers.

    They change clothes, change decibels, even change the price of beer.

    But the same thing is about to happen.

    Someone will make music for someone else.

    Two hours later the applause will arrive.

    And we will have the impression of having witnessed two hours of work.

    It's one of the best possible illusions of music.

    The work that must seem to disappear

    A violinist enters the orchestra and plays.

    A pop singer goes on stage and sings.

    A pianist sits and begins.

    From outside, it's all surprisingly simple.

    The great interpreter, however, exercises a paradoxical profession: work for thousands of hours so that, when we finally look at him, work does not see anymore.

    If we felt the fatigue behind every step, the interpretation would have failed. If the singer continually showed us the support of the breath, if the pianist exhibited the technical difficulty, if the violinist transformed every change of position into a request for national solidarity, we would listen to gymnastics, not music.

    The technique reaches its purpose when it disappears.

    And it is perhaps this invisibleness to have deceived us.

    Behind a symphonic concert there are years of individual training, auditions, general tests, directors, musical librarians, technicians, administrative, room staff, instrument maintenance, transport.

    Behind the concert of a pop artist there is not simply "one who sings".

    There are musicians, arrangers, producer, hall and stage phoenix, lights technicians, backliner, tour managers, security staff, drivers, assemblers, programmers, often choreographers, videomakers and dozens — in the great tours hundreds — of people working before the first deal is played.

    And before the tour there was a song.

    Someone wrote it.

    Someone arranged it.

    Someone recorded it.

    Someone spent three hours choosing the sound of a rocker that the listener will hear for a quarter of a second.

    We do not laugh: in music the great tragedies can also be consumed around a charleston.

    Music has never been so present

    The contemporary paradox is surprising.

    We're not witnessing the disappearance of music.

    On the contrary: we consume gigantic quantities.

    In 2025 the world record music market reached $31.7 billion, growing for the eleventh consecutive year. The streaming now accounts for almost 70% of the total revenues of recorded music and paid accounts reached 837 million. (IFPI)

    Even the live runs.

    In Italy, according to the SIAE 2025 Report, the concerts have passed for the first time 1,16 billion euros of expenditure at the box office, with an increase of 17.5% compared to the previous year. They became the main economic engine of the Italian show. ()

    So the music interests.

    I do.

    We listen to her while we drive, we run, we study, we cook, we work, we fall in love and, in some cases, we desperately try to disconnect ourselves by choosing playlists that invariably get the opposite effect.

    Music is everywhere.

    And that's where the problem begins.

    When something becomes omnipresent, it may seem cheap.

    We used to buy a record. Today we buy access to the universe

    There was an anthropological change, even before it was economical.

    To listen to a record, you had to own it.

    You chose it. He bought it. He was taking him home.

    There was therefore a fairly clear relationship between the musical object and its price.

    Today we pay a subscription and in front of us a sound library practically boundless.

    It is an extraordinary conquest.

    A teenager can pass in seconds from Billie Eilish to Miles Davis, from a Mahler symphony to a Korean rapper, from Monteverdi to an independent band recorded on the other side of the planet yesterday.

    Never in human history have we had such musical availability.

    But abundance changes the perception of value.

    When we own everything, every single thing seems to cost less.

    Streaming is not simply a new support, as were the CD or vinyl. He has transformed our own idea of possession: we no longer buy the work, we buy the permanent possibility of reaching it.

    Spotify, in its data relating to 2025, declares that he has distributed over 11 billion dollars to rights holders and emphasizes that the system does not pay through a fixed tariff "for listening", but through the streaming quota accrued within the royalties mountain. The same platform reports that more than 81,000 artists generated at least $10,000 of Spotify royalties in 2025. They are data of the platform itself and, therefore, they must be read as such; however, they show how complex the economy has become hidden behind a seemingly harmless gesture as to press Play. (loudandclear. byspotify. Community)

    The problem is not to regret the record store as if the last moral reserve of the West had been preserved.

    The problem is another:

    we have increasingly separated the experience of listening from the perception of the work necessary to produce it.

    Bach, Beyoncé and the same problem

    At this point someone might think that the speech is especially worth for orchestras, opera houses and so-called cultured music.

    That would be a mistake.

    Mahler's symphony requires a huge organic and cannot be "optimized" by reducing orchestra professors without changing their nature.

    But not even a rock group can go on tour by replacing the drummer with half a drummer because the price of the diesel has increased.

    And here is an old economic problem that is surprisingly modern.

    In the 1960s economists William Baumol and William Bowen described what would become known as "cost disease", the cost of performing arts.

    The concept, simplifying, is brilliant.

    To build a car today it takes much less hours of work than a century ago, thanks to increased productivity.

    But to perform a Beethoven quartet, it still serves four musicians and a big way the same time it served in 1826.

    We cannot perform Beethoven at 220% of the speed to increase productivity. Technically, we could. Beethoven would probably come to personally claim us from the afterlife.

    Live music resists industrial productivity because his time coincides with our.

    And that also applies to a song.

    Three minutes of music take three minutes to be heard.

    A two-hour concert still needs two hours of artist and audience life.

    Technology can multiply distribution.

    It cannot multiply human time.

    And it is precisely this inefficiency, economically speaking, to constitute a part of the beauty of musical experience.

    The full stadium and the local

    Then there is another contradiction of our time.

    We see exhausted stages and conclude that live music enjoys everywhere of excellent health.

    But observing only the summit means to confuse the health of some great trees with that of the entire forest.

