La musica dei semplici. L’altra Controriforma

[Autom. eng. transl.] The review notes that the title of the book, undoubtedly suggestive in its formulation, represents only one of the perspectives outlined by the ponderous contribution: the one that - to use the curator's words - looks at a "second-rate" music directed at the simple, at the poor, to the uneducated. A 'minor' music that has the field to impose itself in such a wide framework to extend to new worlds. In reality, the book proposes other scenarios that clearly fall within the cultured sphere, even though the spectrum of recipients - at least tendentially - is not limited by social class distinctions. It is pleonastic to observe how the two sides diverge substantially. In the first the apostolic and missionary ideals devoted to persuasion and to the conversion of hearts imply an eminently 'utilitarian' assumption of music, in the second such heteronomous assumption it seems to discount, in practice, an inevitable aesthetic overexposure that the Church, even in the liturgical, fails to contain.