Una prassi alla ricerca di una teoria: Pizzetti e la Nuova teorica dell’armonia di Alberto Gentili

The eclecticism of Pizzetti’s musical language, with its ethical and dramaturgical implications, is a true challenge for the analyst. A useful key to decoding it can perhaps be found in the forgotten pages of Alberto Gentili’s Nuova teorica dell’armonia, a treatise published by the Turin publisher Bocca in the mid-1920s and then reworked during the Second World War. Protagonist of one of the most fascinating stories of musicological research (i.e. the discovery and the bold acquisition by the National Library of Turin of those 27 volumes of manuscripts that turned the spotlight on Antonio Vivaldi’s artistic legacy), Gentili contributes with the Nuova teorica to that renewal of both musical theory and practice based on “early traditions” that had already found a significant manifesto in Pizzetti’s historical-critical study La musica dei Greci. The essay reconsiders the harmonic solutions adopted by Pizzetti for the dramatic situations leading to the closing curtain of the first and of the third act of the tragedy Fedra using two fundamental concepts of the Nuova teorica: allusion and harmonic multivalency.