    United Kingdom — one of the most important musical markets in the world — the Music Venue Trust found that in 2025 the 53% of small live music venues produced no profit. The average margin of the sector was just 2.5%; thirty premises closed permanently and the sector lost thousands of jobs. (Music Venue Trust)

    It is not an Italian data and should not be imported mechanically in our reality.

    But it is a precious warning.

    Because before the stadium there is a hundred-seat place.

    Before the world tour there is often a concert in front of forty people, three of whom are friends of the bassist and one entered only because it rained outside.

    That night may sound irrelevant.

    It's not.

    The small places are workshops where artists learn the craft in front of a real audience.

    You can learn harmony in a school.

    You can study technique in a room.

    But no platform can teach what happens when a room does not react, when a piece does not work, when you have to conquer the attention of someone who has no obligation to give it to us.

    The audience is part of the formation of the musician.

    Even the distracted one.

    Sometimes especially the distracted one.

    ************

    The company loves the result and removes the process

    Here music becomes a mirror of something much larger.

    Our society is in love with the results.

    Let's see the footballer when he scores, not training.

    Let's see the novel published, not the pages thrown.

    We see the singer in the spotlight, not the years in which he sang without anyone calling him an artist.

    Contemporary success is almost always represented as an appearance.

    Suddenly someone "explodes".

    "He became famous. "

    "He's here. "

    As if until the previous week had been kept empty.

    Digital culture has accentuated this perception because it continually shows the outcome, very rarely the duration that produced it.

    And music suffers particularly from this distortion.

    Because it looks easy when it's done well.

    The singer who perfectly controls the voice seems simply to open the mouth.

    The pianist who really owns a passage almost doesn't move his hands.

    The orchestra perfectly together makes you forget that one hundred individuals are making one hundred simultaneous decisions.

    Quality erases its tracks.

    It's his great elegance.

    And economically, sometimes, his condemnation.

    But then should culture be subsidized forever?

    We come to the question that generally appears when talking about orchestras, theatres, festivals, contemporary music:

    If the public is not enough to keep them, why should the community intervene?

    Legitimate question.

    The answer cannot be: "because it is culture", pronounced with the same solemnity with which a cardinal would show a relic.

    Culture should not become the alibi behind which to hide bad administration, lazy programming or institutions unable to speak at their own time.

    Public funding is responsible.

    Transparency.

    Accessibility.

    Education.

    Ability to build public.

    But there is at the same time a misunderstanding to be dismantled: not all that produces social value is able to transform it entirely into a commercial embroidery.

    A library is not useless because it lends books for free.

    A school is not failing because the annual student profit does not appear in its budget.

    A public park should not sell enough trees to justify its existence.

    The market measures some forms of value.

    Not all of them.

    Music produces education, identity, aggregation, memory, tourism, work, cultural reputation, urban well-being, belonging.

    And it produces something even harder to put in Excel:

    occasions when strangers experience something together.

    It's not very short.

    In the most individualized society in history, it could even be a necessity.

    ***********

    From Taylor Swift concert to the gang of the country

    This is where we must finally abandon the old hierarchy between "high" music and "low" music.

    The social value of music lies not only in the complexity of the score.

    A stage that sings together a pop song, a small jazz band in a club, an amateur choir, a band during a procession, a symphonic orchestra that faces Bruckner are doing very musically diverse things.

    But they share a fundamental gesture.

    They're building common time.

    And maybe that's what we keep buying when we buy a ticket.

    Not just sound.

    Presence.

    The disk is repeatable.

    The concert is not.

    We can listen to a hundred recordings of the same track, but that evening, in that room, with those people, that precise execution will exist only once.

    It's a strange commodity.

    At the same time when it is produced, it begins to disappear.

    How much should a song cost?

    There is no simple answer.

    And I'd be wary of who owns one.

    Tickets must remain accessible.

    Artists must be paid.

    Technicians have to live.

    Institutions must be sustainable.

    The premises must be open.

    Authors must receive the rights.

    The public cannot be considered an emotional ATM, to which continually increase the price because "so he loves the artist".

    It's a very delicate balance.

    But at least we can start by changing a question.

    When we say:

    "Why is it so expensive? "

    we should also learn to ask:

    "How many people and how long are there behind what I'm paying? "

    It doesn't mean accepting any price.

    It means recovering the relationship between price and work.

    A relationship that the digital economy has made less and less visible.

    The last note

    At the end of the concert the conductor lowers his arms.

    Or the singer drops the microphone along the side.

    The lights remain firm.

    Something curious happens for an instant.

    The music is over, but the audience does not applaud.

    There is a very short space between the last vibration and the noise of the hands.

    Maybe it's the most valuable time of the whole night.

    Hundred musicians may have worked for weeks.

    A band may have crossed half of Europe.

    A singer may have taken years to get to that stage.

    Technicians and teachers may have worked since morning.

    And all that work has produced something we can save.

    Tomorrow the stage will be empty.

    The room will be clean.

    The instruments will return to the enclosures.

    The orchestra will have to start again.

    The band will have to reassemble everything elsewhere.

    Because music has a wonderful cruelty:

    to continue to live must always die.

    Perhaps we have a wrong question.

    We continue to wonder how much music costs.

    Very.

    In money, discipline, study, renunce, infrastructure, failed attempts, kilometers, evidence, nights.

    But there is a much more serious question.

    How much would a society in which no one had more time, means or courage to do all this?

    A company full of headphones, platforms and speakers, but without new musicians to listen.

    A society capable of consuming music twenty-four hours a day and unable to allow those who create it to live.

    It would be the perfect paradox of our time:

    to have all the music in the world and to have forgotten that somewhere someone still has to do it.

    MINI BOX IRONIC

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