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The article is devoted to the memory of the late Antonio Rostagno (1962-2021). It focuses on Rostagno's commitment to musical aesthetics and attempts to highlight his original way of addressing the space between music and philosophy, following Rostagno's interest in Adorno and Schumann from a historical and theoretical perspective

The female voice has been interpreted as having a key role in the primeval psychoanalytic scene, establishing a crucial bond between mother and child. It is not an easy task to resume the discussion about the female voice today when the binary opposition between genders has become obsolete and sounds like a mere memory from long ago. Feminist thinkers such as Julia Kristeva, Helen Cixous and Adriana Cavarero have further developed and asserted the female lineage of the voice, turning it into an essentialist opposition to language. The relationship between voice and composition is just the same as the one operating between a spoken and a written text in poetry and theatre; however, in the act of performance what matters are the peculiar qualities of a voice, its materiality. The conceptualisation of the voice is still rooted in a male cultural perspective.

The commonsensical meaning of gesture is a movement of the body, which expresses a meaning or an emotion. Gestures can substitute speech, conveying autonomous information or coexisting with it, assisting its communicative function in various ways. Speaking of vocal gestures involves, therefore, a shift to a metaphorical level, because voice does not belong, strictly speaking, to the body, but it is a product of it. Moreover, voice is the medium of language. The voice whatever it does, even the simplest noise, is inescapably meaningful: it always triggers associations and it always carries within itself a model whether natural or cultural. The inscription of the ‘voices of the body’ in art music does not require an absolute disruption of the subjectivity, but calls for a renegotiation of the cast off dimension of the voice-body, which has been active forever in the oral musical tradition.

The early decades of the twentieth century saw Italian opera singers gradually lose the role of co-author they had once enjoyed and evolve into mere performers. The appearance of soprano Maria Callas (1923–1977) provoked a singing revolution which would contribute to restoring the subjectivity of the performance and establishing the centrality of the female voice in musical culture. Almost half a century after her death, she remains the most famous and quoted opera singer of all time, whose reputation has reached well beyond the narrow borders of the musical world. Her almost unconscious action relied on some basic features: – the restoration of lost performing practices, not only forgotten scores, but also techniques and styles related to them; – the legitimacy of a voice that moved away from the common euphony and timbre homogeneity pursued by modern vocal teaching; – the replacement of the concept of “beautiful sound” with that of “dramatically appropriate sound”; – the experimentation of unorthodox emission modes, anticipating some features of the Neue Musik and the so-called New Vocality of the following decades. If a modernisation and re-evaluation of singing and acting as a whole in the world of opera is today so evident, much of the credit is indeed due to her influence.