Scoring Italian Cinema: Patterns of Collaboration (Musical Cultures of the Twentieth Century)

Scoring Italian Cinema: Patterns of Collaboration redefines what it means to write music for the cinema. In eight richly illustrated chapters and a deft introduction, nine leading music and film scholars revisit the great theme of artistic collaboration from a heretofore unexplored angle: the relationship between film directors and composers in the "Long Italian Post-War" (ca. 1945–1975).

Spurred by the surfacing of printed and manuscript scores, sketches, drafts, tapes, letters and miscellaneous notes, the authors of Scoring Italian Cinema examine afresh the partnerships between such figures as Federico Fellini and Nino Rota, Michelangelo Antonioni and Giovanni Fusco, Elio Petri and Ennio Morricone, and Dario Argento and Goblin. The volume also brings to light the role of conductors and performers as well as producers and screenwriters in creating the soundtracks of some of the most important films in the history of Italian cinema, including Bitter Rice (Riso Amaro, 1949), La strada (1954) and Salvatore Giuliano (1962). The intrinsically polyvocal nature of the process of completing a score, such as it emerges in the case studies gathered in Scoring Italian Cinema, invites us to rethink of composing for the films as a new kind of expanded, distributed musical practice.

Meticulously researched and written in an accessible style, Scoring Italian Cinema will appeal to scholars and practitioners in the fields of music, film and media studies.

Giorgio Biancorosso is the author of Situated Listening: The Sound of Absorption in Classical Cinema (2016) and Remixing Wong Kar Wai: Music, Bricolage, and the Aesthetics of Oblivion (2024). He is Professor of Music at the University of Hong Kong.

Roberto Calabretto is Professor of Music in Audio-Visual Media and Music History at the University of Udine, Italy. His book Lo schermo sonoro. La musica per film (The Sound Screen. Music for Films) (2010), now in its seventh edition, has received widespread critical acclaim and has become a reference work in the field of film music studies.