GESTALT THEORY © 2016 (ISSN 0170-057 X) Vol. 38, No.2/3, 267-278 Paolo Russo Dramatic Perception. Foreground and Background in Nineteenth-Century Operatic Concertatos he study of perceptual behavior in music needs a historical and hermeneutical approach, in order to contextualize styles and conventions which implicate the expectations of the listener (see Meyer 1973, 109-241). In the ield of music, subsequent elaboration of the gestalt theory has in fact shown how the basic principles of perception are continually evolving, based on the listener’s experience and competence (see Meyer 1956, Sloboda 1985, Guarnieri Corazzol 2004). Away from the laboratory, these principles have been reconsidered on the basis of mental processes tied to live experience in theatres and concert halls and interpreted as the basis of the listener’s ability to listen to music (see Guarnieri Corazzol 2004, 63). We have had to overcome the diiculties of dividing up long musical compositions and devise general rules for grouping within them (see Sloboda 1985, 174-175) 1 . It may be useful to carry out case studies of structures and musical forms with a clear meaning which does not necessarily have to be descriptive or, in other words, which is not limited by the painting of images or emotions conveyed through words. In opera, for example, the music is not simply an accompaniment and expression of a poetic text; it brings a dramatic or emotional situation to life, through the compositional structures of the music. Indeed, musical theatre is theatre made up of music, consisting of musical forms. A composer creates a drama by manipulating solid musical conventions which the listener unconsciously recognizes, having absorbed them in the course of time, rather 1 But also Bod 2002, 27: “It is widely assumed that the preferred grouping structure of a piece depends on a combination of low-level phenomena, such as local discontinuities and intervallic distances, and high-level phenomena, such as melodic parallelism and internal harmony. Most models of musical segmentation use the Gestalt principles of proximity and similarity … to predict the low-level grouping structure of a piece: grouping boundaries preferably fall on larger inter-onset-intervals, larger pitch intervals, etc.. While most models also incorporate higher-level grouping phenomena, such as melodic parallelism and harmony, these phenomena remain often unformalized”. Many distinguished studies by Irène Deliège have looked at the analysis of listening to long musical texts, among them are: Deliège & Mélen 1997. See also Hanninen 2012.