Music of Italy
Encyclopedia
The music of Italy ranges across a broad spectrum of opera
and instrumental classical music
and a body of popular music drawn from both native and imported sources. Music
has traditionally been one of the cultural markers of Italian national and ethnic identity and holds an important position in society and in politics. Italian innovation in musical scales, harmony
, notation
, and theatre
enabled the development of opera
in the late 16th century, and much of modern European classical music, such as the symphony
and concerto
.
Instrumental and vocal classical music is an iconic part of Italian identity, spanning experimental art music and international fusions to symphonic music and opera. Opera is integral to Italian musical culture, and has become a major segment of popular music
. The Neapolitan song, canzone Napoletana
, and the cantautori singer-songwriter
traditions are also popular domestic styles that form an important part of the Italian music industry, alongside imported genres like jazz
, rock and hip hop
. Italian folk music is an important part of the country's musical heritage, and spans a diverse array of regional styles, instruments and dances.
, Italian music is generally eclectic. 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 Arabs, Greeks
, Slavic Peoples
, French
and Spanish
. The country's historical contributions to music are also an important part of national pride. The relatively recent history of Italy includes the development of an opera
tradition that has spread throughout the world; prior to the development of Italian identity or a unified Italian state, the Italian peninsula contributed to important innovations in music including the development of musical notation
and Gregorian chant
.
Immigrant populations from around the Mediterranean, especially Greece, the Balkans and North Africa, have established large communities in the southern peninsula over the last 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 highly ornamented in Oriental style." Melody has typically been important in most Italian musical forms, even at the expense of lyrics
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-songwriters.
: "We have created Italy; now we have to create Italians." Abroad, Italian culture and society are often stereotyped, associating all Italian music with certain styles. For example, some years ago the Mayor of Venice banned gondoliers from singing Neapolitan songs for the tourists, most of whom requested "‘O sole mio" and other songs typical only of Naples but widely regarded abroad as characteristic of all Italian music.
Allegiance to music is integrally woven into the social identity of Italians but no single style has been considered a characteristic "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 part of music and an integral component of national identity. 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 and 21st 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 came to exist only in small pockets, especially as part of dedicated campaigns to retain local musical identities:)
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, and other occasions. Composers who strayed ran certain risks. Among the best known of such cases was 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 executed by the restored monarchy, but he was exiled.
Music also played a role in the unification of the peninsula. During this period, some leaders attempted to use music to forge a unifying cultural identity. One example is the chorus "Va Pensiero" from Giuseppe Verdi
's opera Nabucco
. The opera is about ancient Babylon, but the chorus
contains the phrase "O mia Patria", ostensibly about the struggle of the Israelites, but also a thinly veiled reference to the destiny of a not-yet-united Italy; the entire chorus became the unofficial anthem of the Risorgimento, the drive to unify Italy in the 19th century. Even Verdi's name was a synonym for Italian unity because "Verdi" could be read as an acronym for Vittorio Emanuele Re d'Italia, Victor Emanuel King of Italy, the Savoy
monarch who eventually became Victor Emanuel II, the first king of united Italy. Thus, "Viva Verdi" was a rallying cry for patriots and often appeared in graffiti in Milan
and other cities in what was then part of Austro-Hungarian territory. Verdi 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 Kingdom of the Two Sicilies
, in the late 1850s. The Neapolitan censors objected to the realistic plot about the assassination of Gustav III
, King of Sweden, in the 1790s. Even after the plot was changed, the Neapolitan censors still rejected it.
Later, in the Fascist era of the 1920s and 30s, government censorship and interference with music occurred, though not on a systematic basis. Prominent examples include the notorious anti-modernist manifesto of 1932 and Mussolini
's banning of G.F. Malipiero's opera La favola del figlio cambiato after one performance in 1934. The music media often criticized music that was perceived as either politically radical or insufficiently Italian. General print media, such as the Enciclopedia Moderna Italiana, tended to treat traditionally favored composers such as Giacomo Puccini
and Pietro Mascagni
with the same brevity as composers and musicians that were not as favored—modernists such as Alfredo Casella
and Ferruccio 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" was passed in 1938, thus denying to Jewish composers and musicians membership in professional and artistic associations. Although there was not a massive flight of Italian Jews from Italy during this period (compared to the situation in Germany) composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco
, an Italian Jew, was one of those who emigrated. Some non-Jewish foes of the regime also emigrated—Toscanini, for one.
More recently, in the later part of the 20th century, especially in the 1970s and beyond, music became further enmeshed 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.
, Gustav Mahler
and Richard Strauss
. Italian music also had little in common with the French reaction to that German music—the impressionism of Claude 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. 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 composers of the period include Luciano Berio
, Luigi Nono
, Luigi Dallapiccola
, Carlo Jachino
, Gian Carlo Menotti
, Jacopo Napoli
, and Goffredo Petrassi
.
. Through the centuries that followed, opera traditions developed in Venice and Naples; the operas of Claudio Monteverdi
, Alessandro Scarlatti
, and, later, of Gioacchino Rossini
, Vincenzo Bellini
, and Gaetano 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 Giuseppe Verdi
, an icon of Italian culture and pan-Italian unity. Italy retained a Romantic operatic musical tradition in the early 20th century, exemplified by composers of the so-called Giovane Scuola
, whose music was anchored in the previous century, including Arrigo Boito
, Ruggiero Leoncavallo, Pietro Mascagni
, and Francesco Cilea
.
After World War I, however, opera declined in comparison to the popular heights of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Causes included the general cultural shift away from Romanticism
and the rise of the cinema
, which became a major source of entertainment. A third cause 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 pamphlet entitled Giaccomo Puccini and International Opera, accused Puccini of "commercialism" and of having deserted Italian traditions. Traditional Romantic opera remained popular; indeed, the dominant opera publisher in the early 20th century was Casa 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 peers such as Marco Tutino
and Lorenzo Ferrero
.
. Until approximately 1800, it was possible to hear Gregorian Chant
and Renaissance
polyphony
, such as the music of Palestrina
, Lassus, Anerio
, and others. Approximately 1800 to approximately 1900 was a century during which a more popular, opera
tic, and entertaining type of church music was heard, to the exclusion of the aforementioned chant and polyphony. In the late 19th century, the Cecilian Movement
was started by musicians who fought to restore this music. This movement gained impetus not in Italy but in Germany, particularly in Regensburg
. The movement reached its apex around 1900 with the ascent of Don Lorenzo Perosi and his supporter (and future saint), Pope Pius X
. The advent of Vatican II, however, nearly obliterated all Latin-language music from the Church, once again substituting it with a more popular style.
, Giovanni Gabrieli
, Tomaso Albinoni
, Arcangelo Corelli
, Antonio Vivaldi
, Luigi Boccherini
, Luigi Cherubini
and Domenico Scarlatti
. (Even opera composers occasionally worked in other forms—Giuseppe Verdi
's String Quartet in E minor, for example. Even Donizetti
, whose name is identified with the beginnings of Italian lyric opera, wrote 18 string quartets.) 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, such as Leone Sinigaglia
, used native folk traditions.
The early 20th century is also marked by the presence of a group of composers called the generazione dell'ottanta (generation of 1880), including Franco Alfano
, Alfredo Casella
, Gian Francesco Malipiero
, Ildebrando Pizzetti
, and Ottorino Respighi
. These composers usually concentrated on writing instrumental works, rather than opera. 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 rassegna 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 audience sought new styles of experimental classical music.
