Music of Italy

The music of Italy is somewhat of a microcosm of Western music in general. That is to say, musical developments in Italy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance helped create much music that spread throughout Europe. Early church music in Italy and then innovations in the use of musical scales, harmony, notation, instrument technology, as well as experiments in musical theater led directly not just to opera in the 17th century, but to instrumental forms such as the symphony and concerto, and to later developments in lighter music such as comic opera and popular music.

Even the phenomenon of music as "show business" can be traced to the first great commercialization of music through the early operas of the 17th century in Venice. Likewise, training for the world of professional music in music conservatories stems from the development of such institutions in Venice and Naples centuries ago. Much more recently, Italian music has borrowed freely from elsewhere to develop vibrant and by now homegrown forms of jazz, rock and pop music.

Folk music in Italy is equally eclectic. The Italian peninsula is at a crossroads of Europe, Africa, and Asia Minor. The great many ethnic communities on the peninsula and on the islands of Sardinia and Sicily have often followed quite separate historical and cultural development over the centuries, and the folk music reflects that diversity. Also, due to Italy's relatively late industrialization and unification as a single nation state, much music of these traditions survived intact long enough to be recorded in the field by ethnomusicologists.

Currently, Italy provides many venues for live and recorded music of all kinds; there are abundant opera houses, conservatories, radio and television stations, recording studios, and music festivals. Musical life in Italy remains extremely active.

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.Niccolodi 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.Charanis 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.Farmer, pp. 451. 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-songritersDizionario.

History

The modern state of Italy did not come into being until 1861, though the roots of music on the Italian peninsula can be traced back to the music of Ancient Rome. However, the underpinnings of much modern Italian music come from the Middle Ages.

Before 1500

Italy was the site of several key musical developments in the development of the Christian liturgies in the West. Around 230, well before Christianity was legalized, the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus attested the singing of Psalms with refrains of Alleluia in Rome. In 386, in imitation of Eastern models, St. Ambrose wrote hymns, some of whose texts still survive, and introduced antiphonal psalmody to the West. Around 425, Pope Celestine I contributed to the development of the Roman Rite by introducing the responsorial singing of a Gradual, and Cassian, Bishop of Brescia, contributed to the development of the monastic Office by adapting Egyptian monastic psalmody to Western usage. Later, around 530, St. Benedict would arrange the weekly order of monastic psalmody in his Rule. Later, in the 6th century, Venantius Fortunatus created some of Christianity's most enduring hymns, including "Vexilla regis prodeunt," which would later become the most popular hymn of the Crusades. McKinnon, pp. 318-320

The Guidonian Hand

The earliest extant music in the West is plainsong,Ulrich and Pisk, p. 27. a kind of monophonic, unaccompanied, early Christian singing performed by Roman Catholic monks, which was largely developed roughly between the seventh and twelfth centuries. Although Gregorian chant has its roots in Roman chant and is popularly associated with Rome, it is not indigenous to Italy, nor was it the earliest nor the only Western plainchant tradition. Ireland, Spain, and France each developed a local plainchant tradition, but only in Italy did several chant traditions thrive simultaneously: Ambrosian chant in Milan, Old Roman chant in Rome, and Beneventan chant in Benevento and Montecassino. Gregorian chant, which supplanted the indigenous Old Roman and Beneventan traditions, derived from a synthesis of Roman and Gallican chant in Carolingian France. Gregorian chant later came to be strongly identified with Rome, especially as musical elements from the north were added to the Roman Rite, such as the Credo in 1014. This was part of a general trend wherein the manuscript tradition in Italy weakened and Rome began to follow northern plainchant traditions. Gregorian chant supplanted all the other Western plainchant traditions, Italian and non-Italian, except for Ambrosian chant, which survives to this day. The native Italian plainchant traditions are notable for a systematic use of ornate, stepwise melodic motion within a generally narrower range, giving the Italian chant traditions a smoother, more undulating feel than the Gregorian.Hiley, p. 546. Crucial in the transmission of chant were the innovations of Guido d'Arezzo, whose Micrologus, written around 1020, described the musical staff, solmization, and the Guidonian hand (image, right). This early form of do-re-mi created a technical revolution in the speed at which chants could be learned, memorized, and recorded. Much of the European classical musical tradition, including opera and symphonic and chamber music can be traced back to these Italian medieval developments in musical notation,Ulrich and Pisk, p. 33. formal music education and construction techniques for musical instruments.

