Evangelisti prima di Evangelisti: gli inediti (1952-57) nel suo archivio personale

Evangelisti before Evangelisti: unissued works (1952-57) in his archive Today, Franco Evangelisti (Rome, 1926-1980) is known, and his music is performed and studied, only from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, plus a lone addition—Campi integrati, No. 2 (1979). His papers, that are currently being transferred to the Isabella Scelsi Foundation, reveal a substantial body of unissued works, dating back to 1952-57—a formative, but not immature, period. Its final works overlap with those Evangelisti “published”, with occasional borrowing of musical material, combinatorial techniques, and even ripe, although unrefined, musical substance. This corpus had been so far partly described, but never studied, and looks interesting for many a reason. Evangelisti’s development started from the common musical reference points of the Italian post-war generation, then he grew intolerant to them and chose to continue his studies in Germany. In particular, he increasingly abandoned a discursive musical approach to favor pure sound phenomenology, while cultivating a growing idiosyncrasy for the voice delivering a poetical text. These papers do not radically alter such image of Evangelisti’s personality, but prompt us to reconsider his appearance on the musical scene and his non-academic way to join avant-garde serialism. An extensive analytical description of those sources and their peculiar musical traits is offered, together with a general discussion of their conditions and of related philological or compositional problems.