, was the European center of court choreography
as early as the 15th century 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" imported to France from Italy caught on, and the first ballet performed in France (1581), Ballet comique de la Royn, was composed by an Italian, Baltazarini di Belgioioso, better known by the French version of his name, Balthasar de 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 played instruments onstage. 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 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.
Currently, major Italian opera theaters maintain ballet companies. They exist to provide incidental and ceremonial dancing 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 is Italian. The Italian equivalent of the Russian Bolshoi Ballet
and similar companies that exist only to perform ballet, independent of a parent opera theater is La Scala Ballet, which is under the direction of Frèdèric Olivieri. Since 1979 there has existed in Italy a modern dance company, the Aterballetto, based in Reggio Emilia. The company performs worldwide under the leadership of choreographer Mauro Bigonzetti
.
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 sounds in future music. He spoke of his dissatisfaction with the constraints of traditional music:
Similarly, Luigi Russolo
, the Italian Futurist
painter and composer, wrote of the possibilities of new music in his 1913 manifestoes The Art of Noises and Musica Futurista. He also invented and built instruments such as the intonarumori, mostly percussion, which were used in a precursor to the style known as musique concrète
. One of the most influential events in early 20th century music was the return 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 the 1950s, Luciano Berio
experimented with instruments accompanied by electronic sounds on tape. In modern Italy, 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 CIME, 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.
, a school of thought that draws on earlier harmonic and melodic concepts that pre-date the conceptions of atonality
and dissonance
. This focus on popular historical composers has helped to maintain a continued presence of classical music across a 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 such as Luciano Berio
, Luigi Nono
, Franco Donatoni
, and Sylvano 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.
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 centre of the Mediterranean; Arabic, African, Celtic
, Persian, Roma
, and Slavic
influences, as well as rough geography and the historic dominance of small city states
, have all combined to allow diverse musical styles to coexist in close proximity.
Italian folk styles are very diverse, and include monophonic
, polyphonic
, and responsorial song, choral, instrumental and vocal music, 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.
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 troubadour
s are some of the oldest preserved samples of vernacular song, and modern bands like Gai Saber
and Lou Dalfin
preserve and contemporize Occitan music. The Occitanian culture retains characteristics of the ancient Celtic influence, 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 Austria 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
. Typical instruments include the launeddas
, a Sardinian triplepipe used in a sophisticated and complex manner. Efisio Melis
was a well-known master launeddas player of the 1930s.
s, lyrical
songs, lullabies
and children's songs, seasonal songs based around holidays such as 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-monostrofici) 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 dirge
s 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 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. 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 band
s, 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 variety of folk flute
s. These include duct, globular and transverse flutes, as well as various variations of the 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 found 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
; dialect names for the bagpipe vary throughout Italy-- beghet in Bergamo
, piva in Lombardy
, müsa in Alessandria
, Genoa
, Pavia
and Piacenza
, and so forth.
Numerous percussion instruments are a part of Italian folk music, including wood blocks, bell
s, castanet
s, drums. Several regions have their own distinct form of rattle
, including the raganella
cog rattle and the Calabrian conocchie
, a spinning or shepherd's staff with permanently attached seed rattles with ritual fertility significance. The Neapolitan rattle is the triccaballacca
, made out of several mallet
s in a wooden frame. Tambourine
s (tamburini, tamburello), as are various kinds of drums, such as the friction drum
putipù
. The Tamburello
, while appearing very similar to the contemporary western tambourine, is actually played with a much more articulate and sophisticated technique (influenced by Middle Eastern playing), giving it a wide range of sounds. 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 largely extinct elsewhere in 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 called the torototela, is common in the northeast of the country. The largely German-speaking area of South Tyrol
is known for the zither
, and the ghironda (hurdy-gurdy) is found in Emilia
, Piedmont
and Lombardy
.
Existing, rooted and widespread traditions confirm the production of ephemeral and toy instruments made of bark, reed (arundo donax), leaves, fibers and stems, as it emerges, for example, from Fabio Lombardi
's research.
; 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. Popular Tuscan dances ritually act out the hunting of the hare, or display blades in weapon dance
s that simulate or recall the moves of combat, or use the weapons as 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
.
Academic interest in the study of dance from the perspectives of sociology and anthropology has traditionally been neglected in Italy but is currently showing renewed life at the university and post-graduate level.
s 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. Until Italian Fascism became officially "allergic" to foreign influences in the late 1930s, American dance music and musicians were quite popular; jazz great Louis Armstrong
toured Italy as late as 1935 to great acclaim. 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.
became immensely popular in the 19th century and was 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 band
s, focused in a local village. These civic bands (banda communale) used instruments to perform operatic arias, with trombone
s or fluegelhorns for male vocal parts and cornet
s for female parts.
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 18th century, 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 opera
s. Later, others—most famously Gaetano Donizetti
—composed Neapolitan songs that garnered great renown 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 joyful one minute and melancholy the next.
The music of Francesco Tosti was popular at the turn of the 20th century, and is 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, Addio 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 autarchia
, the Fascist policy of cultural isolationism in 1922 led to a retreat from international popular music. During this period, popular Italian musicians traveled abroad and learned elements of jazz
, Latin American music
and other styles. These musics influenced the Italian tradition, which spread around the world and further diversified following liberalization after World War II.
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.
, Mina
, Gianni Morandi
, I Pooh
, Adriano Celentano
and, more recently, Zucchero
, Vasco Rossi
, Eros Ramazzotti
, Laura Pausini
, Giorgia Todrani
, 883
, Romina Arena
and international superstar Andrea Bocelli
. 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 song
s: this wave began in the 1960s with musicians like Fabrizio De André
, Giorgio Gaber
, Gino Paoli
and Luigi Tenco
. Social, political, psychological and intellectual themes, mainly in the wake of Gaber and De André's work, became even more predominant in 1970s through authors such as Pino Daniele
, Francesco De Gregori
, Francesco Guccini
, Antonello Venditti
and Roberto Vecchioni
. Lucio Battisti
, from the late 1960s until mid 1990s, merged the Italian music with the British rock and pop and, lately in his career, with genres like the synthpop
, rap, techno
and eurodance
, while Angelo Branduardi
and Franco Battiato
pursued careers more oriented to the tradition of Italian pop music. 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 and very popular 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). Another well-known film composer was Nino Rota
whose post-war career included the scores for films by Federico Fellini
and, later, The Godfather
series. Other prominent film score composers include Ennio Morricone
, Riz Ortolani
and Piero Umiliani
.
, Italian jazz
, Italian rock
, Italian progressive rock
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 overlap between café-chantant, café-concert, cabaret, music hall
, vaudeville
and other similar styles, 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. 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 World War I.
The influence of US pop forms has been strong since the end of World War II. Lavish Broadway-show numbers, big bands
, rock and roll
, and hip hop
continue to be popular. Latin music, especially Brazilian bossa nova
, is also popular, and the Puerto Rican genre of reggaeton
is rapidly becoming a mainstream form of dance music. It is now not uncommon for modern Italian pop artists such as Laura Pausini
, Eros Ramazzotti
, Zucchero
and Andrea Bocelli
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.
Jazz found its way into Europe during World War I through the presence of American musicians in military bands playing syncopated
music. Yet, even before that, Italy received an inkling of new music from across the Atlantic in the form of Creole singers and dancers who performed at the Eden Theater in Milan in 1904; they billed themselves as the "creators of the cakewalk
." The first real jazz orchestras in Italy, however, were formed during the 1920s by bandleaders such as Arturo Agazzi and enjoyed immediate success. In spite of the anti-American cultural policies of the Fascist regime during the 1930s, American jazz remained popular.
