Biography

Claudia di Luzio is Adjunct Lecturer in the Departments of Musicology of Humboldt University of Berlin and Berlin University of the Arts. She also taught at Italian music colleges, at the University of Trento, and at Duke in Berlin. Her postdoctoral research focuses on music dramaturgy of the 20th/21st and 16th/17th centuries; voice, musical gesture, and dialogicity; reception, interpretation, interaction, and transformation in composition and performance. After graduating from the University of Bologna, she gained a PhD in Historical Musicology at Humboldt University Berlin. She was visiting scholar at Royal Holloway, University of London, and has received awards from the DAAD, Paul Sacher Foundation Basel, and Society for American Music.

Project Summary

Italian composers since 1950 have musically received, analyzed, and interpreted early vocal music by transferring it into compositions in refined ways. The project illuminates received compositional models, inspirations, and procedures in terms of specific interpretation and recontextualization in contemporary music that dialogically innovates based on early music. Contemporary transitions—compositions, transcriptions, arrangements, adaptations, and performances—harbor fruitful tensions between past and present, can sharpen compositional and performative strategies, and generate creative impulses through aware propinquity or distancing while appealing to artistic reflection and positioning in music history. By considering transdisciplinary aspects, the project also explores phenomena of intertextual, intermedial, and transcultural interleavings plus processes of interepochal epistemic transitions, including experimentalism. Dialogical relations between historically distant modes of composition and interpretation can come forward as music ascribes dramaturgical relevance through play between presence and absence, expansion and reduction, intermedial extension and shift of expression, or proximity and reflected distance to the Other, Old. Reference to, intervention in, and interaction with early music can offer interpretive coherence through recontextualization in contemporary music and staging as it multiplies interpretive access to bring it closer to the pulse of the times.