These “notes from the field” examine Italo Calvino and Luciano Berio’s collaboration for the opera (or “azione scenica’) Un re in ascolto (A King Listens). My specific approach to the collaboration is through the notions of “expanded music” and “extended voice,” which I use to capture several different stages or “moving parts” of the collaboration. Convergences as well as divergences emerge, and hence experiments amidst novel acoustic spaces and scenarios, within and beyond the classical stage. Calvino first wrote the libretto for Berio as a fairytale about a king, turning it eventually into a favola dell’ascolto, inspired by the article “Ascolto” co-authored by Ronald Barthes and Roland Havas. In the introductory part of my article, I touch briefly on this libretto and the ways in which it evokes different dimensions and layers of listening, including an uncanny “acousmatic” dimension. I go on to consider the “Trattamento” (a later pluri-dimensional proposal by Calvino), as an entry point into Berio’s “musical action”–compositions constructed through a montage of Calvino’s arias, mashed up with excerpt of other texts. In particular, I insist on the friction between the multiplication of women’s voices and the arias Calvino wrote. I discuss Berio’s musical poetics relative to acoustic spaces—constructed through live electronics, instrumental music, and voice—and his own take on Calvino’s musicality. I then plunge into Calvino’s short story “Un re in ascolto.” In reading this short story, I investigate the implications of Calvino’s silence regarding the novel stage –beginning in the late 1970s– of sound reproducibility, a paradigmatic shift that reframed the public and the private soundscape and reshaped the interspersions of the bodily sensorium. In a Calvino-centric mode, these notes engage with existing interpretations about the collaboration (by Adriana Cavarero, Laura Cosso, Daniel Cohen-Levinas, Umberto Eco, Massimo Mila, and Peter Szendy) and the Italian intellectual context of the late 1970s (Aldo Giorgio Gargani, Carlo Ginzburg) in light of the recent expanding field of sound studies (Michael Bull, Francesco Giomi, Shuhei Hosokawa, Jonathan Stern, and Dominic Pettman). I end these notes with a brief incursion into Berio’ later conception of the spatialization of sounds (at the Tempo Reale music research center in Florence) that unexpectedly once again connects with Calvino’s auditory poetics and expands on it.

This essay looks at the experimentation done by the Italian futurist Fortunato Depero during his short stay in New York City (1928-1930) and shows how Depero, as a foreigner, experienced the capital of the twentieth century during its making, capturing crucial elements – immigration and plurilingualism, fashion and transnational commerce, the incessant construction of skyscrapers, billboard advertising and cinema, the music hall and its theatrical and delirious scenography. A close, selective reading of Depero’s unfinished project New York–Film Vissuto, shows Depero’s avant-gardist take on this experience and fosters connections and comparisons with other international modernist actors who experienced or lived in the city (Le Corbusier, Frederich Kiesler, Léonide Massine, and Katherine Drier). Depero was in New York during the Great Depression as well as a time when an incredible energy was just starting to crystallize in art, architecture, film, music, and literature. Depero translates bits of experience into different media, creating a maze of artifacts (painting, advertising, poetry, and prose) that, on one hand, communicate among themselves and, on the other hand, show the Babel-like confusion among the different media. Once back in Italy, Depero announced his intention to produce the book New York–Film Vissuto to be accompanied by a phonograph disc. It wasn’t produced; instead Depero, in tune with Futurist radio poetry, edited Liriche Radiofoniche: spare lyrics blending with fleeting and cosmopolitan aspects of the New York cityscape, others apparently glorifying Fascism, and some embedded with sounds and visions of nature. This last group of lyrics bears traces of the natural mountainscape, close to Rovereto, to which Depero returned to live and work. A reading of Depero’s artifacts shows the shock effect at play between earlier avant-garde gestures and the political and capitalistic complex with which he was confronted. Between these poles, and in a very specific moment, Depero plays with wit, capturing, yet displacing and interrupting, the spectacle of the city.