In the immediate post-war years, jazz took off in Italy. All American post-war jazz styles, from bebop
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. Currently, all Italian music conservatories have jazz departments, and 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.
Italian pop rock has produced major stars like Zucchero
, and has resulted in many top hits. The industry media, especially television, are important vehicles for such music; the television show Sabato Sera is characteristic. Italy was at the forefront of the progressive rock
movement of the 1970s, a style that primarily developed in Europe but also gained audiences elsewhere in the world. It is sometimes considered a separate genre, Italian progressive rock
. Italian bands such as 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 the United States as well. Other progressive bands such as Balletto di Bronzo or Museo Rosenbach
remained little known, but their albums are today considered classics by collectors. A few avant-garde 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
, whose 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. Hip hop is especially characteristic of southern Italy, a fact which some observers have contributed to the view of southern culture as more "African" than "European", as well as the southern concept of rispettu (respect, honor), a form of verbal jousting; both facts have helped identify southern Italian music with the African American hip hop style. 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 known for their mix of Irish, Italian, punk, reggae and many other forms of music.
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 with North African rhythms and instruments.
A recent economics report says that the music industry in Italy made 2.3 billion € 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. By way of comparison, the Italian recording industry ranks eighth in the world; 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. Book and CD superstores have entered the Italian market over the last decade. The largest of these chains is Feltrinelli, originally a publishing house in the 1950s. In 2001, it geared up to the level of Multimedia Store and now sells massive quantities of recorded music. There are, as of 2006, 14 such mega-stores in Italy, with more planned. FNAC
is another large chain, originally French. It has six large outlets in Italy. These stores also serve as venues for music performance, hosting several concerts a week.
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
, the Festival Puccini
and the Wagner Festival
in Ravello
. Some festivals 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 a common destination for well-known orchestras from abroad; at almost any given time during the busiest season, at least one major orchestra from elsewhere in Europe or North America is playing a concert 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 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.
Music in religious rituals, especially Roman Catholic, 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. They commonly perform at religious festivals specific to a particular town, usually in honor of the town's patron saint. The historic orchestral/choral masterpieces performed in church by professionals are well-known; these include such works as the Stabat Mater
by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi
and Verdi's Requiem. 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 modern Italian 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 Sanremo Music Festival) is an 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 runs for one week in February, and gives veteran and new performers a chance to present new songs. Winning the contest has often been a springboard to industry success. 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 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.
Many institutes of higher education teach music in Italy. About 75 music conservatories provide advanced training for future professional musicians. There are also dozens of private music schools and workshops for instrument building and repair. Private teaching is also quite common in Italy. Elementary and high school students can expect to have one or two weekly hours of music teaching, generally in choral singing and basic music theory, though extracurricular opportunities are rare. Though most Italian universities have classes in related subjects such as music history, performance is not a common feature of university education.
Italy has a specialized system of high schools; students attend, as they choose, a high school for humanities, science, foreign languages, or art—but not music. Italy does have ambitious, recent programs to expose children to more music. Furthermore with the recent education reform a specific Liceo musicale e coreutico (2nd level secondary school, ages 14–15 to 18-19) is explicitly indicated by the law decrees. Yet this kind of school has not been set up and is not effectively operational. The state-run television network has started a program to use modern satellite technology to broadcast choral music into public schools.
, an inventory and index of 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.
Audio recordings
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
and instrumental classical music
Classical music
Classical music is the art music produced in, or rooted in, the traditions of Western liturgical and secular music, encompassing a broad period from roughly the 11th century to present times...
and a body of popular music drawn from both native and imported sources. Music
Music
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...
has traditionally been one of the cultural markers of Italian national and ethnic identity and holds an important position in society and in politics. Italian innovation in musical scales, harmony
Harmony
In music, harmony is the use of simultaneous pitches , or chords. The study of harmony involves chords and their construction and chord progressions and the principles of connection that govern them. Harmony is often said to refer to the "vertical" aspect of music, as distinguished from melodic...
, notation
Musical notation
Music notation or musical notation is any system that represents aurally perceived music, through the use of written symbols.-History:...
, and theatre
Musical theatre
Musical theatre is a form of theatre combining songs, spoken dialogue, acting, and dance. The emotional content of the piece – humor, pathos, love, anger – as well as the story itself, is communicated through the words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an...
enabled the development of opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
in the late 16th century, and much of modern European classical music, such as the symphony
Symphony
A symphony is an extended musical composition in Western classical music, scored almost always for orchestra. A symphony usually contains at least one movement or episode composed according to the sonata principle...
and concerto
Concerto
A concerto is a musical work usually composed in three parts or movements, in which one solo instrument is accompanied by an orchestra.The etymology is uncertain, but the word seems to have originated from the conjunction of the two Latin words...
.
Instrumental and vocal classical music is an iconic part of Italian identity, spanning experimental art music and international fusions to symphonic music and opera. Opera is integral to Italian musical culture, and has become a major segment of popular music
Popular music
Popular music belongs to any of a number of musical genres "having wide appeal" and is typically distributed to large audiences through the music industry. It stands in contrast to both art music and traditional music, which are typically disseminated academically or orally to smaller, local...
. The Neapolitan song, canzone Napoletana
Canzone Napoletana
Canzone Napoletana, sometimes referred to as Neapolitan song, is a generic term for a traditional form of music sung in the Neapolitan language, ordinarily for the male voice singing solo, although well-represented by female soloists as well, and expressed in familiar genres such as the lover's...
, and the cantautori singer-songwriter
Singer-songwriter
Singer-songwriters are musicians who write, compose and sing their own musical material including lyrics and melodies. As opposed to contemporary popular music singers who write their own songs, the term singer-songwriter describes a distinct form of artistry, closely associated with the...
traditions are also popular domestic styles that form an important part of the Italian music industry, alongside imported genres like jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
, rock and hip hop
Hip hop music
Hip hop music, also called hip-hop, rap music or hip-hop music, is a musical genre consisting of a stylized rhythmic music that commonly accompanies rapping, a rhythmic and rhyming speech that is chanted...
. Italian folk music is an important part of the country's musical heritage, and spans a diverse array of regional styles, instruments and dances.
Characteristics
More than other elements of Italian cultureCulture of Italy
From antiquity until the 16th century, Italy was at the centre of Western culture, fulcrum or origin of the Etruscan civilization, Ancient Rome, the Roman Catholic Church, Humanism and the Renaissance....
, Italian music is generally eclectic. 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 Arabs, Greeks
Music of Greece
The music of Greece is as diverse and celebrated as its history. Greek music separates into two parts: Greek traditional music and Byzantine music, with more eastern sounds...
, Slavic Peoples
Slavic peoples
The Slavic people are an Indo-European panethnicity living in Eastern Europe, Southeast Europe, North Asia and Central Asia. The term Slavic represents a broad ethno-linguistic group of people, who speak languages belonging to the Slavic language family and share, to varying degrees, certain...
, French
Music of France
France has a wide variety of indigenous folk music, as well as styles played by immigrants from Africa, Latin America and Asia. In the field of classical music, France has produced a number of legendary composers, while modern pop music has seen the rise of popular French hip hop, techno/funk,...
and Spanish
Music of Spain
The Music of Spain has a long history and has played an important part in the development of western music. It has had a particularly strong influence upon Latin American music. The music of Spain is often associated abroad with traditions like flamenco and the classical guitar but Spanish music...