Even as the northern chant traditions were displacing indigenous Italian chant, displaced musicians from the north contributed to a new thriving musical culture in 12th-century Italy. The Albigensian Crusade, supposedly to attack Cathar heretics, brought southern France under northern French control and crushed Occitan culture and language. Most troubadours fled, especially to Spain and Italy. Italy developed its own counterparts to troubadours, called trovatori, including Sordello of Mantua. Frederick II, the last great Hohenstaufen Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily, encouraged music at the Sicilian court, which became a refuge for these displaced troubadours, where they contributed to a melting pot of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim musical styles. Italian secular music was largely the province of these jongleurs, troubadors, and mimes.(Gallo 1995) One important consequence of the troubadour influence during this period, in Italy and across Europe, was the gradual shift from writing strictly in Latin to the local language, as championed by Dante in his treatise De vulgari eloquentia; this development extended to the lyrics of popular songs and forms such as the madrigal,Ulrich and Pisk, p. 185. meaning "in the mother tongue." Also around this time, Italian flagellants developed the Italian folk hymns known as spiritual laude.

Between 1317 and 1319, Marchettus of Padua wrote the Lucidarium in artae musicae planae and the Pomerium artis musicae mensuratae, major treatises on plainchant and polyphony, expounding a theory of rhythmic notation that paved the way for trecento music (Italian ars nova). Around 1335, the Rossi Codex, the earliest extant collection of Italian secular polyphony, included examples of indigenous Italian genres of the trecento including early madrigals, cacce, and ballate. The early madrigal was simpler than the more well-known later madrigals, usually consisting of tercets arranged polyphonically for two voices, with a refrain called a ritornello. The caccia was often in three-part harmony, with the top two lines set to words in musical canon. The early ballata was often a poem in the form of a virelai set to a monophonic melody.Hoppin, p. 438. The Rossi Codex included music by Jacopo da Bologna, the first famous trecento composer.

The Ivrea Codex, dated around 1360, and the Squarcialupi Codex, dated around 1410, were major sources of late trecento music, including the music of Francesco Landini, the famous blind composer. Landini's name was attached to his characteristic "Landini cadence," in which the final note of the melody dips down two notes before returning, such as C-B-A-C. Trecento music influenced northern musicians such as Johannes Ciconia, whose synthesis of the French and Italian styles presaged the "international" music typical of the Renaissance.

During the 15th century, Italy entered a slow period in native composition, with the exception of a few bright lights such as the performer and anthologist Leonardo Giustinian. As the powerful northern families such as the d'Este and Medici built up powerful political dynasties, they brought northern composers of the Franco-Flemish school such as Josquin and Compère to their courts. Starting in the last decades of the century, Italian composers such as Marchetto Cara and Bartolomeo Tromboncino wrote light, courtly songs called frottole for the Mantuan court of Isabella d'Este. With the support of the Medici, the Florentine Mardi Gras season led to the creation of witty, earthy carnival songs called canti carnascialeschi.

Renaissance era, 16th century

For more details, see also Roman School, Venetian School, Venetian polychoral style, Music of Venice

Saint Mark's in Venice. The spacious, resonant interior was one of the inspirations for the music of the Venetian School.

The 16th century saw the advent of printed polyphonic music and advances in instrumental music, which contributed to the international distribution of music characteristic of the Renaissance. In 1501, Ottaviano dei Petrucci published the Harmonice Musices Odhecaton, the first substantial collection of printed polyphonic music, and in 1516, Andrea Antico published the Frottole intablate da sonari organi, the earliest printed Italian music for keyboard. Italy became the primary center of harpsichord construction, violin production started in Cremona in the workshop of Andrea Amati, and lutenist Francesco Canova da Milano earned Italy an international reputation for virtuosic musicianship.Atlas, p. 494.

Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa.

