California Italian Studies

These “notes from the field” examine Italo Calvino and Luciano Berio’s collaboration for the opera (or “azione scenica’) Un re in ascolto (A King Listens). My specific approach to the collaboration is through the notions of “expanded music” and “extended voice,” which I use to capture several different stages or “moving parts” of the collaboration. Convergences as well as divergences emerge, and hence experiments amidst novel acoustic spaces and scenarios, within and beyond the classical stage. Calvino first wrote the libretto for Berio as a fairytale about a king, turning it eventually into a favola dell’ascolto, inspired by the article “Ascolto” co-authored by Ronald Barthes and Roland Havas. In the introductory part of my article, I touch briefly on this libretto and the ways in which it evokes different dimensions and layers of listening, including an uncanny “acousmatic” dimension. I go on to consider the “Trattamento” (a later pluri-dimensional proposal by Calvino), as an entry point into Berio’s “musical action”–compositions constructed through a montage of Calvino’s arias, mashed up with excerpt of other texts. In particular, I insist on the friction between the multiplication of women’s voices and the arias Calvino wrote. I discuss Berio’s musical poetics relative to acoustic spaces—constructed through live electronics, instrumental music, and voice—and his own take on Calvino’s musicality. I then plunge into Calvino’s short story “Un re in ascolto.” In reading this short story, I investigate the implications of Calvino’s silence regarding the novel stage –beginning in the late 1970s– of sound reproducibility, a paradigmatic shift that reframed the public and the private soundscape and reshaped the interspersions of the bodily sensorium. In a Calvino-centric mode, these notes engage with existing interpretations about the collaboration (by Adriana Cavarero, Laura Cosso, Daniel Cohen-Levinas, Umberto Eco, Massimo Mila, and Peter Szendy) and the Italian intellectual context of the late 1970s (Aldo Giorgio Gargani, Carlo Ginzburg) in light of the recent expanding field of sound studies (Michael Bull, Francesco Giomi, Shuhei Hosokawa, Jonathan Stern, and Dominic Pettman). I end these notes with a brief incursion into Berio’ later conception of the spatialization of sounds (at the Tempo Reale music research center in Florence) that unexpectedly once again connects with Calvino’s auditory poetics and expands on it.