Book presentation with Giuliano Budden.
In the autumn of 2024, the State Library of Lucca hosted Synthetic Sources: Libraries in the Age of Artificial Hallucinations, a workshop conceived by Guido Segni as part of GIUNGLA and dedicated to exploring the relationship between archives, memory, and artificial intelligence. Drawing on the Library’s collections and holdings, participants were invited to construct a plausible yet entirely fictional historical narrative, testing the ways in which we assign authenticity to sources and distinguish fact from plausibility.
From this experience emerged DORIA: Letters, Cylinders and Transmissions from the Impossible Archive, an alternate history built around the Puccini collections preserved by the State Library of Lucca. The project imagines a small deviation in the biography of Giacomo Puccini: a seemingly insignificant event that alters the course of his personal story and opens up a different reading of his life and times. Through letters, recordings, testimonies, and apparently authentic documents, the narrative intertwines invention and research, bringing to light real yet little-known aspects of the Puccinian universe.
The volume is presented as the work of Giuliano Budden, a musicologist, archivist, and scholar of historical sound recording. Yet Budden is also a fiction: an imaginary author created to lend coherence and credibility to the impossible archive from which the story of DORIA emerges. His biography, research, and critical voice form an integral part of the work and of the narrative framework developed by the project.
Giuliano Budden (Milan, 1955) is a musicologist, archivist, and essayist. He taught Music History and Source Criticism at the University of Brescia-Valcamonica, with a break in his academic activity between 1989 and 1992. He collaborated with the Italian Centre for Musical Documentation in Bologna and with the European Institute for Phonographic Studies in Geneva, where he conducted research into signal alteration phenomena in early twentieth-century wax-cylinder recordings.
His research focuses on Italian opera between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular attention to hidden creative processes, private correspondence, and the earliest sound testimonies of cylinder phonography, whose ability to preserve “not only sound, but the threshold before sound” he has frequently highlighted in academic conferences.
He has edited critical editions of previously unpublished correspondence and contributed to collective volumes on the reception of Puccini’s operas in Europe. He occasionally collaborates with private archives and artists’ families in the recovery and preservation of materials not originally intended for publication.
DORIA: Letters, Cylinders and Transmissions from the Impossible Archive is his first work of narrative writing—a choice, as he himself declares, imposed by the materials themselves.