Music of Italy
The music of Italy ranges across a broad spectrum, from opera to modern experimental classical music, and from the traditional music of the diverse regions to a body of popular music drawn from both native and imported sources. Music has traditionally been one of the great cultural markers of Italian national and ethnic identity and holds an important position in society and in politics.
Musical developments in Italy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance created music that spread throughout Europe. Innovations in the use of musical scales, harmony, notation, and experiments in musical theater led directly to opera in the late 16th century. This is the origin of much of modern European classical music, such as the symphony and concerto, and of later developments in popular music.
Modern Italian music includes a range of native and recently imported styles. The field of classical music includes instrumental and vocal music, ranging from experimental styles and international fusions to opera, which is also a form of popular music. Italian popular music incorporates indigenous styles such as the canzone Napoletana and imported forms such as American jazz and hip hop. Italian folk music remains an important part of the country's musical heritage, and spans a diverse array of regional styles, instruments and dances. The infrastructure that supports music as a profession includes a wide range of conservatories, opera houses, radio and television stations, recording studios, music festivals, and centers of musicological research.
Characteristics
Italian music is generally eclectic, like other elements of Italian culture. No parochial protectionist movement has ever attempted to keep Italian music pure and free from foreign influence, except briefly under the Fascist regime of the 1920s and 30s. As a result, Italian music has kept elements of the many peoples that have dominated or influenced the country, including Germanic tribes, Arabs, French and Spanish.
Immigrant populations from around the Mediterranean, especially Greece, the Balkans and North Africa, have established large communities in the southern peninsula over the last one thousand years. As a result, folk music on Sicily and the southern Italian mainland display features typical of elsewhere in the Mediterranean. These include an excessive nasality in the voice and an extremely ornamental approach to pitch. Lomax's description of southern Italian singing is widely cited: "A voice as pinched and strangulated and high-pitched as any in Europe. The singing expression is one of true agony, the throat is distended and flushed with strain, the brow knotted with a painful expression. Many tunes are long and highy ornamented in Oriental style." Melody has typically been important in most Italian musical forms, even at the expense of text and harmonic complexity. This is true in opera, popular music and even, to some extent, in modern text-centered styles such as Italian hip hop and the music of the cantautori singer-songriters.
Social identity
The Italian statesman Massimo d’Azeglio is said to have uttered one of the most famous phrases to come out of the drive to unite Italy in the 19th century: “We have created Italy; now we have to create Italians.” It was a succint statement of a problem that has by no means been overcome in modern Italy--creating a sense of national identity extending through the many different social classes and ethnic groups from the Alps to Sicily. In one asks, What is “Italian music?” or “Can Italian cultural and social identity be defined by a particular kind of music?”, it is very easy to fall into stereotypes, perceptions about Italy and Italians that exist largely abroad. For example, some years ago in the city of Venice, the mayor banned gondoliers from singing Neapolitan songs for the tourists. It seems that almost all foreigners were climbing into the boats and requesting ‘O sole mio and other songs typical of Naples but widely regarded abroad as “Italian music.”
Perhaps all one can say is that allegiance to music is integrally woven into the social identity of Italians, but no single style has ever been associated with a sense of an Italian identity, or been considered a "national style". Most folk musics are localized, and unique to a small region or city. Italy's classical legacy, however, is an important point of the country's identity, particularly opera; traditional operatic pieces remain a popular and important part of music. The musical output of Italy remains characterized by "great diversity and creative independence (with) a rich variety of types of expression".
With the growing industrialization that accelerated during the 20th century, Italian society gradually moved from an agricultural base to an urban and industrial center. This change weakened traditional culture in many parts of society; a similar process occurred in other European countries, but unlike them, Italy had no major initiative to preserve traditional musics. Immigration from North Africa, Asia, and other European countries led to further diversification of Italian music. Traditional music largely existed only in small pockets, especially as part of dedicated campaigns to retain local musical identities.
Politics
Music and politics have been intertwined for centuries in Italy. Just as many works of art and sculpture in the Italian Renaissance were commissioned by royalty and the Roman Catholic Church, much music was likewise composed on the basis of such commissions--incidental court music, music for coronations, for the birth of a royal heir, royal marches (what we, today, call "national anthems"), etc. Composers who strayed ran certain risks. Among the best known of such cases involves the Neapolitan composer Domenico Cimarosa, who composed the Republican hymn for the short-lived Neapolitan Republic of 1799. When the republic fell, he was tried for treason along with other revolutionaries. Cimarosa was not among those executed by the restored monarchy, but he was exiled.
Music also played a role in Italian political life in early attempts at unification of the peninsula when some leaders attempted to use music to forge a unifying cultural identity. The most outstanding example of this is the chorus Va Pensiero from Verdi's opera Nabucco. The opera is about ancient Babylonia, but the chorus contains the phrase "O mia Patria", ostensibly about the struggle of the Israelites. It was a not-so-veiled reference to the destiny of a not-yet-united Italy, and there was no doubt in any Italian's mind which "Patria" was meant. The entire chorus became the unofficial anthym of the Risorgimento, the drive to unify Italy in the 19th century. Many still feel that the chorus should be the national anthym of Italy; although it is not, it is still regarded as one of the greatest pieces of Italian patriotic music ever composed. Even Verdi's name was a synoym for Italian unity since "Verdi" could be read as an acronym for "Vittorio Emanuele Re d'Italia" (Victor Emanuel King of Italy, in reference to the Savoy monarch who eventually became Victor Emanuel II, the first king of united Italy). Thus, "Viva Verdi" became a rallying cry for patriots and often appeared as graffiti scrawled on the walls of cities such as Milan in what was then territory under the control of Austro-Hungary. Interestingly, Verdi, himself, had problems with censorship before the unification of Italy. His opera Un ballo in maschera was originally entitled Gustavo III and was presented to the San Carlo opera in Naples, the capital of the then Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, in the late 1850s . The Neapolitan censors objected to the realistic plot about the real-life assassination of Gustav III, king of Sweden, in the 1790s. Even after the plot was totally changed, the Naples censors still rejected it.