Music achieved new heights of cultural respectability. Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier recommended proficiency at music as a courtly virtue, and Santa Maria di Loreto, the first music conservatory, was built in Naples. Adrian Willaert developed music for double chorus at St. Mark's in Venice. This tradition of Venetian polychoral music would reach its height in the early baroque music of Giovanni Gabrieli. Unlike the earlier, simpler madrigals of the trecento, madrigals of the 16th century were written for several voices, often by non-Italians brought into the wealthy northern courts. Madrigalists aspired to create high art, often using the refined poetry of Petrarchan sonnets, and utilizing musically sophisticated techniques such as text painting. Composers such as Cipriano de Rore and Orlando di Lasso experimented with increasing chromaticism, which would culminate in the mannerist music of Carlo Gesualdo. In 1558, Gioseffo Zarlino, the premier musical theorist of the period, wrote the Istitutioni harmoniche, which addressed such practical musical issues as invertible counterpoint. Lighter music was represented by the villanella, which originated in popular songs of Naples and spread throughout Italy.

Music was not immune to the politically charged atmosphere of Renaissance Italy. In 1559, Antonio Gardano published Musica nova, whose politically pro-republican partisan songs pleased the northern Italian republics and riled the Church.Atlas, p. 406. In 1562-1563, the third portion of the Council of Trent addressed issues of music in the Church. Most paraliturgical music, including all but four Sequences were banned. An outright ban on polyphonic music was debated behind the scenes, and guidelines were issued requiring that church music have clear words and a pure, uplifting style. Although the tales of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina "rescuing" polyphony with the Missa Papae Marcelli are no longer accepted by scholars, Palestrina's music remains the paradigm of the musical aesthetic promoted by the Church.Atlas, p. 583. Shortly afterwards, in 1614, the Editio medicea (Medicean Edition) of Gregorian chant was released, rewriting the Gregorian chant repertory to purge it of perceived corruptions and barbarisms, and return it to a "purer" state closer in style to Palestrinian melodies.

In the late 16th century and early 17th century, composers began pushing the limits of the Renaissance style. Madrigalism reached new heights of emotional expression and chromaticism in what Claudio Monteverdi called his seconda pratica (second practice), which he saw originating with Cipriano de Rore and developing in the music of composers such as Luca Marenzio and Giaches de Wert. This music was characterized by increased dissonance and by sections of homophony, which led to such traits of the early baroque as unequal voices where the bass line drove the harmonies and the treble melody became more prominent and soloistic. This transitional period between the Renaissance and baroque included the development of the Sicilian polyphonic school in the works of Pietro Vinci, the first extant polyphony written by women, the fusion of Hebrew texts and European music in the works of Salomone Rossi, and the virtuosic women's music of Luzzasco Luzzaschi performed by the Concerto delle donne in Ferrara.

Baroque era, 16th – 18th centuries

Claudio Monteverdi

The exact nature of ancient Greek musical drama is a matter of dispute. What is important, however, for the later development of Italian and European music is that poets and musicians of the Florentine Camerata in the late 1500s thoughtthat the "ancient Greeks sang entire tragedies on the stage".Paliska, p. 408. Thus was born the musical version of the Italian Renaissance: paying tribute to classical Greece by retelling Greek myths within a staged musical context--the first operas. The works emerged in this period with relatively simple melodies and the texts about Greek mythology sung in Italian. (Opera may have deeper roots in the Tuscan maggio drammatico traditionLomax, p. 126.Magrini (1992).). Three cities are especially important in this period in Italy: Venice, as the birthplace of commercial opera; Rome, for Palestrina's school of Renaissance polyphony; and Naples, as the birthplace of church-sponsored music conservatories. These conservatories evolved into training grounds, providing composers and musicians for Italy and, indeed, Europe as a whole. Claudio Monteverdi is considered the first great composer of the new musical form, opera, the person who turned Florentine novelty into a "unified musical drama with a planned structure."Ulrich and Pisk, p. 220.

The years 1600 to 1750 encompass the musical Baroque. A new dominance of melody within harmony at the expense of text led to great changes, including the expansion of instrumental resources of the orchestra. The keyboard was extended, and the making of stringed instruments by Antonio Stradivari became a great industry in Cremona. Instrumental music started to develop as a separate "track," quite apart from the traditional role of accompanying the human voice. Instrumental forms include such things as the sonata, symphony, and concerto. Important names in music within this period in Italy are Alessandro Scarlatti, and Antonio Vivaldi, representing the importance of Naples and Venice, respectively, within this period.

