Pizzetti classico contemporaneo

Because of his overt contrast to avant-garde experimentations, Pizzetti is very often considered conservative. Yet, much of his music, particularly the choral compositions, sounds unexpectedly contemporary to the twentieth-first century audience. Immersed in the musical trends of the early twentieth-century — recovery of Greek-Latin musical knowledge, the study of medieval sources and the revival of Gregorian chant in the Catholic liturgy — Pizzetti was able to create an image of the past sound world, which maintained the aesthetic distance from the present whilst becoming a cultural memory to be projected into the future. In Pizzetti’s music discourse the musical figures have a diachronic depth which produces a multi-layered temporal dimension, forcing the listeners to change continuously their focus through the temporal music flow. As a case study, the Requiem Mass (1923) will allow us to analyse these procedures and to describe their effectiveness within the anachronism of listening. If the forms of listening seem to represent Pizzetti’s main artistic problem, it can be argued that his solution can be associated to a process typical of the musical industry, that is the production of “sound”. Nevertheless, Pizzetti’s reflection about time, his peculiar way of referring to classicism, the modern attitude of mediation between different ages, leads to consider the Italian composer as a possible reference point to reformulate the category of “contemporary classic” in terms of a formal theory of art, against the label that is used to identify certain products in the current music marketing.