Later, in the Fascist era of the 1920s and 30s, government censorship occurred, though not on a systematic basis. The music media often criticized music that was perceived as either politically radical or insufficiently Italian. General print media such as, for example, the Enciclopedia Moderna Italiana, tended to treat traditionally favored composers such as Puccini and Mascagni with the same brevity as composers and musicians that were not as favored—modernists such as Casella and Busoni; that is, encyclopedia entries of the era were mere lists of career milestones such as compositions and teaching positions held. Even the conductor Arturo Toscanini, an avowed opponent of Fascism, gets the same neutral and distant treatment with no mention at all of his “anti-regime” stance. Perhaps the best-known episode of music colliding with politics involves Toscanini. He had been forced out of the musical directorship at La Scala in Milan in 1929 because he refused to begin every performance with the fascist song, Giovinezza. For this insult to the regime, he was attacked and beaten on the street outside the Bologne opera after a performance in 1931. During the Fascist era, political pressure stymied the development of classical music, although censorship was not as systematic as in Nazi Germany. A series of "racial Laws" were passed in 1938 denying Jews membership in professional and artistic associations, thus denying to Jewish composers and musicians in Italy access to a professional life.
More recently, in the later part of the 20th century, especially in the 1970s and beyond, music became further emmeshed in Italian politics. A roots revival stimulated interest in folk traditions, led by writers, collectors and traditional performers. The political right in Italy viewed this roots revival with disdain, as a product of the "unprivileged classes". The revivalist scene thus became associated with the opposition, and became a vehicle for "protest against free-market capitalism" Similarly, the avant-garde classical music scene has, since the 1970s, been associated with and promoted by the Italian Communist Party, a change that can be traced back to the 1968 student revolts and protests. Many songs of the modern singer-songwriters--the cantautori-- deal with alienation from society. For example, these lines are from Pino Daniele's Terra Mia:
- "How sad and how bitter it is
- To sit and watch it all and
- hear words that that can do nothing.
- If I kill myself, I'll be throwing away
- The bit of freedom that this world and its people owe me."
Classical music
Italy has long been a center for European classical music, and by the beginning of the 20th century, Italian classical music had forged a distinct national sound that was decidedly Romantic and melodic. As typified by the operas of Verdi, it was music in which "...The vocal lines always dominate the tonal complex and are never overshadowed by the instrumental accompaniments..." Italian classical music had resisted the "German harmonic juggernaut"—that is, the dense harmonies of Wagner, Mahler and R. Strauss. Italian music also had little in common with the French reaction to that German music—the impressionism of Debussy, for example, in which melodic development is largely abandoned for the creation of mood and atmosphere through the sounds of individual chords.
European classical music changed greatly in the 20th century. The new music abandoned much of the historical, nationally developed schools of harmony and melody in favor of experimental music, atonality, Minimalism and electronic music, all of which employ features that have become common to European music in general and not Italy specifically. These changes have also made classical music less accessible to many people. Important modern composers of 20th–century Italian music include Luciano Berio, Luigi Dallapiccola, Carlo Jachino, Gian Carlo Menotti, Jacopo Napoli, and Goffredo Petrassi.
Opera
Opera had its origins in Italy in the late 1500s during the time of the Florentine Camerata. Through the centuries that followed, great tradtions of opera developed in Venice and Naples; the operas of Monteverdi, Alessandro Scarlatti, and, later, of Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti flourished. Opera has remained the musical form most closely linked with Italian music and Italian identity. This was most obvious in the 19th century through the works of Verdi, an icon of Italian culture and, particularly, of pan-Italian unity. Italy retained a Romantic operatic musical tradition in the early 20th century, exemplified by composers whose music was anchored in the previous century, including Arrigo Boito, Ruggiero Leoncavallo, Pietro Mascagni, and Francesco Cilea.
After WWI, however, opera declined in popularity compared to the great heights of the 19th and early 20th centuries. One cause was the general cultural shift away from Romanticism, and another was perhaps the rise of the cinema, which became a major source of entertainment. A third cause, possibly, is the fact that "internationalism" had brought contemporary Italian opera to a state where it was no longer "Italian." This was the opinion of at least one prominent Italian musicologist and critic, Fausto Terrefranca, who, in a 1912 pamphelt entitled Giaccomo Puccini and International Opera, accused Puccini of "commercialism" and of having deserted Italian traditions. Traditional Romantic opera remained--and remains--popular; indeed, the dominant opera publisher in the early 20th century was Ricordi, which focused almost exclusively on popular operas until the 30s, when the company allowed more unusual composers with less mainstream appeal. The rise of relatively new publishers such as Carisch and Suvini Zerboni also helped to fuel the diversification of Italian opera. Opera remains a major part of Italian culture; renewed interest in opera across the sectors of Italian society began in the 1980s. Respected composers from this era include the well-known Aldo Clementi, and younger composers such as Marco Tutino and Lorenzo Ferrero.
Instrumental music
The dominance of opera in Italian music tends to overshadow the important area of instrumental music. Historically, such music includes the vast array of sacred instrumental music, instrumental concertos, and orchestral music in the works of Andrea Gabrielli, Giovanni Gabrielli, Albinoni, Corelli, Vivaldi, Boccherini, Cherubini and Domenico Scarlatti. Even opera composers occasionally worked in other forms-- Verdi's Requiem, for example, or his String Quartet in E minor. In the early 20th century, instrumental music began growing in importance, a process that started around 1904 with Giuseppe Martucci's Second Symphony, a work that Malipiero called "the starting point of the renascence of non-operatic Italian music. Several early composers from this era used native folk traditions, such as Leone Sinigaglia.
