California Italian Studies

My aim is to reconstruct a phase of the intellectual biography of Amelia Rosselli from 1950 to 1965, in order to highlight her transition from music to poetry. I touch on some of her intellectual relationships such as those with Bartók, Dallapiccola, Carpitella, Berio, Maderna, Cage and Tudor. Her “end”, music, turned into a “beginning”: the “beginning” of a poetic oeuvre regarded as one of the greatest of XX century. As a possible title for her arduous theoretical essay “Spazi metrici”, Amelia proposed to Pasolini the title “Trasposizioni”. Musicians transform poetry into music in many ways, from the Renaissance madrigals to Luigi Nono's experimentalism. Amelia, on the contrary, transposes musical structures into a metrical system.  Her powerful metrical rhythm, added to her abnormal lexicon, creates a strong emotional impact, which is felt even if it is not completely understood. Yet we still will try to understand it.