The phonosphere, ethnophony, and art

Music in Visconti’s "La terra trema"

Abstract

The aim of this article is to read Visconti’s film La terra trema from a sound perspective and to rethink from this musical point of view the relationship between the original literary text (the Giovanni Verga’s novel I Malavoglia) and its cinematic adaption. On the one hand, the centrality of the soundscape of Acitrezza (an ancient Sicilian fishing village) in the diegetic space of the film will be highlighted and particular attention will be paid to all those acoustic events that present a significant documentary value for the ethnomusicological research in Sicily, from the popular songs to instrumental folk music. On the other hand, the few extradiegetic musics, composed by Visconti and Willi Ferrero, convey the director’s stance toward the filmic story and share the same narrative function as the comments entrusted to the ‘voice over’. The sound perspective finally sheds new light on the relationship between the film and Verga’s novel: it will be discovered that – despite different ideological approach of the two authors – the influence of the Sicilian writer on Visconti’s film adaption goes far beyond the narrative path and affects the director’s vision of the world.