. The country's historical contributions to music are also an important part of national pride. The relatively recent history of Italy includes the development of an opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
tradition that has spread throughout the world; prior to the development of Italian identity or a unified Italian state, the Italian peninsula contributed to important innovations in music including the development of musical notation
Musical notation
Music notation or musical notation is any system that represents aurally perceived music, through the use of written symbols.-History:...
and Gregorian chant
Gregorian chant
Gregorian chant is the central tradition of Western plainchant, a form of monophonic liturgical music within Western Christianity that accompanied the celebration of Mass and other ritual services...
.
Immigrant populations from around the Mediterranean, especially Greece, the Balkans and North Africa, have established large communities in the southern peninsula over the last 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
Pitch (music)
Pitch is an auditory perceptual property that allows the ordering of sounds on a frequency-related scale.Pitches are compared as "higher" and "lower" in the sense associated with musical melodies,...
. 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 highly ornamented in Oriental style." Melody has typically been important in most Italian musical forms, even at the expense of lyrics
Lyrics
Lyrics are a set of words that make up a song. The writer of lyrics is a lyricist or lyrist. The meaning of lyrics can either be explicit or implicit. Some lyrics are abstract, almost unintelligible, and, in such cases, their explication emphasizes form, articulation, meter, and symmetry of...
and harmonic complexity
Harmony
In music, harmony is the use of simultaneous pitches , or chords. The study of harmony involves chords and their construction and chord progressions and the principles of connection that govern them. Harmony is often said to refer to the "vertical" aspect of music, as distinguished from melodic...
. This is true in opera, popular music and even, to some extent, in modern text-centered styles such as Italian hip hop
Italian hip hop
The rap was born in Italy between the years 80 and 90, first of all just evolved as a form of expression, based loosely on the copy of rappers Americans.The first real Italian rapper was Kaos One and his Radical Stuff, but rap in English....
and the music of the cantautori singer-songwriters.
Social identity
Italy was not unified politically until the 19th century. The drive towards unification led to efforts to create a sense of Italian identity, famously described by the Italian statesman Massimo d’AzeglioMassimo Taparelli, marquis d'Azeglio
Massimo Taparelli, marquis d'Azeglio was an Italian statesman, novelist and painter.-Biography:Marquis d'Azeglio was born in Turin, descended from an ancient and noble Piedmontese family...
: "We have created Italy; now we have to create Italians." Abroad, Italian culture and society are often stereotyped, associating all Italian music with certain styles. For example, some years ago the Mayor of Venice banned gondoliers from singing Neapolitan songs for the tourists, most of whom requested "‘O sole mio" and other songs typical only of Naples but widely regarded abroad as characteristic of all Italian music.
Allegiance to music is integrally woven into the social identity of Italians but no single style has been considered a characteristic "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 part of music and an integral component of national identity. 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 and 21st 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 came to exist 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 in the Italian RenaissanceRenaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
were commissioned by royalty and the Roman Catholic Church
Roman Catholic Church
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with over a billion members. Led by the Pope, it defines its mission as spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, administering the sacraments and exercising charity...
, 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, and other occasions. Composers who strayed ran certain risks. Among the best known of such cases was the Neapolitan composer Domenico Cimarosa
Domenico Cimarosa
Domenico Cimarosa was an Italian opera composer of the Neapolitan school...
, who composed the Republican hymn for the short-lived Neapolitan Republic of 1799
Parthenopaean Republic
The Parthenopean Republic was a French-supported republic in the territory of the Kingdom of Naples, formed during the French Revolutionary Wars after King Ferdinand IV fled before advancing French troops...
. When the republic fell, he was tried for treason along with other revolutionaries. Cimarosa was not executed by the restored monarchy, but he was exiled.
Music also played a role in the unification of the peninsula. During this period, some leaders attempted to use music to forge a unifying cultural identity. One example is the chorus "Va Pensiero" from Giuseppe Verdi
Giuseppe Verdi
Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was an Italian Romantic composer, mainly of opera. He was one of the most influential composers of the 19th century...
's opera Nabucco
Nabucco
Nabucco is an opera in four acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Temistocle Solera, based on the Biblical story and the 1836 play by Auguste Anicet-Bourgeois and Francis Cornue...
. The opera is about ancient Babylon, but the chorus
Refrain
A refrain is the line or lines that are repeated in music or in verse; the "chorus" of a song...
contains the phrase "O mia Patria", ostensibly about the struggle of the Israelites, but also a thinly veiled reference to the destiny of a not-yet-united Italy; the entire chorus became the unofficial anthem of the Risorgimento, the drive to unify Italy in the 19th century. Even Verdi's name was a synonym for Italian unity because "Verdi" could be read as an acronym for Vittorio Emanuele Re d'Italia, Victor Emanuel King of Italy, the Savoy
Savoy
Savoy is a region of France. It comprises roughly the territory of the Western Alps situated between Lake Geneva in the north and Monaco and the Mediterranean coast in the south....
monarch who eventually became Victor Emanuel II, the first king of united Italy. Thus, "Viva Verdi" was a rallying cry for patriots and often appeared in graffiti in Milan
Milan
Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...
and other cities in what was then part of Austro-Hungarian territory. Verdi had problems with censorship before the unification of Italy. His opera Un ballo in maschera
Un ballo in maschera
Un ballo in maschera , is an opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi with text by Antonio Somma. The libretto is loosely based on an 1833 play, Gustave III, by French playwright Eugène Scribe who wrote about the historical assassination of King Gustav III of Sweden...
was originally entitled Gustavo III and was presented to the San Carlo
Teatro di San Carlo
The Real Teatro di San Carlo is an opera house in Naples, Italy. It is the oldest continuously active such venue in Europe.Founded by the Bourbon Charles VII of Naples of the Spanish branch of the dynasty, the theatre was inaugurated on 4 November 1737 — the king's name day — with a performance...
opera in Naples
Naples
Naples is a city in Southern Italy, situated on the country's west coast by the Gulf of Naples. Lying between two notable volcanic regions, Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, it is the capital of the region of Campania and of the province of Naples...
, the capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies
Kingdom of the Two Sicilies
The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, commonly known as the Two Sicilies even before formally coming into being, was the largest and wealthiest of the Italian states before Italian unification...
, in the late 1850s. The Neapolitan censors objected to the realistic plot about the assassination of Gustav III
Gustav III of Sweden
Gustav III was King of Sweden from 1771 until his death. He was the eldest son of King Adolph Frederick and Queen Louise Ulrica of Sweden, she a sister of Frederick the Great of Prussia....
, King of Sweden, in the 1790s. Even after the plot was changed, the Neapolitan censors still rejected it.
Later, in the Fascist era of the 1920s and 30s, government censorship and interference with music occurred, though not on a systematic basis. Prominent examples include the notorious anti-modernist manifesto of 1932 and Mussolini
Benito Mussolini
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism....
's banning of G.F. Malipiero's opera La favola del figlio cambiato after one performance in 1934. The music media often criticized music that was perceived as either politically radical or insufficiently Italian. General print media, such as the Enciclopedia Moderna Italiana, tended to treat traditionally favored composers such as Giacomo Puccini
Giacomo Puccini
Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini was an Italian composer whose operas, including La bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, and Turandot, are among the most frequently performed in the standard repertoire...
and Pietro Mascagni
Pietro Mascagni
Pietro Antonio Stefano Mascagni was an Italian composer most noted for his operas. His 1890 masterpiece Cavalleria rusticana caused one of the greatest sensations in opera history and single-handedly ushered in the Verismo movement in Italian dramatic music...
with the same brevity as composers and musicians that were not as favored—modernists such as Alfredo Casella
Alfredo Casella
Alfredo Casella was an Italian composer, pianist and conductor.- Life and career :Casella was born in Turin; his family included many musicians; his grandfather, a friend of Paganini's, was first cello in the San Carlo Theatre in Lisbon and eventually was soloist in the Royal Chapel in Turin...
and Ferruccio Busoni
Ferruccio Busoni
Ferruccio Busoni was an Italian composer, pianist, editor, writer, piano and composition teacher, and conductor.-Biography:...