The early 20th century is also marked by the presence of a group of composers called the generazione dell'ottanta (generation of 1880), including Alfano, Casella, Malpiero, Pizetti, and Respighi. These composers usually concentrated on writing instrumental works, rather than the operas in which Puccini and his musical forebears had specialised. Members of this generation were the dominant figures in Italian music after Puccini's death in 1924. New organizations arose to promote Italian music, such as the Venice Festival of Contemporary Music and the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. Guido Gatti's founding of the periodical il Piano and then La ressegna musicale also helped to promote a broader view of music than the political and social climate allowed. Most Italians, however, preferred more traditional pieces and established standards, and only a small but growing audience sought new styles of experimental classical music.
Ballet
While one does not generally think of Italy as a nation of ballet, it is important to note the contributions that Italians have made to this classical dance form. Italy, particularly Milan, was the European center of court choreography as early as the 1400s in the form of such things as ritual masked balls. Early choreographers and composers of ballet include Fabrizio Caroso and Cesare Negri. The style of ballet known as the “spectacles all’italiana" that Catherine de Medici imported into France from her native Italy caught on, and the first ballet performed in France (1581), Ballet comique de la Royn, was in fact composed by an Italian, Baltazarini di Belgioioso, better known by the French version of his name, Beaujoyeulx. Early ballet was accompanied by considerable instrumentation, with the playing of horns, trombones kettle drums, dulcimers, bagpipes, etc. Although the music has not survived, there is speculation that dancers, themselves, may have carried instruments on the stage and played them. Then, in the wake of the French Revolution, Italy again became a center of ballet, largely through the efforts of Salvatore Viganò, a choreographer who worked with some of the most prominent composers of the day. He was made the balletmaster of La Scala in Milan in 1812. The best-known example of Italian ballet from the 19th century is probably Excelsior, with music by Romualdo Marenco and choreography by Luigi Manzotti. It was composed in 1881 and is a lavish tribute to the scientific and industrial progress of the 19th century. It is still performed and was staged as recently as 2002 in Milan.
Currently, major Italian opera theaters maintain ballet companies. They exist to provide incidental and ceremonial dancing called for in many operas, such as Aida or La Traviata. These dance companies usually maintain a separate ballet season and perform the standard repertoire of classical ballet, little of which, however, is Italian. There is no Italian equivalent of, for example, the Russian Bolshoi Ballet and similar companies that exist only to perform ballet, independent of a parent opera theater. Since 1979, however, there has existed in Italy a modern dance company, the Alterballetto. It is based in Reggio Emilia and is the first permanent ballet-producing organization independent of an opera house in Italy. The company performs worldwide; the artistic director since 1998 is choreographer Mauro Bigonzetti.
Experimental music
Experimental music is a broad, loosely-defined field encompassing musics created by abandoning traditional classical concepts of melody and harmony, and by using the new technology of electronics to create hitherto impossible sounds. In Italy, one of the first to devote his attention to experimental music was Ferruccio Busoni, whose 1907 publication, Sketch for a New Aesthetic of Music, discussed the use of electrical and other new sound sources in future music. He spoke of his dissatisfaction with the constraints of traditional music:
- “We have divided the octave into twelve equidistant degrees…and have constructed our instruments in such as way that we can never get in above or below or between them…our ears are no longer capable of hearing anything else…yet Nature created an infinite gradation—infinite! Who still knows it nowadays?”
Similarly, Luigi Russolo the Italian Futurist painter and composer, wrote of the possibilities of new music in his 1913 manifestoes The Art of Noises (1913) and Musica Futurista. He also invented and built instruments such as the intonarumori ("intoners" or "noise machines"), mostly percussion, to create "noises" for performance. These noise machines were an early precursor to the later style known as musique concrète. One of the most influential events in early 20th century classical music history was the return of of Alfredo Casella from France in 1915; Casella founded the Società Italiana di Musica Moderna, which promoted several composers in disparate styles, ranging from experimental to traditional. After a dispute over the value of experimental music in 1923, Casella formed the Corporazione delle Nuove Musiche to promote modern experimental music in Italy.
Early attempts to use new electronic media include Ottorino Respighi’s 1924 composition, The Pines of Rome, which called for the use of a phonograph recording of nightingales. This probably constitutes the first combination of acoustic instruments with an electronic device. In the 1950s, Luciano Berio experimented with instruments accompanied by electronic sounds on tape.
Today, one important organization that fosters research in avantgarde and electronic music is CEMAT, the Federation of Italian Electroacoustic Music Centers. It was founded in 1996 in Rome and is a member of the C.I.M.E., the Confédération Internationale de Musique Electroacoustique. CEMAT promotes the activities of the “Sonora” project, launched jointly by the Department for Performing Arts, Ministry for Cultural Affairs and the Directorate for Cultural Relations, Ministry for Foreign Affairs with the object of promoting and diffusing Italian contemporary music abroad.
Classical music in society
Italian classical music grew gradually more experimental and progressive into the mid-20th century, while popular tastes have tended to stick with well established composers and compositions of the past. The 2004-2005 program at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples is typical of modern Italy: of the eight opera represented, the most recent was Puccini. In symphonic music, of the 26 composers whose music was played, 21 of them were from the 19th century or earlier. This shows a focus on composers who use the melodies and harmonies typical of the Romantic era. This phase of musical development is common to other European traditions, and is known as postmodernism, a style that reaches back to earlier harmonic and melodic concepts that pre-date the modern conceptions of atonality and dissonance. This has helped to maintain a continued presence of classical music across the broad spectrum of Italian society. When music is part of a public display or gathering, it is often chosen from a very eclectic repertoire that is as likely to include well-known classical music as popular music.
A few recent works have become a part of the modern repertoire, including scores and theatrical works by composers like Berio, Nono, Donatoni, and Bussotti. These composers are not part of a distinct school or tradition, though they do share certain techniques and influences. By the 1970s, avant-garde classical music had become linked to the Italian Communist Party, while a revival of popular interest continued into the next decade, with foundations, festivals and organization created to promote modern music. Near the end of the 20th century, government sponsorship of musical institutions began to decline, and several RAI choirs and city orchestras were closed. Despite this, a number of composers gained international reputations in the early 21st century.
