The symphony of the world: From personal and cultural to universal musical discourse

This paper deals with musical experiences centred on the creation of Museo del Paesaggio sonoro (Soundscape Museum) in Riva presso Chieri, in Piedmont, Italy. This expressive centre enables and combines a complex network of relationships between individual and cultural agency, which can be grouped into a series of basic performance models: a moment of reaffirmation and shared celebration of common cultural roots; a space of testimony, reflection and narration of collective history through sound and its repositories; the embodiment and actualisation of a common cultural background; a place of transcendence, from the individual and community dimension to universal matter, of translation from an idiomatic into a cross-cultural language, of reduction of music to sounds and, finally, to the symbolical essentiality of the sound. The final and most meaningful stage of this undertaking focuses on the natural, ripe fruits of a long experimental application process, and of constant conceptual development. This process has culminated with the theatrical and musical performance Paesaggi sonori (Soundscapes), especially in its opening piece, La sinfonia del mondo (The symphony of the world). Although it is the creative product of one musician and researcher, Domenico Torta, what emerges is the act of gathering and condensing a collective, layered vision of the soundsphere, as well as the extended compositional effort of a dynamic multipart music lab.