; 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
Arturo Toscanini
Arturo Toscanini was an Italian conductor. One of the most acclaimed musicians of the late 19th and 20th century, he was renowned for his intensity, his perfectionism, his ear for orchestral detail and sonority, and his photographic memory...
, 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
La Scala
La Scala , is a world renowned opera house in Milan, Italy. The theatre was inaugurated on 3 August 1778 and was originally known as the New Royal-Ducal Theatre at La Scala...
in Milan
Milan
Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...
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" was passed in 1938, thus denying to Jewish composers and musicians membership in professional and artistic associations. Although there was not a massive flight of Italian Jews from Italy during this period (compared to the situation in Germany) composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco was an Italian composer. He was known as one of the foremost guitar composers in the twentieth century with almost one hundred compositions for that instrument. In 1939 he migrated to the United States and became a film composer for some 200 Hollywood movies for the next...
, an Italian Jew, was one of those who emigrated. Some non-Jewish foes of the regime also emigrated—Toscanini, for one.
More recently, in the later part of the 20th century, especially in the 1970s and beyond, music became further enmeshed in Italian politics. A roots revival
Roots revival
A roots revival is a trend which includes young performers popularizing the traditional musical styles of their ancestors. Often, roots revivals include an addition of newly-composed songs with socially and politically aware lyrics, as well as a general modernization of the folk sound.After an...
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
Italian Communist Party
The Italian Communist Party was a communist political party in Italy.The PCI was founded as Communist Party of Italy on 21 January 1921 in Livorno, by seceding from the Italian Socialist Party . Amadeo Bordiga and Antonio Gramsci led the split. Outlawed during the Fascist regime, the party played...
, a change that can be traced back to the 1968 student revolts and protests.
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 Richard WagnerRichard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...
, Gustav Mahler
Gustav Mahler
Gustav Mahler was a late-Romantic Austrian composer and one of the leading conductors of his generation. He was born in the village of Kalischt, Bohemia, in what was then Austria-Hungary, now Kaliště in the Czech Republic...
and Richard Strauss
Richard Strauss
Richard Georg Strauss was a leading German composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras. He is known for his operas, which include Der Rosenkavalier and Salome; his Lieder, especially his Four Last Songs; and his tone poems and orchestral works, such as Death and Transfiguration, Till...
. Italian music also had little in common with the French reaction to that German music—the impressionism of Claude Debussy
Claude Debussy
Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...
, 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. New music abandoned much of the historical, nationally developed schools of harmony and melody in favor of experimental music
Experimental music
Experimental music refers, in the English-language literature, to a compositional tradition which arose in the mid-20th century, applied particularly in North America to music composed in such a way that its outcome is unforeseeable. Its most famous and influential exponent was John Cage...
, atonality
Atonality
Atonality in its broadest sense describes music that lacks a tonal center, or key. Atonality in this sense usually describes compositions written from about 1908 to the present day where a hierarchy of pitches focusing on a single, central tone is not used, and the notes of the chromatic scale...
, minimalism
Minimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...
and electronic music
Electronic music
Electronic music is music that employs electronic musical instruments and electronic music technology in its production. In general a distinction can be made between sound produced using electromechanical means and that produced using electronic technology. Examples of electromechanical sound...
, 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 composers of the period include Luciano Berio
Luciano Berio
Luciano Berio, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI was an Italian composer. He is noted for his experimental work and also for his pioneering work in electronic music.-Biography:Berio was born at Oneglia Luciano Berio, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI (October 24, 1925 – May 27, 2003) was an Italian...
, Luigi Nono
Luigi Nono
Luigi Nono was an Italian avant-garde composer of classical music and remains one of the most prominent composers of the 20th century.- Early years :Born in Venice, he was a member of a wealthy artistic family, and his grandfather was a notable painter...
, Luigi Dallapiccola
Luigi Dallapiccola
Luigi Dallapiccola was an Italian composer known for his lyrical twelve-tone compositions.-Biography:Dallapiccola was born at Pisino d'Istria , to Italian parents....
, Carlo Jachino
Carlo Jachino
Carlo Jachino was a prominent Italian composer of the 20th century. Born in Sanremo,on February 3, 1887 he studied in Leipzieg under Hugo Riemann. Jachino's 3-act opera, Giocondo and his King won a national competition in and was premiered in 1922 at the Dal Verme theater in Milan in 1924...
, Gian Carlo Menotti
Gian Carlo Menotti
Gian Carlo Menotti was an Italian-American composer and librettist. Although he often referred to himself as an American composer, he kept his Italian citizenship. He wrote the classic Christmas opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors, among about two dozen other operas intended to appeal to popular...
, Jacopo Napoli
Jacopo Napoli
Jacopo Napoli was an Italian composer of the 20th century.Born in Naples, he studied privately. He taught composition at the Cagliari music conservatory. He was the director of the Naples conservatory...
, and Goffredo Petrassi
Goffredo Petrassi
Goffredo Petrassi was an Italian composer of modern classical music, conductor, and teacher. He is considered one of the most influential Italian composers of the twentieth century.-Life:...
.
Opera
Opera originated in Italy in the late 16th century during the time of the Florentine CamerataFlorentine Camerata
The Florentine Camerata was a group of humanists, musicians, poets and intellectuals in late Renaissance Florence who gathered under the patronage of Count Giovanni de' Bardi to discuss and guide trends in the arts, especially music and drama...
. Through the centuries that followed, opera traditions developed in Venice and Naples; the operas of Claudio Monteverdi
Claudio Monteverdi
Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi – 29 November 1643) was an Italian composer, gambist, and singer.Monteverdi's work, often regarded as revolutionary, marked the transition from the Renaissance style of music to that of the Baroque period. He developed two individual styles of composition – the...
, Alessandro Scarlatti
Alessandro Scarlatti
Alessandro Scarlatti was an Italian Baroque composer especially famous for his operas and chamber cantatas. He is considered the founder of the Neapolitan school of opera. He was the father of two other composers, Domenico Scarlatti and Pietro Filippo Scarlatti.-Life:Scarlatti was born in...
, and, later, of Gioacchino Rossini
Gioacchino Rossini
Gioachino Antonio Rossini was an Italian composer who wrote 39 operas as well as sacred music, chamber music, songs, and some instrumental and piano pieces...
, Vincenzo Bellini
Vincenzo Bellini
Vincenzo Salvatore Carmelo Francesco Bellini was an Italian opera composer. His greatest works are I Capuleti ed i Montecchi , La sonnambula , Norma , Beatrice di Tenda , and I puritani...
, and Gaetano Donizetti
Gaetano Donizetti
Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti was an Italian composer from Bergamo, Lombardy. His best-known works are the operas L'elisir d'amore , Lucia di Lammermoor , and Don Pasquale , all in Italian, and the French operas La favorite and La fille du régiment...
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 Giuseppe Verdi
Giuseppe Verdi
Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was an Italian Romantic composer, mainly of opera. He was one of the most influential composers of the 19th century...
, an icon of Italian culture and pan-Italian unity. Italy retained a Romantic operatic musical tradition in the early 20th century, exemplified by composers of the so-called Giovane Scuola
Giovane Scuola
The giovane scuola refers to a group of Italian composers who succeeded Verdi and flourished in the late 19th and early 20th century...