Folk music
Italian folk music has a deep and complex history. Because national unification came late to the Italian peninsula, the traditional music of its many hundreds of cultures exhibit no homogeneous national character. Rather, each region and community possesses a unique musical tradition that reflects the history, language, and ethnic composition of that particular locale. These traditions reflect Italy's geographic position in southern Europe and in the center of the Mediterranean Sea; Arabic, African, Celtic, Persian, Roma, and Slavic influences, as well as her rough geography and the historic dominance of small city states have all combined to allow notably diverse musical styles to coexist in close proximity.
Italian folk styles are very diverse, and include monophonic, polyphonic, responsorial song, choral music, instrumental and vocal performances, and other styles. Choral singing and polyphonic song forms are primarily found in northern Italy, while south of Naples, solo singing is more common, and groups usually use unison singing in two or three parts carried by a single performer. Northern ballad-singing is syllabic, with a strict tempo and intelligible lyrics, while southern styles use a rubato tempo, and a strained, tense vocal style.
Folk musicians use the dialect of their own regional tradition; this rejection of the standard Italian language in folk song is nearly universal. There is little perception of a common Italian folk tradition, and the country's folk music never became a national symbol.
Regions
Today, Italy's folk music is sometimes divided into several spheres of geographic influence, a classification system proposed by Alan Lomax in 1956 and often repeated. Additionally, Curt Sachs proposed the existence of two quite distinct kinds of folk music in Europe: continental and Mediterranean, and others have placed the transition zone from the former to the latter roughly in north-central Italy, approximately between Pesaro and La Spezia. The central, northern and southern parts of the peninsula each share certain musical characteristics, and are each distinct from the music of Sardinia.
In the Piedmontese valleys and some Ligurian communities of northwestern Italy, the music preserves the strong influence of ancient Occitania. The lyrics of the Occitanic Troubadours are some of the oldest preserved samples of vernacular song, and modern bands like Gai Saber and Lou Dalfin preserve and contemporize the Occitan music. The Occitanian culture retains characteristics of the ancient Celtic influence and the music does as well, through the use of six or seven hole flutes (fifre) or the bagpipes (piva). The music of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, in northeastern Italy, shares much more in common with Austrian and Slovenia including variants of the waltz and the polka. Much of northern Italy shares with areas of Europe further to the north an interest in ballad singing (called canto epico lirico in Italian) and choral singing. Even ballads--usually thought of as a vehicle for a solo voice--may be sung in choirs. In the province of Trento "folk choirs" are the most common form of music making.
Noticeable musical differences in the southern type include increased use of interval part singing and a greater variety of folk instruments. The Celtic and Slavic influences on the group and open-voice choral works of the north yield to a stronger Arabic, Greek, and African-influenced strident monody of the south. In parts of Apulia (Grecìa Salentina, for example) the Griko dialect is commonly used in song. The Apulian city of Taranto is a home of the tarantella, a rhythmic dance widely performed in southern Italy. Apulian music in general, and Salentine music in particular, has been well researched and documented by ethnomusicologists and by Aramirè.
The music of the island of Sardinia is best known for the polyphonic chanting of the tenores. The sound of the tenores recalls the roots of Gregorian chant, and is similar to but distinctive from the Ligurian trallalero. As well, typical instruments include the launeddas, a Sardinian triplepipe used in a sophisticated and complex manner. Efisio Melis was a master launeddas player of the 1930s, and other modern Sardinian folk revivalists include Elena Ledda and Tancaruja.
Songs
Italian folk songs include ballads, lyrical songs, lullabies and children's songs, seasonal songs based around holidays like Christmas, life-cycle songs that celebrate weddings, baptisms and other important events, dance songs, cattle calls and occupational songs, tied to professions such as fishermen, shepherds and soldiers. Ballads (canti epico-lirici) and lyric songs (canti lirico-monostrifici) are two important categories. Ballads are most common in northern Italy, while lyric songs prevail further south. Ballads are closely tied to the English form, with some British ballads existing in exact correspondence with an Italian song. Other Italian ballads are more closely based on French models. Lyric songs are a diverse category that consist of lullabies, serenades and work songs, and are frequently improvised though based on a traditional repertoire.
Other Italian folk song traditions are less common than ballads and lyric songs. Strophic, religious laude, sometimes in Latin, are still occasionally performed, and epic songs are also known, especially those of the maggio celebration. Professional female singers perform dirges similar in style to those elsewhere in Europe. Yodeling exists in northern Italy, though it is most commonly associated with the folk musics of other Alpine nations. The Italian Carnival is associated with several song types, especially the Carnival of Bagolino, Brescia. Choirs and brass bands are a part of the mid-Lenten holiday, while the begging song tradition extends through many holidays throughout the year.
Instrumentation
Instrumentation is an integral part of all facets of Italian folk music. There are several instruments that retain older forms even while newer models have become widespread elsewhere in Europe. Many Italian instruments are tied to certain rituals or occasions, such as the zampogna bagpipe, typically heard only at Christmas. Italian folk instruments can be divided into string, wind and percussion categories. The most common instruments include the organetto, an accordion most closely associated with the saltarello; the diatonic button organetto is most common in central Italy, while chromatic accordions prevail in the north. Many municipalities are home to brass bands, which perform with roots revival groups; these ensembles are based around the clarinet, accordion, violin and small drums, adorned with bells.
Italy's wind instruments include most prominently a wide variety of folk flutes. These include duct, globular and transverse flutes, as well as the firlinfeu pan flute. Double flutes are most common in Campania, Calabria and Sicily. A ceramic pitcher called the quartara is also used as a wind instrument, by blowing across an opening in the narrow bottle neck; it is most common in eastern Sicily and Campania Single- (ciaramella) and double-reed (piffero) pipes are commonly played in groups of two or three. Several folk bagpipes are well-known, including central Italy's zampogna, the beghet of Bergamo, the piva of Lombardy, and the müsa of Alessandria, Genoa, Pavia and Piacenza.
