Bakhtin’s carnivalesque and parody in contemporary music: Evidence from my piece "I mballakkeri"

This paper will present the use of parody in my piece I mballakkeri as deriving from Bakhtin’s writings on the carnivalesque, related in turn to Dostoevsky’s and Rabelais’s works. The core of Bakhtin’s insights on carnival as a social institution and on its function as a guarantor of social order will be briefly presented in the introductive section, while the central section of the paper will be focussed on the application of this theoretical framework to my activity as a composer, with particular regards to my recent piece I mballakkeri for Disklavier and electronics, premiered in November 2012 at Goldsmiths, University of London, as part of the Interactive Keyboard Symposium: in this piece, the interaction between instrumental fragments and electronics, in the form of a distorted caricature of the former by the latter, responds to a specific parodic intent, aimed at the symbolic depiction of political discourse, which in turn implies a reflection on the ambivalent nature of democratic participation.