Mario Baroni

Relationships between music and poetry in the arias of Giovanni Legrenzi

This paper presents in detail part of a project set up to analyze the arias of Giovanni Legrenzi. Its aim is to study the relationship between poetry and music. By means of a metric-syntactic tree describing the structure of the poem, it is possible to formulate the rules which govern the form of the arias and their tonal organization. A computer program verifies the completeness and self-consistency of the twenty-eight generative rules used in the analysis. This project on Legrenzis arias is part of a wider project developing a theory of European melody.

Musical rules and musical signification: hermeneutic problems

Musical signification — according to the main hypothesis of this paper — is based on a syntactic organization of micro-components (minimal units of signification). Each of them contributes to the global meaning of the more extended units of which they are a part. Such a meaning is neither to be intended as a sum of its components, nor as a fixed and well definable entity. On the contrary, it is open to the possibility of several coherent interpretations. Coherence is based partly on markers of a syntactic nature, partly on the possibility of finding a correspondence between the musical fragment and a human experience. Interpretation is linked to procedures based on symbolic thinking. This componential theory is applied to the analysis of a short fragment of Schubert.