The “Studi Musicali Moderni” research group of the Fondazione Ugo e Olga Levi is organizing a conference in Venice on October 9 and 10, 2026, titled Stories of Life and Music. The conference aims to stimulate the study and analysis of autobiographical narratives (both published and unpublished) by individuals who have worked within the field of music in various capacities: composition and performance, dance, musicology, journalism, instrument making and tuning, event management, etc.
The Scientific Committee invites proposals of papers on any topic related to this theme. In the context of this conference, autobiographical writings are understood to include not only formal memoirs but also interviews, correspondence, dedications, and any type of document from any historical period or culture that is relevant to the indicated field of research.
In particular—though not exclusively—the committee encourages in-depth exploration of the autobiographical writings of female musicians. While a solid line of research on women’s autobiographies has developed over the last thirty years (Smith-Watson 1998; Dibattista 2014), it remains to be explored whether specific issues exist in this domain related to being a female musician. Consider, for instance, the question of public identity. In contrast to female writers who managed to gain attention and visibility in the public sphere beyond their autobiographical production (from George Sand to Virginia Woolf, from Gertrude Stein to Simone de Beauvoir), for many other women who remained in the shadows, autobiography was a means of writing “their own story within History, through a subtle transgression of the frontiers between the private sphere, to which they were
supposed to belong, and the public or event-based domain, the reserve of men” (Castro-Paoli 2001).
Through this type of writing, women were able to “touch the heart of their own identity’s roots, overcoming the historical barriers between public and private” (Ulivieri-Biemmi 2011). This explains certain constants such as “the indeterminacy of the narrative, the modesty of confidences, and a principle of narrative circulation” (Castro-Paoli 2001), as well as “a more particular attention toward certain subjects such as the body and everything connected to it, such as sexuality, motherhood, or violence” (Olivier 2007).
Such a framework certainly applies, at least until the middle of the last century, to the autobiographical production of women who played instruments and wrote music, who were largely confined to the private sphere—or prejudicially opposed, as in the field of composition. However, if we look at the memoirs of female protagonists in musical theater—both highbrow and popular—we find traits that are in some ways opposite. Rather, these artists experienced (and still experience) powerful public visibility and intense media exposure (articles and reviews, caricatures and photos, recordings and films—and today, social media), which lead to a fragmentation of the self in a kaleidoscope of interpretations by others, predominantly male (the male gaze described by Laura Mulvey). To this great emotional pressure, they reacted by recounting their “true” selves. In addition to the primadonnas of Opera, this phenomenon was particularly striking among artists of the café-concert and music-hall, where the exposure of the body and the insecurity stemming from the ebb and flow of success and failure played a central role. We thus witness the paradox of an autobiography written in 1865 at age twenty-eight by Thérésa, a star of the café-concert, seeking “the consolation of seeing my name outlive my success, so that, on the day I lose my voice, at least my Memoirs will remain” (Privitera 2015, p. 14). The flourishing autobiographical production of famous contemporary singers subject to extraordinary media exposure (from Joan Baez to Joni Mitchell, from Rita Pavone to Iva Zanicchi, from Juliette Gréco to Britney Spears), confirms this need to tell the “truth” about themselves.