The musical and literary adventures of Massimo Giuntoli: Beat Generation, Gertrude Stein, and imaginary worlds

Résumé 0

Massimo Giuntoli is an Italian composer and multi-instrumentalist who has been active since the early 1980s. A pianist with classical training but deeply influenced by progressive rock (especially by the so-called "Canterbury scene" and Frank Zappa), over the years he has developed various artistic projects, including solo and duo albums, multimedia installations, plugged and unplugged ensembles. Over the last decade, his production has increasingly addressed the literary field with various outputs, from the duo project "Pie Glue!", which sets the poems of the Beat Generation to music, through the album for piano and voice "Tender Buttons", on poems by Gertrude Stein, to "Found in Translation", a project of songs written in the made-up languages of Molkaya, a utopian land inhabited by various imaginary ethnic groups, explicitly inspired by the fictional universes of Daevid Allen's Gong and Magma. Giuntoli's recent production will be the starting point for my paper, the aim of which is, on the one hand, to study the mediation mechanisms through which literary productions that have virtually nothing to do with rock materialise in the musical production of an artist claiming the progressive rock influence, and, on the other hand, to investigate the creative processes that make music the starting point for the development of utopian narratives (as in the case of "Found in Translation”). An interview with Giuntoli and access to the scores of his projects will provide the document basis for the article, whose main perspective will be analytical and descriptive. A comparative reflection upon Giuntoli's poetics and those of the prog artists who inspired him will complement the discussion, particularly concerning utopian narratives and the use of literary sources.