Rendering Music Textualities through Time. An Interactive Platform Based on Luciano Berio’s 'Gesti'

The aim of this two-year project is to create a prototype of an interactive multimedia platform which can display the relationships between the various forms of textuality of a musical work. This platform will help in analyzing the work’s textual history, genesis, editorial process and its performance history, as documented by written and audiovisual sources. This hypertext – specifically designed for 20th century art music – will be put to the test with an emblematic case study: Gesti (1966), for treble recorder by Luciano Berio. Thanks to today’s digital technology, the platform will allow to draw connections among the many sources (from manuscripts to recordings) of the piece, in order to cast light on how creative process and performance process unfolded and interacted with each other over time, and until today. The platform aims to provide a flexible and user-friendly tool for teaching and research both in musicology and performance practice, whose use could potentially be extended to archival science and publishing.