How Does the Italian Cultural Heritage Sound? The Case of Roman Vlad’s Documentary Music

The transition between the 1940s and the 1950s was a watershed moment for shaping post-war Italian identity through cinema. After World War II devastation, documentaries on art and cultural heritage were called in to achieve a humanist ideal of emancipation through education. Whereas much scholarship has been devoted to music’s agency in feature film, so far, sound in documentary film has received little scholarly attention (Rogers 2014). Nevertheless, as documentary theorists have already clearly shown, documentaries are always a representation of the world (Nichols 2010), filtered by the camera and mediated by sound. In Italy, in particular, the figure of the composer gained a unique role as the soundtrack’s primary references, as a consequence of several technical conventions and limitations in direct sounds’ recording. In this chapter, I will focus on Roman Vlad’s output, a leading character of the twentieth-century Italian cultural environment, who was active as a composer, artistic director, musicologist, and music critic. Vlad worked with celebrated filmmakers, such as Luciano Emmer and Franco Zeffirelli, and he offered insights on his compositional activity and thoughts through several articles. Drawing from an examination of archival sources combined with historiographical and theoretical discourses of musicology and film studies, I will examine Vlad’s formal, emotional and narrative strategies in his documentary film music to investigate how Italian cultural heritage was mediatized.