Intersezioni geosemantiche fra classico e neoclassico: la furlana

In the piano suite Le Tombeau de Couperin, composed in the years of the Great War, Ravel inserts a “furlana” (or “forlane”), an ancient Renaissance dance of Friulian origin, little known and little diffused both at the time and during the previous three hundred years. Paradoxically, this dance (as well as the other five movements of the suite) serves as an epicedium for the French dead of the war. The nationalist spirit in contrast with the foreign origin of the dance set in motion a dynamic that, inserted within a broader reflection on furlana (understood as dance tout court), raises questions about the re-semantization of music depending on the socio-cultural variables that characterize the era and the mentality in which it is produced. More specifically, the Tombeau de Couperin era, the dawn of twentieth-century musical Neoclassicism, coincides with a profound and complex meditation on “classical materials” - melodies, rhythms, pieces - and on the possibilities of re-elaboration and masking not only of the compositional tradition - in a technical and structural sense - but also of the semantic values of the musical past.