“Between the Key of Hope and the Atonal Slash of Nothingness”

Musical Meaning in Richard Powers’ “Orfeo”

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13135/1592-4467/10159

Keywords:

Intermediality, Musical meaning, Musical narrative, Orfeo, Richard Powers

Abstract

This article investigates the phenomenon of musical meaning in Richard Powers’ Orfeo (2014) through the lens of intermediality and philosophy of music. I am interested in the protagonist’s recurring motto – “music doesn’t mean things. It is things” (69, passim) – as a conceptual cue to investigate both his conflicted musical identity, and the ways in which it reflects on the novel’s broader context as well as on its implied message that music is capable of signifying something other than itself.

Author Biography

Stefano Franceschini, “Sapienza” University of Rome

Stefano Franceschini holds a PhD in Anglo-American Literature at Roma Tre University. His thesis focused on the meaning of music in the fiction of Richard Powers. In 2021 he was awarded the “Caterina Gullì” prize by AISNA and the Center for American Studies for his 2020 MA dissertation. In 2022, he was a visiting scholar at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute in New York City. In 2023, he received an “Ernst Mach Grant – Worldwide” scholarship (funded by the Austrian Ministry of Education, Science and Research) for a research period at the Center for Intermediality Studies in Graz. He is an adjunct professor of English at Sapienza University and has published on Gothic Fiction and intermediality. His monograph, “What does that tune mean?” Il significato della musica nei romanzi di Richard Powers (Nova Delphi), is scheduled for publication at the end of the year.

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Published

2024-08-16

Issue

Vol. 35 No. 1 (2024): Books Erased: Printed Word Censorship and US National Identity

Section

Articles

License

RSAJournal will apply a CC BY 4.0 license to all its contributions starting with issue 37 (2026). Previous issues are licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND licence.