Percussion instruments are numerous: wood blocks, bells, castanets, drums. Several regions have their own distinct form of rattle, including the raganelle cog rattles, the Calabrian connochie, a spinning or shepherd's staff with permanently attached seed rattles with ritual fertility significance. The Neapolitan rattle is the triccheballacche, made out of several mallets in a wooden frame. Tambourines (tamburini, tamburello) are common, as are various kinds of drums, such as the friction drum putipù. The mouth-harp, scacciapensieri or care-chaser, is a distinctive instrument, found only in northern Italy and Sicily.
String instruments vary widely depending on locality, with no nationally prominent representative. Viggiano is home to a harp tradition, which has a historical base in Abruzzi, Lazio and Calabria. Calabria, alone, has 30 traditional musical instruments, some of which have
strongly archaic characteristics and are in part, or entirely, extinct in other parts of Italy. It is home to the four- or five-stringed guitar called the chitarra battente, and a three-stringed, bowed fiddle called the lira, which is also found in similar forms in the music of Crete and Southeastern Europe. A one-stringed, bowed fiddle, torototela, is common in the northeast of the country. The German-speaking Alto Aldige is known for the zither, and the ghironda (hurdy-gurdy) is found in Emilia, Piedmont and Lombardy.
Dance
Dance is an integral part of folk traditions in Italy. Some of the dances are ancient and, to a certain extent, persist today. There are magico-ritual dances of propitiation as well as harvest dances, including the “sea-harvest” dances of fishing communities in Calabria and the wine harvest dances in Tuscany. There are famous dances such as the tarantella in southern Italy. Perhaps the most iconic of Italian dances, the tarantella is in 6/8 time, and is part of a folk ritual intended to cure the poison caused by tarantula bites. As well, there are popular Tuscan dances that ritually act out the hunting of the hare, and there are still traces of the ancient weapon dance in dancing that displays knives, swords, hatchets, etc. Some of these dances use weapons to simulate or recall the moves of combat, while in others the weapons become stylized instruments of the dance, itself; for example, in a few villages in northern Italy, swords are replaced by wooden half-hoops embroidered with green, similar to the so-called "garland dances" in northern Europe. There are also dances of love and courting, such as the duru-duru dance in Sardinia.
Many of these dances are group activities, the group setting up in rows or circles; some—the love and courting dances—involve couples, either a single couple or more. The tammuriata (performed to the sound of the tambourine) is a couple dance performed in southern Italy and accompanied by a lyric song called a strambotto. Other couples dances are collectively referred to as saltarello. There are, however, also solo dances; most typical of these are the “flag dances” of various regions of Italy, in which the dancer passes a town flag or pennant around the neck, through the legs, behind the back, often tossing it high in the air and catching it. These dances can also be done in groups of solo dancers acting in unison or by coordinating flag passing between dancers. Northern Italy is also home to the monferrina, an accompanied dance that was incorporated in Western art music by the composer Muzio Clementi.
Popular music
The earliest Italian popular music was the 19th century Italian opera. Opera has had the more lasting effect, influencing Italy's folk, classical and popular musics. Opera tunes spread throughout Italy, through brass bands and itinerant ensembles. Canzone Napoletana, or Neapolitan song, is a distinct tradition that became a part of popular music in the 19th century, and was an iconic image of Italian music abroad by the end of the 20th century.
Imported styles have also become an important part of Italian popular music, beginning with the French Café-chantant in the 1890s and then the arrival of American jazz in the 1910s. Jazz remained little known, however, and Italy remained largely closed from international popular music until the end of World War 2. In the 1950s, American styles became more prominent, especially rock. The singer-songwriter cantautori tradition was a major development of the later 1960s, while the Italian rock scene soon diversified into progressive, punk, funk and folk-based styles.
Early popular song
Italian opera became a major part of the Italian popular tradition in the 19th century. It was immensely popular, known across even the most rural sections of the country. Most villages had occasional opera productions, and the techniques used in opera influenced rural folk musics. Opera spread through itinerant ensembles and brass bands, focused in a local village. These civic bands (banda communale) used instruments to perform operatic arias, with trombones or fluegelhorns for male vocal parts and cornets for female parts.
Besides opera, some regional music in the 19th century also became popular throughout Italy. Notable among these local traditions was the Canzone Napoletana—the Neapolitan Song. Although there are anonymous, documented songs from Naples from many centuries ago, the term, canzone Napoletana now generally refers to a large body of relatively recent, composed popular music—such songs as "'O sole mio", "Torna a Surriento", and "Funiculi Funicula". In the 1700s, many composers, including Alessandro Scarlatti, Leonardo Vinci, and Giovanni Paisiello, contributed to the Neapolitan tradition by using the local language for the texts of some of their comic operas. Later, others—most famously Gaetano Donizetti—composed Neapolitan songs that started the great popularity of the music in Italy and abroad.< The Neapolitan song tradition became formalized in the 1830s through an annual songwriting competition for the yearly Piedigrotta festival, dedicated to the Madonna of Piedigrotta, a well-known church in the Mergellina area of Naples. The music is identified with Naples, but is famous abroad, having been exported on the great waves of emigration from Naples and southern Italy roughly between 1880 and 1920. Language is an extremely important element of Neapolitan song, which is always written and performed in Neapolitan, the regional minority language of Campania. Neapolitan songs typically use simple harmonies, and are structured in two sections, a refrain and narrative verses, often in contrasting relative or parallel major and minor keys. In non-musical terms, this means that many Neapolitan songs can sound "happy" one minute and "melancholy" the next.
Popular, as well, at the turn of the century, was the music of Francesco Tosti, remembered for his light, expressive songs. His style became very popular during the Belle Époque and is often known as salon music. His most famous works are Serenata(lyrics: Cesareo), Addio (lyrics: Rizzelli) and the popular Neapolitan song, Marechiaro, the lyrics of which are by the prominent Neapolitan dialect poet, Salvatore di Giacomo.
