ABSTRACT
Italianist Edoardo Sanguineti coined the term 'anti-music' to explain how Dante Alighieri's music in Inferno is antithetical to any music that humans are used to hearing. Twentieth-century composers were intrigued by the challenge of portraying God's heavenly music. A small number of contemporary composers accepted this challenge directly, choosing to focus on passages from Paradiso where the extraordinary music is discussed. Most contemporary composers daring to adapt Dante's Paradiso to music have focused on the last, unusually non-musical canto of Paradiso. Dante's own prayer and his description of the vision have been adapted only by twentieth and twenty-first century composers. The combination of the text of Paradiso with other texts serves to place Dante's vision in a larger context. The modern-day translations of the physical space of Paradiso into places such as a museum, an amusement park and a talk show set make it more accessible to a much wider audience.
