Tecniche di sincronizzazione nella musica per film di Angelo Francesco Lavagnino: una prospettiva musicologica

From the advent of sound film composers’ attention gradually shifted from the structural parameters of the score (formal organization, melodic-syntactic articulation, tonal coherence), intended as aesthetically autonomous configuration, to the sound result in relation to the audiovisual destination of musical composition. This concerns not only timbre and instrumentation – aspects that are in any case under the control of the composer – but also the aspects involved in the increasingly sophisticated process of sound recording, sound editing and post-production in general, which was mainly controlled by engineers and technicians. Moreover, from the end 1940s on, some composers became increasingly aware of the aspects of synchronization and sonorization: on the one hand they envisaged the collaboration of technicians, on the other hand they gave up the autonomy of their artistic activity all to the good of sound shaping for the audiovisual construction. This was particularly the case of composers who specialized in film music, such as Angelo Francesco Lavagnino, who during the 1950s – namely after his collaboration to Orson Welles' "The Tragedy of Othello: the Moor of Venice" (1952) – elaborated and developed personal techniques of composing for the films in a rapid and effective way, also with repercussions on the scores. This aspect sheds light on a neglected aspect of film production, where composition as practical activity generally demands high levels of ‘performance’ particularly considering the aspect of time – in many cases the whole process of composing, recording and synchronizing took approximately four weeks. Lavagnino was particularly aware of this, as shown by the unpublished conferences in the private archive of the composers’ daughters in Gavi. Starting from the musical sources conserved in the Biblioteca "Luigi Chiarini", Rome, I discuss Lavagnino’s techniques of sonorization by means of the analysis of relevant synchronization points. In the article I focus attention on Lavagnino’s score for the Italian-French-American mainstream production "The Naked Maja" (1958), directed by Henry Koster, and particularly on aspects of sonorization in the music for the last macro-sequences (corresponding to the last reels), characterized by changes soliciting the composer for readjustments. The comparison with the working process in some sequences of "Othello" allows me pinpoint specific elements of the evolution in Lavagnino’s approach to film synchronization techniques through the 1950s.