Recorded popular music began in the late 19th century, with international styles influencing Italian music by the late 1910s; however, the rise of the fascist autarchia of policy cultural isolationism in 1922 led to a retreat from international popular music. During this period, popular Italian musicians traveled abroad and learned elements of foreign styles like jazz and Latin American music. These musics influenced the Italian tradition, which spread abroad and further diversified following liberalization after World War 2.
Under the isolationist policies of the fascist regime, which rose to power in 1922, Italy developed an insular musical culture. Foreign musics were suppressed while Mussolini's government encouraged nationalism and linguistic and ethnic purity. Popular performers, however, travelled abroad, and brought back new styles and techniques. American jazz was an important influence on singers such as Alberto Rabagliati, who became known for a swinging style. Elements of harmony and melody from both jazz and blues were used in many popular songs, while rhythms often came from Latin dances like the tango, rumba and beguine. Italian composers incorporated elements from these styles, while Italian music, especially Neapolitan song, became a part of popular music across Latin America.
Modern pop
Among the best-known Italian pop singers of the last few decades are Domenico Modugno, Mina, Gianni Morandi, Adriano Celentano, and Al Bano. The repertoire combines American popular songs (in English or Italian) and home-grown Italian pop songs, such as: "Nel blu dipinto di blu" (best known as "Volare"), "Azzurro", "Insieme". Musicians who compose and sing their own songs are called cantautori (singer-songwriters). Their compositions typically focus on topics of social relevance and are often protest songs: this wave was begun in the 1960s by musicians like Fabrizio De André (cited by literary critic Fernanda Pivano as "Italy's best poet of the 20th century"), Giorgio Gaber, Gino Paoli and Luigi Tenco. Social, politic, psychological and intellectual themes, mainly in the wake of Gaber and De André's work, became even more predominant in 1970s authors like Pino Daniele (who sings mainly in Neapolitan), Francesco De Gregori, Francesco Guccini, Antonello Venditti and Roberto Vecchioni, although at the same time Lucio Battisti, Angelo Branduardi or Franco Battiato pursued a career more oriented to the tradition of Italian pop music, though with no less originality. There is some genre cross-over between the cantautori and those who are viewed as singers of "protest music".
Film scores, although they are secondary to the film, are often critically acclaimed in their own right. Among early music for Italian films from the 1930s was the work of Riccardo Zandonai with scores for the films La Principessa Tarakanova (1937) and Caravaggio (1941). Post-war examples include Goffredo Petrassi with Non c'e pace tra gli ulivi (1950) and Roman Vlad with Giulietta e Romeo (1954). Well-known, too, is Nino Rota whose post-war career included the scores for a number of films by Federico Fellini and, later, The Godfather series. Other prominent film score composers include Ennio Morricone, Riz Ortolani and Piero Umiliani.
Imported styles
(see also Italian rock, Italian hip hop
During the Belle Époque the French fashion of performing popular music at the café-chantant spread throughout Europe. The tradition had much in common with cabaret , and there is genre overlap in trying to define café-chantant, café-concert, cabaret, music hall, vaudeville, etc., but at least in its Italian manifestation, the tradition remained largely apolitical, focusing on lighter music, often risqué—but not bawdy. The first café-chantant in Italy was the Salone Margherita, which opened in 1890 on the premises of the new Galleria Umberto in Naples. The Salone was named for Margherita, queen consort of King Umberto, king of Italy. Elsewhere in Italy, the Gran Salone Eden in Milan and the Music Hall Olympia in Rome opened shortly thereafter. Café-chantant was alternately known as the Italianized caffè-concerto. The main performer, usually a woman, was called a chanteuse in French; the Italian term, sciantosa, is a direct coinage from the French. The songs, themselves, were not French, but were lighthearted or slightly sentimental songs composed in Italian. That music went out of fashion with the advent of WWI.
It is impossible to overstate the influence and importance of American popular music in Italy since the early 20th century and especially since 1950. All US pop forms, from lavish Broadway-show numbers to big-bands to Rock 'n' Roll to Rap have been—and continue to be—popular in Italy. Latin music, especially Brazilian bossa nova is also popular, and the Puerto Rican genre of reggaeton is rapidly become a popular form of dance music. It is now not uncommon for modern Italian pop artists such as Laura Pausini, Eros Ramazzotti, and Zucchero to release new songs in English or Spanish in addition to (or instead of) Italian. Thus, musical revues, which are standard fare on current Italian television, can easily go, in a single evening, from a big-band number with dancers to an Elvis impersonator to a current pop singer doing a rendition of a Puccini aria.
Italy has also become a home for a number of Mediterranean fusion projects. These include Al Darawish, a multicultural band based in Sicily and led by Palestinian Nabil Ben Salaméh. The Luigi Cinque Tarantula Hypertext Orchestra is another example, as is the TaraGnawa project by Phaleg and Nour Eddine. The Neapolitan popular singer, Massimo Ranieri has also released a CD, Oggi o dimane, of traditional canzone napoletana sung with North African rhythms and instruments.
Jazz found its way into Europe during WW1 through the presence of American musicians in military bands playing "syncopated" music. The first Italian jazz orchestras were formed during 1920s by musicians such as Arturo Agazzi with his Syncopated Orchestra and enjoyed immediate success. In spite of the anti-American cultural policies of the Fascist regime during the 1930s, American jazz remained popular. (Even Romano Mussolini, Benito's son, was a great jazz fan and then prominent jazz pianist.)
In the immediate post-war years jazz took off in Italy. All American post-war jazz styles, from be-bop to Free Jazz and Fusion have their equivalents in Italy. The universality of Italian culture ensured that jazz clubs would spring up throughout the peninsula, that all radio and then television studios would have jazz-based "house-bands," that Italian musicians would then start nurturing a "home grown" kind of jazz, based on European song forms, classical composition techniques and folk music (for example, in Sicily, where Enzo Rao and his group Shamal have added native Sicilian and Arab influences to American jazz). Currently, all Italian music conservatories have jazz departments, there are jazz festivals each year in Italy, the best-known of which is the Umbria Jazz Festival, and there are prominent publications such as the journal, Musica Jazz.
