La nouvelle vague musicale del cinema italiano

Nino Rota and Ennio Morricone are the latest cases of composers of the Italian school who have been 'lent' to cinema. In the first decades after the Second World War, the scope of Italian cinema music oscillated between symphonic grandeur, operatic heritage, traditional sketches and fashionable songs, sometimes laced with cautious signs of renewal, principally emanating from Rota and Morricone, together with Giovanni Fusco, Vittorio Gelmetti, Piero Umiliani and a few others. Berio had in fact understood perfectly how electro-acoustic music could adapt to creating soundtracks for television and film scripts, and had asked composers to take on cinema, adopting a language which was deliberately intended to accompany moving images. At that time, however, his call fell on deaf ears. The composers of the last generation of Italian cinema seem to have accepted this invitation and have exploited the resources of electronic music by using the possibilities of today's technology in a creative and often anti-academic way. If Fabio Vacchi has felt able to confirm his own separation from the avant-garde by exploring an eclecticism which helps his music interact with the images of Olmi's film work, on the other hand Riccardo Giagni and Carlo Crivelli have looked to the East, and in particular the music of composers like Giya Kancheli and his “dynamic stasis”, in which they have found the key to follow the distinctive narrative paths of Marco Bellocchio's cinema. Others, like Nicola Piovani and Franco Piersanti, have knowingly picked up the stylistic patterns of popular music as the life blood of a new melodism, far from the worn-out stereotypes that had characterised Italian film music for a number of decades.