The Party: microstoria ed eterogenesi di un classico della house music

he Party, a ‘song’ produced in 1988 in New York by Haitian musician Richard Jean Laurent, had a strong impact on the reception of house music in the European cultural context. An analysis of the track is carried out through transcription of structures and of the musical lines that constitute its ‘text’ and by several inter-objective comparisons with other music that is related to The Party in various ways. Laurent's work will be the subject of a microhistorical inquiry, an approach opposed to serial methods according to which only uniform facts should be considered. Instead, microhistory privileges a singular case in order to bring out a ‘normal exception', an apparently isolated occurrence that can shed light on otherwise homogeneously opaque series such as the 'canon' of house music and its reception and assimilation in Italy.