, whose music was anchored in the previous century, including Arrigo Boito
Arrigo Boito
Arrigo Boito , aka Enrico Giuseppe Giovanni Boito, pseudonym Tobia Gorrio, was an Italian poet, journalist, novelist and composer, best known today for his libretti, especially those for Giuseppe Verdi's operas Otello and Falstaff, and his own opera Mefistofele...
, Ruggiero Leoncavallo, Pietro Mascagni
Pietro Mascagni
Pietro Antonio Stefano Mascagni was an Italian composer most noted for his operas. His 1890 masterpiece Cavalleria rusticana caused one of the greatest sensations in opera history and single-handedly ushered in the Verismo movement in Italian dramatic music...
, and Francesco Cilea
Francesco Cilea
Francesco Cilea was an Italian composer. Today he is particularly known for his operas L'arlesiana and Adriana Lecouvreur.-Biography:...
.
After World War I, however, opera declined in comparison to the popular heights of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Causes included the general cultural shift away from Romanticism
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
and the rise of the cinema
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
, which became a major source of entertainment. A third cause 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
Fausto Terrefranca
Fausto Terrefranca Italian musicologist and critic. He studied in Turin and in Germany and was the music librarian at the conservatories in Naples and in Milan. As well, he taught at the Catholic University of Milan and at the University of Florence...
, who, in a 1912 pamphlet entitled Giaccomo Puccini and International Opera, accused Puccini of "commercialism" and of having deserted Italian traditions. Traditional Romantic opera remained popular; indeed, the dominant opera publisher in the early 20th century was Casa Ricordi
Casa Ricordi
Casa Ricordi is a classical music publishing company founded in 1808 as G. Ricordi & Co. by violinist Giovanni Ricordi in Milan, Italy...
, 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
Carisch
Carish is an Italian music publishing house, founded in Milan in 1887 by the Swiss, G.A. Carish. Initially dealling with the sale of musical instruments and music manuscripts, it became a music publishing concern in 1894. Ownership passed down to various members of the Carish family and the firm...
and Suvini Zerboni
Suvini Zerboni
Suvini Zerboni Italian music publishing house founded in 1907 in Milan, taking its name from the theater society of the same name. The ESZ catalogue included, besides operetta favourites, the best of Italian contemporary music, such composers as Goffredo Petrassi, Luigi Dallapiccola, Luciano...
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
Aldo Clementi
-Life:Aldo Clementi was born in Catania, Italy. He studied the piano, graduating in 1946. His studies in composition began in 1941, and his teachers included Alfredo Sangiorgi and Goffredo Petrassi. After receiving his diploma in 1954, he attended the Darmstadt summer courses from 1955 to 1962...
, and younger peers such as Marco Tutino
Marco Tutino
Marco Tutino is an Italian composer. His emergence during the late 1970s was as the spearhead of an Italian Neo-Romantico group, founded with two other composers, Lorenzo Ferrero and Carlo Galante....
and Lorenzo Ferrero
Lorenzo Ferrero
Lorenzo Ferrero is a contemporary Italian composer with a predilection for opera, a librettist, author, and book editor. He started composing at an early age and wrote over a hundred compositions thus far, including twelve operas, three ballets, and numerous orchestral, chamber music, solo...
.
Sacred music
Italy, being one of Catholicism's seminal nations, has a long history of music for the Roman Catholic ChurchRoman Catholic Church
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with over a billion members. Led by the Pope, it defines its mission as spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, administering the sacraments and exercising charity...
. Until approximately 1800, it was possible to hear Gregorian Chant
Gregorian chant
Gregorian chant is the central tradition of Western plainchant, a form of monophonic liturgical music within Western Christianity that accompanied the celebration of Mass and other ritual services...
and Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
polyphony
Polyphony
In music, polyphony is a texture consisting of two or more independent melodic voices, as opposed to music with just one voice or music with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords ....
, such as the music of Palestrina
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was an Italian Renaissance composer of sacred music and the best-known 16th-century representative of the Roman School of musical composition...
, Lassus, Anerio
Anerio
The brothers Anerio were two notable composers of Italy:*Felice Anerio *Giovanni Francesco Anerio These two brothers born at Narni, were great Roman masters of 16th century polyphony. Felice, the elder, was born about 1560, studied under G. M. Nanino and succeeded Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina...
, and others. Approximately 1800 to approximately 1900 was a century during which a more popular, opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
tic, and entertaining type of church music was heard, to the exclusion of the aforementioned chant and polyphony. In the late 19th century, the Cecilian Movement
Cecilian Movement
The Cecilian Movement of church reform was centered in Italy but received great impetus from Regensburg, Germany, where Franz Xaver Haberl had a world-renowned Kirchenmusicschule...
was started by musicians who fought to restore this music. This movement gained impetus not in Italy but in Germany, particularly in Regensburg
Regensburg
Regensburg is a city in Bavaria, Germany, located at the confluence of the Danube and Regen rivers, at the northernmost bend in the Danube. To the east lies the Bavarian Forest. Regensburg is the capital of the Bavarian administrative region Upper Palatinate...
. The movement reached its apex around 1900 with the ascent of Don Lorenzo Perosi and his supporter (and future saint), Pope Pius X
Pope Pius X
Pope Saint Pius X , born Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto, was the 257th Pope of the Catholic Church, serving from 1903 to 1914. He was the first pope since Pope Pius V to be canonized. Pius X rejected modernist interpretations of Catholic doctrine, promoting traditional devotional practices and orthodox...
. The advent of Vatican II, however, nearly obliterated all Latin-language music from the Church, once again substituting it with a more popular style.
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 GabrieliAndrea Gabrieli
Andrea Gabrieli was an Italian composer and organist of the late Renaissance. The uncle of the somewhat more famous Giovanni Gabrieli, he was the first internationally renowned member of the Venetian School of composers, and was extremely influential in spreading the Venetian style in Italy as...
, Giovanni Gabrieli
Giovanni Gabrieli
Giovanni Gabrieli was an Italian composer and organist. He was one of the most influential musicians of his time, and represents the culmination of the style of the Venetian School, at the time of the shift from Renaissance to Baroque idioms.-Biography:Gabrieli was born in Venice...
, Tomaso Albinoni
Tomaso Albinoni
Tomaso Giovanni Albinoni was an Italian Baroque composer. While famous in his day as an opera composer, he is mainly remembered today for his instrumental music, such as the concertos, some of which are regularly recorded.-Biography:Born in Venice, Republic of Venice, to Antonio Albinoni, a...
, Arcangelo Corelli
Arcangelo Corelli
Arcangelo Corelli was an Italian violinist and composer of Baroque music.-Biography:Corelli was born at Fusignano, in the current-day province of Ravenna, although at the time it was in the province of Ferrara. Little is known about his early life...
, Antonio Vivaldi
Antonio Vivaldi
Antonio Lucio Vivaldi , nicknamed because of his red hair, was an Italian Baroque composer, priest, and virtuoso violinist, born in Venice. Vivaldi is recognized as one of the greatest Baroque composers, and his influence during his lifetime was widespread over Europe...
, Luigi Boccherini
Luigi Boccherini
Luigi Rodolfo Boccherini was an Italian classical era composer and cellist whose music retained a courtly and galante style while he matured somewhat apart from the major European musical centers. Boccherini is most widely known for one particular minuet from his String Quintet in E, Op. 11, No...
