ROMAVANTGARDE aims to reveal a particular phenomenon in the history of music: the effervescence of avant-garde networks in Rome during the 1960s. This phenomenon saw the first steps of influential figures to come: Frederic Rzewski, Alvin Curran, and Ennio Morricone. But it is also of particular interest as it involved a large number of artists from varied national and cultural horizons, connected diverse institutions (schools, bars, religious establishments), and saw the convergence of various genres (art, jazz, and popular music) to create original repertoires. As a consequence, this is an ideal case to contribute to research on musical creativity and, in particular, to study how art music creation—despite the enduring paradigm of the individual genius—is a collective phenomenon involving human but also nonhuman actors (institutions, artifacts, concepts). To do so, ROMAVANTGARDE draws specifically on Actor-Network Theory (ANT), but also on Social Network Analysis (SNA). The first approach maps the social relationships between people, objects, and ideas, treating them all as agentic entities that form a vast network. The second explores social structures using networks and graph theory. The combination of both will prove an innovative tool for the understanding of sociotechnical networks in music creation. ROMAVANTGARDE’s expected impacts are to advance knowledge on the history of twentieth-century music and to reveal Rome as a cosmopolitan city actively participating in the construction of the European and international musical landscape. Doing so, ROMAVANTGARDE aims to enhance our understanding of the cultural dynamics in twentieth-century Europe. Moreover, it aspires to further research on creativity and collective intelligence, and to encourage the recent exchanges between music studies and networks theories such as ANT and SNA.