The San Carlo theater (building on right in photo) in Naples.

The physical resources for music advanced greatly during the 1700s. The great opera houses in Naples and Milan were built: the San Carlo Theater and La Scala, respectively. It is the age, as well, of the rise to prominence of the Neapolitanâ€"and then Italianâ€"Comic opera. Important, too, is the restoring of balance between text and music in opera, largely through the librettos of Pietro Trapassi, called Metastasio.Crocker, p. 341.

Important Italian composers in this century are: Domenico Scarlatti, Benedetto Marcello, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Niccolò Piccinni, Giovanni Paisiello, Luigi Boccherini, Domenico Cimarosa, and Luigi Cherubini. It is also the age in which Italian music became international, so to speak, with many Italian composers beginning to work abroad.

Giuseppe Verdi.

19th century

The 19th century is the age of Romanticism in European literature, art, and music. Italian opera forsakes the Comic opera for the more serious fare of Italian lyric Romanticsm. Although the generally light-hearted and ever-popular Rossini was certainly an exception to that, Italian music of the 19th century is dominated at the beginning by the likes of Bellini and Donizetti, giving to Italian music the lyrical melodies that have remained associated with it ever since. Then, the last fifty years of the century were dominated by Giuseppe Verdi, the greatest musical icon in Italian history. Verdi's music "sought universality within national character"Crocker, p. 473.; that is, much of what he composed in terms of historical themes could be related to his pan-Italian vision. Verdi was the composer of the Italian Risorgimento, the movement to unify Italy in the 19th century. Later in the century is also the time of the early career of Giacomo Puccini, perhaps the greatest composer of pure melody in the history of Italian music.

Frontispiece from the score of Cavalleria Rusticana, a masterpiece of Italian Verismo from 1890.

Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of Italian musical form in the 19th century, and that which distinguishes it from musical developments elsewhere, is that it remained primarily operatic. All significant Italian composers of the century wrote opera almost to the exclusion of other forms, such as the symphony.Crocker, ch. 13. There are no Italian symphonists in this century, the way one might speak of Brahms in Germany, for example. Many Italian composers, however, did write significant sacred music, however, well-known examples of which are the Stabat Mater and Messa solenne by Rossini and the Requiem Mass by Giuseppe Verdi.

Romanticism in all European music certainly held on through the turn of the century. In Italy, the music of Verdi and Puccini continued to dominate for a number of years. Even the realistic plots and more modern compositional techniques of the operas of Italian Verismo, such as Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana, did not greatly affect the extremely melodic nature of Italian music.

Classical music

(This article uses the term "classical music" in the sense used by the general public; that is, the music of operas, symphonies, concertos, etc., as opposed to folk music or popular music. Readers should note, however, that in the specialized terminology of musicology, "classical" may refer specifically to music only from the early 18th to 19th century --that is, the period between the Baroque and Romanticism.)

The auditorium, in Torino, of the National Symphony Orchestra of the RAI, the Italian Radio and Television network.

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..."Ulrich and Pisk, p. 531. Italian classical music had resisted the "German harmonic juggernaut"Crocker, p. 487â€"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 musicâ€"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. Ulrich and Pisk, pp. 581-582

European classical music changed greatly in the 20th century. The new music was characterized by the abandonment of historically and 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.Crocker, p. 517. These changes have also made classical music less accessible to many people. Italy did retain, however, a Romantic 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, Francesco Cilea, and Ottorino Respighi. Then, however, after World War 1 and the death of Puccini (1924), Italian music became more European and less distinctly Italian. Important modern composers of 20thâ€"century Italian music are Luciano Berio, Luigi Dallapiccola, Carlo Jachino, Gian Carlo Menotti, Jacopo Napoli, Goffredo Petrassi and Ildebrando Pizzetti.

