Gino Marinuzzi Jr: Electronics and Early Multimedia Mentality in Italy

Abstract

In this essay I reassess the complexity of the convergence between electronic music and media practices in Rome in the 1950s and 1960s, through the reconstruction of the experience of composer Gino Marinuzzi Jr (1920-96). His engagement with technology as a structuring device of compositional processes is fundamental and inescapable, and brings to the fore crucial issues of ‘applied’ music’s troublesome reputation in the Italian cultural discourse. In reviewing Marinuzzi’s biography over the period 1949-75, my goal is to exemplify the key phases of this transitional period in Italian music history, in which technology, through the spreading of media and their increasing importance in cultural representations, came to constitute a new value of musical activity and at the same time renewed old questions concerning music’s aesthetic autonomy.