Joanna Evelyn Helms, Ph.D. 2020

Advisor: Andrea Bohlman

Dissertation Title: Electronic Music History Through the Everyday: The Rai Studio Di Fonologia (1954-83)

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Dissertation Abstract:

My dissertation analyzes cultural production at the Studio di Fonologia (SdF), an electronic music studio operated by Italian state media network Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI) in Milan from 1955 to 1983. At the SdF, composers produced music and sound effects for radio dramas, television documentaries, stage and film operas, and musical works for concert audiences. Much research on the SdF centers on the art-music outputs of a select group of internationally prestigious Italian composers (namely Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna, and Luigi Nono), offering limited windows into the social life, technological everyday, and collaborative discourse that characterized the institution during its nearly three decades of continuous operation. This preference reflects a larger trend within postwar electronic music histories to emphasize the production of a core group of intellectuals—mostly art-music composers—at a few key sites such as Paris, Cologne, and New York. 

Through close archival reading, I reconstruct the social conditions of work in the SdF, as well as ways in which changes in its output over time reflected changes in institutional priorities at RAI. I argue that music and sound produced at the SdF contributed to postwar prestigebuilding activities on the part of the Italian state, the RAI network, and the individuals who worked at the studio, situating it within local, national, and transnational social networks. I also examine the SdF’s participation in broadcasting networks through tape exchange. Finally, I iii analyze broadcast content produced at the studio to demonstrate how RAI addressed and cultivated listeners through its electronic music programming. Each chapter of my dissertation takes a different approach to institutional history as informed by the everyday, drawing from science and technology studies, sociology, and queer and feminist studies. 

By focusing on routine and everyday practices that structured work at the SdF, I reorient dominant historical understandings of the space based primarily on its contributions to avantgarde aesthetics or the activities of the most famous composers to work there. Instead, I foreground the ways that social interactions within and outside of the studio impacted early electronic music production by determining access to equipment, knowledge, and financial resources. 

Dr. Helms is currently an editorial assistant at J & J Editorial. She has published in NewMusicBox.