Nicola Usula
Nicola Usula (Villacidro 1983) is professor in "Poesia per musica e drammaturgia musicale" at the Conservatorio "Giuseppe Verdi" in Turin. At the core of his production are publications on dramaturgy of music, philology of music and libretto (with a focus on Opera and Oratorio both in Italy and in Vienna in the 17th and 18th century), together with codicology and music iconography.
Usula achieved a Graduate Performance Diploma in Choir Conducting at the Conservatory “G. Frescobaldi” of Ferrara in 2013, and, after studying History of Opera with E. Rosand at the Yale University, Dramaturgy of Music with L. Bianconi, and Philology of Music with M. Beghelli at the University of Bologna (Master in Musical Disciplines 2010), he defended his PhD. dissertation in Bologna in 2014. His work, concerning the Florentine operatic production between 1679 and 1684, was finalist at the “Opera critica” Prize awarded by the Associazione Sigismondo Malatesta, and it has been published in 2019 with the title "'Cavato dal spagnuolo e dal franzese:' fonti e drammaturgia del 'Carceriere di sé medesimo' di Lodovico Adimari e Alessandro Melani (Firenze 1681)" (Pisa: Pacini).
In 2017-2019 he lead a personal postdoc project entitled “Viennese Opera by Italian Librettists (1620-1705): Towards the Birth of a Transnational Genre” (fully funded by the Austrian FWF, with a Lise Meitner fellowship, M 2252), and in 2019-2020 worked as a postdoc researcher at the Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales of the University Complutense in Madrid as a librettologist for the ERC Advanced Grant led by Álvaro Torrente: “DIDONE project. The Sources of Absolute Music: Mapping Emotions in Eighteenth-Century Italian Opera”. From 2021 he is appointed senior researcher for the Swiss National Fund project “L’opera italiana oltre le Alpi: la collezione di partiture e libretti di Leopoldo I a Vienna (1640-1705)”, hosted by the University of Fribourg (2021–2023, project no. 100016_197560).
Among Usula’s main editorial contributions are some philological works on Seventeenth-century opera, which focus on the Italian operatic context: "La finta pazza" by F. Sacrati (facsimile edition, Milan: Ricordi 2018); "L’Orione" by F. Cavalli (critical edition of libretto and score, Kassel: Bärenreiter-Verlag 2015, together with Davide Daolmi); and "Il novello Giasone" by F. Cavalli and A. Stradella (facsimile edition, Milan: Ricordi 2013). His main work in the field of Music iconography is the recent catalogue (Claire Brook Award 2019) "I ritratti del Museo della Musica di Bologna da padre Martini al Liceo musicale" (Florence: Olschki 2018) published together with Lorenzo Bianconi, Maria Cristina Casali Pedrielli, Giovanna Degli Esposti, Angelo Mazza, and Alfredo Vitolo.
In 2020 Nicola Usula was awarded with the prize ‘Antonio Feltrinelli Giovani’ in the category ‘Storia e Cultura della musica,’ by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome.
Usula achieved a Graduate Performance Diploma in Choir Conducting at the Conservatory “G. Frescobaldi” of Ferrara in 2013, and, after studying History of Opera with E. Rosand at the Yale University, Dramaturgy of Music with L. Bianconi, and Philology of Music with M. Beghelli at the University of Bologna (Master in Musical Disciplines 2010), he defended his PhD. dissertation in Bologna in 2014. His work, concerning the Florentine operatic production between 1679 and 1684, was finalist at the “Opera critica” Prize awarded by the Associazione Sigismondo Malatesta, and it has been published in 2019 with the title "'Cavato dal spagnuolo e dal franzese:' fonti e drammaturgia del 'Carceriere di sé medesimo' di Lodovico Adimari e Alessandro Melani (Firenze 1681)" (Pisa: Pacini).
In 2017-2019 he lead a personal postdoc project entitled “Viennese Opera by Italian Librettists (1620-1705): Towards the Birth of a Transnational Genre” (fully funded by the Austrian FWF, with a Lise Meitner fellowship, M 2252), and in 2019-2020 worked as a postdoc researcher at the Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales of the University Complutense in Madrid as a librettologist for the ERC Advanced Grant led by Álvaro Torrente: “DIDONE project. The Sources of Absolute Music: Mapping Emotions in Eighteenth-Century Italian Opera”. From 2021 he is appointed senior researcher for the Swiss National Fund project “L’opera italiana oltre le Alpi: la collezione di partiture e libretti di Leopoldo I a Vienna (1640-1705)”, hosted by the University of Fribourg (2021–2023, project no. 100016_197560).
Among Usula’s main editorial contributions are some philological works on Seventeenth-century opera, which focus on the Italian operatic context: "La finta pazza" by F. Sacrati (facsimile edition, Milan: Ricordi 2018); "L’Orione" by F. Cavalli (critical edition of libretto and score, Kassel: Bärenreiter-Verlag 2015, together with Davide Daolmi); and "Il novello Giasone" by F. Cavalli and A. Stradella (facsimile edition, Milan: Ricordi 2013). His main work in the field of Music iconography is the recent catalogue (Claire Brook Award 2019) "I ritratti del Museo della Musica di Bologna da padre Martini al Liceo musicale" (Florence: Olschki 2018) published together with Lorenzo Bianconi, Maria Cristina Casali Pedrielli, Giovanna Degli Esposti, Angelo Mazza, and Alfredo Vitolo.
In 2020 Nicola Usula was awarded with the prize ‘Antonio Feltrinelli Giovani’ in the category ‘Storia e Cultura della musica,’ by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome.
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The Department of Musicology at the University of Fribourg is pleased to present the two-day international conference "Collecting Music in Europe in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century" on October 20 and 21, 2023.
Different practices of 17th-century European music collecting are at the core of this international conference, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) as an outcome of the research project launched in 2021 in the Department of Musicology at the University of Fribourg: "L'opera italiana oltre le Alpi: la collezione di partiture e libretti di Leopoldo I a Vienna (1640-1705)." In their papers fifteen speakers address various aspects of music collecting in the seventeenth century, in Italy, France, Scandinavia and the Holy Roman Empire, focusing on this phenomenon as a symptom (and trigger) of a wide process of dissemination, exchange and hybridisation of different European musical traditions.
At the link is the two-day program and booklet with abstracts.