’Oh… Modern music!’. Hollywood, Satire and ‘Modernism’ in Giuseppe Piazzi’s Score for I fratelli Dinamite (1949)

This chapter is about the music of I fratelli dinamite (“The Dynamite Brothers”, dir. Nino Pagot, 1949), one of the first two full-length Italian animated features. The discourse focuses on the peculiar coexistence of ‘modernist’ and ‘European’ musical elements with traits borrowed from Disney musicals of the late 1930s and early 1940s. While Ferdinando Palermo’s songs stay true to the Disney sound of that age, Giuseppe Piazzi’s orchestral score is mostly inspired by Igor Stravinsky. There is a satirical reason behind this: in the film, the Stravinsky references are prominently presented as chaotic results of the misdeeds of the Dynamite brothers. The Italian cinema audience of the late 1940s would have likely mistaken a ‘Stravinskian’ language for aural nonsense; so, while laughing at what they believed to be a manifestation of musical ignorance, cinemagoers were actually the real subject of Piazzi’s subtle sarcasm.