ABSTRACT
This introduction offers a detailed examination of the literary influences behind the experimental music of five twentieth-century Italian composers: Luigi Dallapiccola, Bruno Maderna, Luciano Berio, Giacomo Manzoni, and Armando Gentilucci. It concentrates one composition by each of the five composers: Dallapiccola's Ulisse, Maderna's Ausstrahlung, Berio's Laborintus II, Manzoni's Parole da Beckett, and Gentilucci's Strofe di Ungaretti. The chapter presents a study that offers a detailed examination of the literary influences behind the experimental music of these composers. The intention is to analyse closely the literary extracts that have been used to compile each of the five libretti; to examine the personal and/or political reasons behind the composers' choice of writers and texts; to comment upon the relationship between the texts and the music; and to examine the fine network of subtle relationships that exist between the different literary extracts, and the many and different writers that have been juxtaposed in the libretti.