Current tastes in classical music do value these modern composers, but opera and symphonic music programming in any major city in Italy show how much attention is still paid to traditional tastes. The 2004/5 program at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples is typical: of the eight composers whose operas were presented, 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. Thus, there continues to be a desire for earlier music and even neo-Romantic music in Italy, that is, composers whose tastes run to the melodies and harmonies of the Romantic era. Modern Italian classical music has entered the same phase as other European musics, post-Modernismâ€" that is, a style not devoted to the "modernisms" of atonality and dissonance, but one that reaches back, as well, to earlier harmonic and melodic concepts.Kramer It is very much a consolidation phase in classical music.

Folk music

Some common geographical names used as points of reference in Italy.

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.Sassu. 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.Keller, Catalano and Colicci, in the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, pp 604 - 625

Regions

Today, Italy's folk music is sometimes divided into several spheres of geographic influence, a classification system proposed by Alan Lomax in 1956 Lomax, pp. 48-50 and often repeated. Additionally, Curt SachsSachs proposed the existence of two quite distinct kinds of folk music in Europe: continental and Mediterranean, and othersMagrini (1990), p. 20. 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 penninsula each share certain musical characteristics, and are each distinct from the music of Sardinia. Noticeable musical differences in the southern type include increased use of interval part singing and a greater variety of folk instruments.

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.Keller, Catalano and Colicci, in the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, pp 604 - 625; Garland notes that during the second half of the nineteenth and part of the twentieth century, opera and so-called Neapolitan popular song served such purposes.

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. 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 playerLeydi, p. 179 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

A folk accordion.

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 ChristmasGuizzi, pp. 43-44. Italian folk instruments can be divided into string, wind and percussion categories.Olson, pp. 108-109. 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.

A selection of folk flutes

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.Carpitella, pgs. 422-428, cited in the Garland Encyclopedia of World music, pg. 616 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 mĂĽsa 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.

The zampogna, a folk bagpipe.

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 is also home to a four- or five-stringed guitar called the chitarra battente, 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. The chitarra battente is a four- or five-stringed guitar, found in central and southern Italy, especially Calabria.

Dance

Dance is an important part of the Italian folk tradition. The tarantella is perhaps the most iconic of Italian dances. It is in 6/8 time, and is part of a folk ritual intended to cure the poison caused by tarantula bites. Northern Italy is also home to the monferrina, an accompanied dance that was incorporated in Western art music with the composer Muzio Clementi. The tammuriata is a couple dance performed accompanied by a lyric song called strambotti. Other couples dances are collectively referred to as saltarello.

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, Vajro, p. 17 the term, canzone Napoletana now generally refers to a large body of relatively recent, composed popular musicâ€"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,Napoletana, notes to vol.1 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, Maiden (2) 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.

The most authoritative recorded anthology of Neapolitan Song is this 12-LP/CD collection, researched and sung by Roberto Murolo. It was released in 1963 by Durium S.p.A., Milan.

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 epoque 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 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 like 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

Recent album by Massimo Ranieri.

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. Dizionario There is some genre cross-over between the cantautori and those who are viewed as singers of "protest music".Bordoni, p. 237

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. Fazzini, pp.7-19

Imported styles

During the Belle Époque the French fashion of performing popular music at the cafĂ©-chantant spread throughout Europe. The tradition had much in common with cabaret , and there is genre overlap in trying to define cafĂ©-chantant, cafĂ©-concert, cabaret, music hall, vaudeville, etc., but at least in its Italian manifestation, the tradition remained largely apolitical, focusing on lighter music, often risquĂ©â€"but not bawdy. The first cafĂ©-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. CafĂ©-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 beenâ€"and continue to beâ€"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.Mazzoletti 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

Inside a music superstore.

A recent economics reportRapporto 2005. 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.

Venues, festivals and holidays

The annual Festival of Ravello is a popular music venue in Italy. Here, an orchestra starts to set up on a stage overlooking the Amalfi coast.

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 musicâ€"besides winning considerable prize moneyâ€"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.

A current Italian musical based on a traditional theme.

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 30â€"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.Boccardi.

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".

At festival time, Italian TV guides concentrate on Sanremo.

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

Within the courtyard of the Naples Music Conservatory

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 RĂ©pertoire International des Sources Musicales. Also, the Discoteca di Stato (National Archives of Recordings), 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. 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.

References

* cited in the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, pg. 616
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