ABSTRACT
Nino Rota (1911–79) composed a considerable amount of concert music over the course of his long career, but most of this has been unfairly overshadowed by the many film scores he contributed to Italian cinema between 1933 and 1979. Rota’s concert music reflects a multitude of cosmopolitan musical influences, and all of it might be described as being written, clearly, within a neo-classical framework. This chapter explores Rota’s concert music as a rich reservoir from which he often drew material for his film composition. It is written in the hope that a deeper understanding of Rota’s concert music, especially his symphonies and concertos, will offer a new perspective on his approach to composing for films, and will generate a greater understanding of Rota’s finely crafted compositional dialectic.