Italy was at the forefront of the progressive rock movement of the 1970s, a style that primarily developed in Europe but also gained airplay and popularity elsewhere in the world. Italian bands like Premiata Forneria Marconi (PFM), Banco del Mutuo Soccorso, and Le Orme incorporated a mix of symphonic rock and Italian folk music and were popular throughout Europe and (in case of PFM) the United States as well. Other progressive bands like Balletto di Bronzo or Museo Rosenbach remained little known, but their albums are today considered classics by collectors. A few avantgarde-rock bands (Area or Picchio dal Pozzo) gained notoriety for their innovative sound. Progressive rock concerts in Italy tended to have a strong political undertone and an energetic atmosphere.
The Italian hip hop scene began in the early 1990s with Articolo 31 from Milan. Their style was mainly influenced by East Coast rap. Other early hip hop crews were typically politically-oriented, like 99 Posse, who later became more influenced by British trip hop. More recent crews include gangster rappers like Sardinia's La Fossa. Other recently imported styles include techno, trance, and electronica performed by artists including Gabry Ponte, Eiffel 65, and Gigi D`Agostino. Additionally, there are many bands in Italy that play a style called patchanka, which is characterized by a mixture of traditional music, punk, reggae, rock and political lyrics. Modena City Ramblers are one of the more popular bands; they mix Irish, Italian, punk, reggae and many other forms of music.
Industry
A recent economics report says that the music industry in Italy made 2.3 billion euros in 2004. That sum refers to the sale of CDs, music electronics, musical instruments, and ticket sales for live performances; it represents a 4.35% growth over 2004. The actual sale of music albums has decreased slightly, but there has been a compensatory increase in paid-for digitally downloaded music from industry-approved sites. Thus, the recording industry in Italy is, as elsewhere, in somewhat of an uncertain stage in the CD vs Download struggle. By way of comparison, the Italian recording industry ranks eighth in the world; i.e. Italians own 0.7 music albums per capita as opposed to the USA, in first-place with 2.7. The report cites a 20% increase in 2004 over 2003 in paid royalties for on-air as well as live music.
Nationwide, there are three state-run and three private TV networks. All provide live music at least some of the time, thus giving work to musicians, singers, and dancers. Many large cities in Italy have local TV stations, as well, which may provide live folk or dialect music often of interest only to the immediate area.
The age of Book & CD superstores has come to Italy in the last decade. The largest of these chains is Feltrinelli, originally a publishing house started in the 1950s. In 2001, it geared up to the "Multimedia Store," massive department stores full of music. There are, at present, 14 such mega-stores in Italy, with more on the way. Other large chains include FNAC, originally a French concern. It operates internationally and currently has six large outlets in Italy. These stores also serve as venues for music performance, providing on the premises several live concerts a week of all genres of music.
Composing music for films is a major industry in Italy. Although secondary to the film, the music is often critically acclaimed in its own right. Among early music for Italian films from the 1930s was the work of Riccardo Zandonai with scores for the films La Principessa Tarakanova (1937) and Caravaggio (1941). Post-war examples include Goffredo Petrassi with Non c'e pace tra gli ulivi (1950) and Roman Vlad with Giulietta e Romeo (1954). Well-known, too, is Nino Rota whose post-war career included the scores for a number of films by Federico Fellini and, later, The Godfather series. Other prominent film score composers include Ennio Morricone, Riz Ortolani and Piero Umiliani.
Venues, festivals and holidays
Venues for music in Italy include concerts at the many music conservatories, symphony halls and opera houses. Italy also has many well-known international music festivals each year, including the Festival of Spoleto and the Wagner Festival in Ravello. Some festivals also offer venues to younger composers in classical music by producing and staging winning entries in competitions. The winner, for example, of the "Orpheus" International Competition for New Opera and Chamber music—besides winning considerable prize money—gets to see his or her musical work performed at The Spoleto Festival. There are also dozens of privately sponsored master classes in music each year that put on concerts for the public. Italy is also on the "must play" list for well-known orchestras from abroad; at almost any given time during the "high season", some major orchestra from elsewhere in Europe or North America is playing a concert somewhere in Italy.
Additionally, public music may be heard at dozens of pop and rock concerts throughout the year. Open-air opera may even be heard, for example, at the ancient Roman amphitheater, the Arena of Verona. Military bands, too, are popular in Italy. At a national level, one of the best-known of these is the concert band of the Guardia di Finanza (Italian Customs/Border Police); it performs many times a year.
Many theaters also routinely stage not just Italian translations of American musicals, but true Italian musical comedy, which are called by the English term "musical". In Italian, that term now describes a kind of musical drama not native to Italy, a form that employs the American idiom of jazz-pop-and rock-based music and rhythms to move a story along in a combination of songs and dialogue.
Attention should be paid to the religious venue for music in Italy, a predominantly Roman Catholic nation. Music in religious rituals manifests itself in a number of ways. Parish bands, for example, are quite common throughout Italy. They may be as small as four or five members to as many as 20 or 30—a real marching band. They commonly perform at religious festivals specific to a particular town, usually in honor of the patron saint of the town. Well-known, too, are the historic orchestral/choral masterpieces performed in church by professionals; these include such works as the Stabat Mater by Pegolesi and Verdi's Requiem. At the level of participation in music by church-goers, the Second Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965 revolutionized music in the Roman Catholic church, leading to an increase in the number of amateur choirs that perform regularly for services; the Council also encouraged the congregational singing of hymns, and a vast repertoire of new hymns has been composed in the last 40 years.
