This inaugural issue of Bibliotheca Dantesca features articles originating from a conference on DANTE AND MUSIC, held at the University of Pennsylvania on November 5-6, 2015, in commemoration of the 750th anniversary of the poet’s birth. This monographic volume offers a wide-ranging exploration of the interrelations between Dante and music, revealing how sonic imagination, musical structure, and performative practices permeate the poet’s works and their afterlives. Bringing together literary criticism, musicology, reception studies, and intellectual history, the essays trace music’s presence from the lyric experimentation of the Vita nova to the theological and cosmological harmonies of the Commedia, examining sound, song, polyphony, dance, and silence as vehicles of meaning, devotion, and transformation. Contributors investigate the musical architecture of Dante’s poetic design, the ethical and affective force of liturgical and communal singing, and the allegorical, sensual, and narrative dimensions of musical figures encountered along the pilgrim’s journey. The volume also follows Dante’s resonance beyond the medieval text, considering modern critical responses and a rich tradition of operatic, symphonic, and programmatic adaptations that reinterpret his characters and episodes in new sonic media. This volume’s studies collectively position music not as ornament but as a generative principle of Dante’s poetics and reception, shaping experiences of reading, listening, embodiment, and transcendence across centuries.
The articles in vol. 1 are only available in PDF. To access an article's PDF, visit the article page and click on the grey cube icon next to the article title.
