Negativi di Parigi : Epifonie della Ville Lumière all'Expo di Milano (1881)

Over the past two decades, the musicological debate has been productively stimulated by the so-called “spatial turn” to concentrating on historical soundscapes (urban musicology) and the digital mapping of musical places (GIS). Yet, there seems to lack a proper emphasis on the psychoanalytical processes at play in the in the shaping of the modern subject/listener. Our study focuses on a single, illuminating moment in time and space, the 1881 National Exposition in Milan, to understand the role of historical sounds and the discourses surrounding urban acoustemologies in defining Italy’s post-Unification modernity. Having left behind the Wars of Independence and the controversial relationship with the French Empire, Milan seems to develop an obsessive attachment to the Parisian metropolitan model. The “moral capital” of Italy thus elaborated a kind of sonic displacement of its past trauma by shifting its attention from the interior of musical institutions and theaters to the streets and the roadworks of the new boulevards at the core of the Milan’s new urban planning. The authors have chosen two case studies to analyze such phenomenon: on one hand, the silencing of the sounds of the war (associated with the Battle of Solferino and S. Martino—i.e., France), embodied by the Panorama built next to the Exhibition; on the other hand, the Parisian retroactive influence on the Indisposizione di Belle Arti, a "humorous exhibition" characterized by sonic mots d’esprit as epiphonic fantasies of the French beyond.