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Pastiching as Artistic Research: Ifigenia/Ipermestra (Brussels, 2006)

On 6 December 2006, students of the Royal Conservatoire of Brussels performed two one-act pasticci arranged by the author of this article: Ifigenia and Ipermestra. Assembled by the author of this article as experiments in the young discipline of artistic research in music, both ‘cut & paste’ operas offered opportunities to explore issues of music-dramatic syntax in opera seria. In the article, I explain how individual arias and recitatives were combined into two meta-compositions that sometimes respected, and sometimes overrode the eighteenth-century generic conventions. By revisiting the scores, libretti, archives and first-hand memories pertaining to this venture, I show that ‘pastiching’ (pasticciare) is more than a historical form; it is a transhistorical method, involving a broad network of agencies, operators, and stakeholders whose strategies can be artistic and non-artistic, convergent and divergent. Pastiching does not necessarily result in ‘works’, fixed in time and space, but rather produces meta-compositional assemblages, the transience and formal instability of which provide opportunities to showcase neglected repertoire and tackle outdated musical ontologies.

Additional information:This is the open data set accompanying the homonymous article in 'Musicology Today', and consisting of two full scores and an Italian libretto with Dutch translation.
Publication year:2021
Accessibility:open
Original language:IT
Publisher:Zenodo
License:CC-BY-4.0
Version:1
Format:PDF
Open format:Yes
Size:6.4 MB
Disciplines: Music composition, Dramaturgy
Keywords: opera seria, pasticcio, artistic research