There is not a great deal of native Italian Christmas music. The most popular Italian Christmas carol is "Tu scendi dalle stelle", the words to which were written by Pope Pius IX in 1870. The melody is a major-key version of an older, minor-key Neapolitan carol "Quanno Nascette Ninno". Other than that, Italians largely sing translations of carols that come from the German and English tradition ("Silent Night", for example). There is no native Italian secular Christmas music, which accounts for the popularity of Italian-language versions of "Jingle Bells" and "White Christmas".
The Festival of Italian Song (also known as the Festival of Sanremo) is the most important venue for popular music in Italy. It has been held annually since 1951 and is currently staged at the Teatro Ariston in Sanremo. It is held in late February and runs for one week; it is, essentially, a gigantic popular music contest, giving veterans and newcomers a chance to present new songs. Winning the contest, though not a guarantee of subsequent fame and fortune, has often been a springboard to success for many performers. The festival is televised nationally for three hours a night, is hosted by the best-known Italian TV personalities, and has been a vehicle for such performers as Domenico Modugno, perhaps the best-known Italian pop singer of the last 50 years.
Television variety shows are the widest venue for popular music. They change often, but, currently, Buona Domenica, Domenica In, and I raccomandati are popular. The longest running musical broadcast in Italy is La Corrida, a three-hour weekly program of amateurs and would-be musicians. It started on the radio in 1968 and moved to TV in 1988. The studio audience bring cow-bells and sirens and are encouraged to show good-natured disapproval.
The city with the highest number of rock concerts (of national and international artists) is Milan, with a number close to the other European music capitals, as Paris, London and Berlin. In the Metro Area of Milan there were more than 700 concerts each year.
Education
In Italy, there are about 75 music conservatories, schools that provide advanced training for future professional musicians. There are also dozens of private music schools and workshops for things such as instrument building and repair. At the level, then, of higher education, there is no shortage of places to study music. However, Italy has virtually no extra-curricular music instruction at any level. That is to say, you don't go to high school or college and sign up for band. Elementary and high school students can expect to have one or two hours of musical instruction per week, generally in choral singing, and though most Italian universities have classes in related subjects such as music history, there is nothing in the way of performance. Thus, public education at any level is not a training ground or "feeder system" into amateur or professional music. True, Italy has a specialized system of high schools; students attend, as they choose, a high school for the classics, for science, for foreign languages, or for art--but not music. Italy does have ambitious, recent programs to expose children to more music; the state-run television network has started, for example, a program to use modern satellite technology to broadcast fine choral music into public schools (see External Links, below).
Scholarship
Scholarship in the field of collecting, preserving and cataloguing all varieties of music is vast. In Italy, as elsewhere, these tasks are spread over a number of agencies and organizations. Most large music conservatories maintain departments that oversee the research connected with their own collections. Such research, obviously, is now coordinated on a national and international scale via the internet. One prominent institution in Italy is IBIMUS, the Istituto di Bibliografia Musicale in Rome. It works with other agencies on an international scale through RISM, the Répertoire International des Sources Musicales, an international inventory and index of musical source material. Also, the Discoteca di Stato (National Archives of Recordings) in Rome, founded in 1928, holds the largest public collection of recorded music in Italy with some 230,000 examples of classical music, folk music, jazz, and rock, recorded on everything from antique wax cylinders to modern electronic media.
The scholarly study of traditional Italian music began in about 1850, with a group of early philological ethnographers who studied the impact of music on a pan-Italian national identity. A unified Italian identity only just started to develop after the political integration of the peninsula in 1860. The focus at that time was on the lyrical and literary value of music, rather than the instrumentation; this focus remained until the early 1960s. Two folkloric journals helped to encourage the burgeoning field of study, the Rivista Italiana delle Tradizioni Popolari and Lares, founded in 1894 and 1912, respectively. The earliest major musical studies were on the Sardinian launeddas in 1913-1914 by Mario Giulio Fara; on Sicilian music, published in 1907 and 1921 by Alberto Favara; and studies of the music of Emilia Romagna in 1941 by Francesco Balilla Pratella.
The earliest recordings of Italian traditional music came in the 1920s, but they were rare until the establishment of the Centro Nazionale Studi di Musica Popolare at the National Academy of Santa Cecilia in Rome. The Center sponsored numerous song collection trips across the peninsula, especially to southern and central Italy. Giorgio Nataletti was an instrumental figure in the Center, and also made numerous recordings himself. The American scholar Alan Lomax and the Italian, Diego Carpitella, made an exhaustive survey of the peninsula in 1954. By the early 1960s, a roots revival encouraged more study, especially of northern musical cultures, which many scholars had previously assumed maintained little folk culture. The most prominent scholars of this era included Roberto Leydi, Ottavio Tiby and Leo Levi. During the 1970s, Leydi and Carpitella were appointed to the first two chairs of ethnomusicology at universities, with Carpitella at the University of Rome and Leydi at the University of Bologna. In the 1980s, Italian scholars began focusing less on making recordings, and more on studying and synthesizing the information already collected. Others studied Italian music in the United States and Australia, and the folk musics of recent immigrants to Italy.
External links
Audio clips: Traditional music of Italy. Musée d'ethnographie de Genève. Accessed November 25, 2010.- RomanticaTours: Italian opera, tickets, concerts
Rockit.it - Online database of Italian indiependent music- Net Music Italia: List of major recording companies
- Estatica: Italian encyclopedia of music (English menu navigation)
- CILEA: Lombard inter-university consortium for automatic computation
- CEMAT: Organization to promote computer music research.
- SIBMAS: International Directory of Performing Arts Collections and Institutions
- Concertoggi: Frequently updated schedule of concerts
- Newsletter of Contemporary Italian Music: Archive
- Italian music libraries
- Music Teaching Institutions
- Music Publishers
- National Symphony Orchestra of the RAI (Italian Radio and Television network).
- Verdincanto, a program to broadcast choral music into public schools.
- Music of the Mafia
- SIBMAS International Directory of Performing Arts Collections and Institutions, Italy.
- Frequently updated schedule of concerts and musical activities throughout Italy.