, Luigi Cherubini
Luigi Cherubini
Luigi Cherubini was an Italian composer who spent most of his working life in France. His most significant compositions are operas and sacred music. Beethoven regarded Cherubini as the greatest of his contemporaries....
and Domenico Scarlatti
Domenico Scarlatti
Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti was an Italian composer who spent much of his life in the service of the Portuguese and Spanish royal families. He is classified as a Baroque composer chronologically, although his music was influential in the development of the Classical style...
. (Even opera composers occasionally worked in other forms—Giuseppe Verdi
Giuseppe Verdi
Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was an Italian Romantic composer, mainly of opera. He was one of the most influential composers of the 19th century...
's String Quartet in E minor, for example. Even Donizetti
Gaetano Donizetti
Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti was an Italian composer from Bergamo, Lombardy. His best-known works are the operas L'elisir d'amore , Lucia di Lammermoor , and Don Pasquale , all in Italian, and the French operas La favorite and La fille du régiment...
, whose name is identified with the beginnings of Italian lyric opera, wrote 18 string quartets.) In the early 20th century, instrumental music began growing in importance, a process that started around 1904 with Giuseppe Martucci
Giuseppe Martucci
Giuseppe Martucci was an Italian composer, conductor, pianist and teacher. As a composer and teacher he was influential in reviving Italian interest in non-operatic music. As a conductor he helped to introduce Richard Wagner's operas to Italy and also gave important early concerts of English music...
'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, such as Leone Sinigaglia
Leone Sinigaglia
Leone Sinigaglia was an Italian composer and mountaineer.- Biography :Born in Turin into an upper middle class family, Sinigaglia knew the leading figures of thought, arts and science that lived in the city at the time, such as Galileo Ferraris, Cesare Lombroso, and Leonardo Bistolfi...
, used native folk traditions.
The early 20th century is also marked by the presence of a group of composers called the generazione dell'ottanta (generation of 1880), including Franco Alfano
Franco Alfano
Franco Alfano was an Italian composer and pianist. Best known today for his opera Risurrezione and above all for having completed Puccini's opera Turandot in 1926. He had considerable success with several of his own works during his lifetime.- Biography :He was born in Posillipo, Naples...
, Alfredo Casella
Alfredo Casella
Alfredo Casella was an Italian composer, pianist and conductor.- Life and career :Casella was born in Turin; his family included many musicians; his grandfather, a friend of Paganini's, was first cello in the San Carlo Theatre in Lisbon and eventually was soloist in the Royal Chapel in Turin...
, Gian Francesco Malipiero
Gian Francesco Malipiero
Gian Francesco Malipiero was an Italian composer, musicologist, music teacher and editor.-Early years:Born in Venice into an aristocratic family, the grandson of the opera composer Francesco Malipiero, Gian Francesco Malipiero was prevented by family troubles from pursuing his musical education in...
, Ildebrando Pizzetti
Ildebrando Pizzetti
Ildebrando Pizzetti was an Italian composer of classical music.- Biography :Pizzetti was born in Parma in 1880. He was part of the "Generation of 1880" along with Ottorino Respighi and Gian Francesco Malipiero. They were among the first Italian composers in some time whose primary contributions...
, and Ottorino Respighi
Ottorino Respighi
Ottorino Respighi was an Italian composer, musicologist and conductor. He is best known for his orchestral "Roman trilogy": Fountains of Rome ; Pines of Rome ; and Roman Festivals...
. These composers usually concentrated on writing instrumental works, rather than opera. 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
Venice Festival of Contemporary Music
Venice Festival of Contemporary Music . Founded in 1930 as an adjunct of the older Venice Biennale festival. Some works by Prokofiev and Stravinsky were premiered at the festival...
and the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino
Maggio Musicale Fiorentino
Maggio Musicale Fiorentino is an annual opera festival which was founded in April 1933 by conductor Vittorio Gui with the aim of presenting contemporary and forgotten operas in visually dramatic productions. It was the first music festival in Italy. The first opera presented was Verdi's early...
. Guido Gatti
Guido Gatti
Guido Maggiorino Gatti. . Italian music critic and founder of the journal Rassegna musicale in 1928. Previously he had edited another music journal, called Il Pianoforte. He was director of the Turin Theater from 1925-31 and general director of the first Maggio Musicale Fiorentino...
's founding of the periodical il Piano and then La rassegna 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 audience sought new styles of experimental classical music.
Ballet
Italian contributions to ballet are less known and appreciated than in other areas of classical music. Italy, particularly MilanMilan
Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...
, was the European center of court choreography
Choreography
Choreography is the art of designing sequences of movements in which motion, form, or both are specified. Choreography may also refer to the design itself, which is sometimes expressed by means of dance notation. The word choreography literally means "dance-writing" from the Greek words "χορεία" ...
as early as the 15th century in the form of such things as ritual masked balls. Early choreographers and composers of ballet include Fabrizio Caroso and Cesare Negri
Cesare Negri
Cesare Negri Italian dancer and choreographer. He was nicknamed il Trombone, an ugly or jocular name for someone "who likes to blow his own horn." Born in Milan, he founded a dance academy there in 1554. He was an active court choreographer for the nobility in Milan...
. The style of ballet known as the "spectacles all’italiana" imported to France from Italy caught on, and the first ballet performed in France (1581), Ballet comique de la Royn, was composed by an Italian, Baltazarini di Belgioioso, better known by the French version of his name, Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx
Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx
Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx , originally Baldassare de Belgiojoso was an Italian violinist, composer, and choreographer.-Career:...
. 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 played instruments onstage. Then, in the wake of the French Revolution
French Revolution
The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...
, Italy again became a center of ballet, largely through the efforts of Salvatore Viganò
Salvatore Viganò
Salvatore Viganò , was an Italian choreographer, dancer and composer.He was born in Naples. He studied composition with Luigi Boccherini and by the mid-1780s was composing original music. In 1788 he appeared as a dancer on the stage in Venice. He performed in the coronation festivities of...
, a choreographer who worked with some of the most prominent composers of the day. He was made the balletmaster of La Scala
La Scala
La Scala , is a world renowned opera house in Milan, Italy. The theatre was inaugurated on 3 August 1778 and was originally known as the New Royal-Ducal Theatre at La Scala...
in 1812. The best-known example of Italian ballet from the 19th century is probably Excelsior, with music by Romualdo Marenco
Romualdo Marenco
Romualdo Marenco was an Italian composer primarily noted for ballet music. Marenco started his musical career as a violinist in the Doria Theater in Genoa. His first composition was the ballet Garibaldi's Landing in Marsala...
and choreography by Luigi Manzotti
Luigi Manzotti
Luigi Manzotti was an Italian mime dancer and choreographer.Born in Milan, Manzotti created his first ballet in 1858 and his subsequent productions were performed around the world. Today he is best remembered for his choreography of the ballet Excelsior , music by Romualdo Marenco.-External links:...
. 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.
Currently, major Italian opera theaters maintain ballet companies. They exist to provide incidental and ceremonial dancing in many operas, such as Aida
Aida
Aida sometimes spelled Aïda, is an opera in four acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Antonio Ghislanzoni, based on a scenario written by French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette...
or La Traviata
La traviata
La traviata is an opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi set to an Italian libretto by Francesco Maria Piave. It is based on La dame aux Camélias , a play adapted from the novel by Alexandre Dumas, fils. The title La traviata means literally The Fallen Woman, or perhaps more figuratively, The Woman...
