La divulgazione musicale in Rai-tv fra gli anni Sessanta e Ottanta. Specchio sonoro di Roman Vlad (1964)e Tutto è musica di Vittorio Gelmetti (1980)

In its first thirty years of activity (the television service started on 3 January 1954), RAI-TV popularised art music not only by airing opera and symphonic events, but also by designing and producing pedagogical and educational programmes. Particularly on the second channel, RAI produced a few programmes on art music led by important musicologists: it is the case of Specchio sonoro, in which Roman Vlad illustrates the life and works of great composers from the twentieth century (Bartók, Stravinskij, Prokof’ev, Schönberg, Berg, and Webern), setting them in their historical and cultural context and explaining their style by playing their pieces on the piano. In the following decade, programmes with explicit educational goals, led by expert-lecturers, give way to programmes that are more related to the genre of “investigation”, where in-depth news analysis and the investigation of current dimension prevailed. In the thirteen episodes of Tutto è musica, composer Vittorio Gelmetti attempts an analysis of the ‘musical phaenomenon’ under several perspectives, avoiding qualitative distinctions between genres, periods of time and civilisations. Through the analysis of these two broadcasts - Specchio sonoro and Tutto è musica - the essay aims to highlight two different ways of divulging music on television, corresponding to those phases of Italian TV that Umberto Eco summarised in the definitions "paleo-tv" and "neo-tv".