. These dance companies usually maintain a separate ballet season and perform the standard repertoire of classical ballet, little of which is Italian. The Italian equivalent of the Russian Bolshoi Ballet
Bolshoi Ballet
The Bolshoi Ballet is an internationally renowned classical ballet company, based at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, Russia. Founded in 1776, the Bolshoi is among the world's oldest ballet companies, however it only achieved worldwide acclaim by the early 20th century, when Moscow became the...
and similar companies that exist only to perform ballet, independent of a parent opera theater is La Scala Ballet, which is under the direction of Frèdèric Olivieri. Since 1979 there has existed in Italy a modern dance company, the Aterballetto, based in Reggio Emilia. The company performs worldwide under the leadership of choreographer Mauro Bigonzetti
Mauro Bigonzetti
Mauro Bigonzetti is an internationally acclaimed choreographer of contemporary ballet. Born in Rome in 1960, Bigonzetti trained at the ballet school of Teatro dell'Opera di Roma and entered their company in 1979. In 1983 he joined the Reggio Emilia company Aterballetto, renowned for its...
.
Experimental music
Experimental music is a broad, loosely-defined field encompassingFerruccio Busoni
Ferruccio Busoni was an Italian composer, pianist, editor, writer, piano and composition teacher, and conductor.-Biography:...
, whose 1907 publication, Sketch for a New Aesthetic of Music, discussed the use of electrical and other new sounds 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
Luigi Russolo
Luigi Russolo was an Italian Futurist painter and composer, and the author of the manifesto The Art of Noises . He is often regarded as one of the first noise music experimental composers with his performances of "noise concerts" in 1913-14 and then again after World War I, notably in Paris in 1921...
, the Italian Futurist
Futurism (art)
Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized and glorified themes associated with contemporary concepts of the future, including speed, technology, youth and violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane and the industrial city...
painter and composer, wrote of the possibilities of new music in his 1913 manifestoes The Art of Noises and Musica Futurista. He also invented and built instruments such as the intonarumori, mostly percussion, which were used in a precursor to the style known as musique concrète
Musique concrète
Musique concrète is a form of electroacoustic music that utilises acousmatic sound as a compositional resource. The compositional material is not restricted to the inclusion of sounds derived from musical instruments or voices, nor to elements traditionally thought of as "musical"...
. One of the most influential events in early 20th century music was the return of Alfredo Casella
Alfredo Casella
Alfredo Casella was an Italian composer, pianist and conductor.- Life and career :Casella was born in Turin; his family included many musicians; his grandfather, a friend of Paganini's, was first cello in the San Carlo Theatre in Lisbon and eventually was soloist in the Royal Chapel in Turin...
from France in 1915; Casella founded the Società Italiana di Musica Moderna
Società Italiana di Musica Moderna
The Società Italiana di Musica Moderna , an organization founded in 1917 by Alfredo Casella, Gian Francesco Malipiero, and Gabriele D’Annunzio. The organization published a journal called Ars Nuova....
, 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
Corporazione delle Nuove Musiche
The Corporazione delle Nuove Musiche was founded in 1923 by Alfredo Casella as a successor organization to his early Società Italiana di Musica Moderna ....
to promote modern experimental music.
In the 1950s, Luciano Berio
Luciano Berio
Luciano Berio, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI was an Italian composer. He is noted for his experimental work and also for his pioneering work in electronic music.-Biography:Berio was born at Oneglia Luciano Berio, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI (October 24, 1925 – May 27, 2003) was an Italian...
experimented with instruments accompanied by electronic sounds on tape. In modern Italy, one important organization that fosters research in avantgarde and electronic music is CEMAT
CEMAT
CEMAT . It was founded in 1996 with the purpose of promoting the activity of Italian computer music research and production centers...
, the Federation of Italian Electroacoustic Music Centers. It was founded in 1996 in Rome and is a member of the CIME, 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 operas 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, composers who use the melodies and harmonies typical of the Romantic era. This focus is common to other European traditions, and is known as postmodernismPostmodern music
Postmodern music is either simply music of the postmodern era, or music that follows aesthetical and philosophical trends of postmodernism. As the name suggests, the postmodernist movement formed partly in reaction to modernism...
, a school of thought that draws on earlier harmonic and melodic concepts that pre-date the conceptions of atonality
Atonality
Atonality in its broadest sense describes music that lacks a tonal center, or key. Atonality in this sense usually describes compositions written from about 1908 to the present day where a hierarchy of pitches focusing on a single, central tone is not used, and the notes of the chromatic scale...
and dissonance
Consonance and dissonance
In music, a consonance is a harmony, chord, or interval considered stable, as opposed to a dissonance , which is considered to be unstable...
. This focus on popular historical composers has helped to maintain a continued presence of classical music across a 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 such as Luciano Berio
Luciano Berio
Luciano Berio, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI was an Italian composer. He is noted for his experimental work and also for his pioneering work in electronic music.-Biography:Berio was born at Oneglia Luciano Berio, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI (October 24, 1925 – May 27, 2003) was an Italian...
, Luigi Nono
Luigi Nono
Luigi Nono was an Italian avant-garde composer of classical music and remains one of the most prominent composers of the 20th century.- Early years :Born in Venice, he was a member of a wealthy artistic family, and his grandfather was a notable painter...
, Franco Donatoni
Franco Donatoni
Franco Donatoni was an Italian composer.Born in Verona, he started studying violin at the age of seven, and frequented the local Music Academy...
, and Sylvano Bussotti
Sylvano Bussotti
Sylvano Bussotti is an Italian composer of contemporary music whose work is unusually notated and often creates special problems of interpretation.Born in Florence, Bussotti learned to play the violin as a child, becoming a prodigy...
. 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
Italian Communist Party
The Italian Communist Party was a communist political party in Italy.The PCI was founded as Communist Party of Italy on 21 January 1921 in Livorno, by seceding from the Italian Socialist Party . Amadeo Bordiga and Antonio Gramsci led the split. Outlawed during the Fascist regime, the party played...
, 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
RAI
RAI — Radiotelevisione italiana S.p.A. known until 1954 as Radio Audizioni Italiane, is the Italian state owned public service broadcaster controlled by the Ministry of Economic Development. Rai is the biggest television company in Italy...
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 unificationItalian unification
Italian unification was the political and social movement that agglomerated different states of the Italian peninsula into the single state of Italy in the 19th century...
came late to the Italian peninsula
Italian Peninsula
The Italian Peninsula or Apennine Peninsula is one of the three large peninsulas of Southern Europe , spanning from the Po Valley in the north to the central Mediterranean Sea in the south. The peninsula's shape gives it the nickname Lo Stivale...
, 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 centre of the Mediterranean; Arabic, African, Celtic
Celtic music
Celtic music is a term utilised by artists, record companies, music stores and music magazines to describe a broad grouping of musical genres that evolved out of the folk musical traditions of the Celtic people of Western Europe...
, Persian, Roma
Roma music
Romani music is the music of the Romani people, who have their origins in Northern India, but today live mostly in Europe....
, and Slavic
Music of Southeastern Europe
The music of Southeastern Europe or Balkan music is a type of music distinct from others in Europe. This is mainly because it was influenced by traditional music of Southeastern European ethnic groups and mutual music influences of these ethnic groups in the period of the Ottoman Empire...
influences, as well as rough geography and the historic dominance of small city states
Italian city-states
The Italian city-states were a political phenomenon of small independent states mostly in the central and northern Italian peninsula between the 10th and 15th centuries....
, have all combined to allow diverse musical styles to coexist in close proximity.
Italian folk styles are very diverse, and include monophonic
Monophony
In music, monophony is the simplest of textures, consisting of melody without accompanying harmony. This may be realized as just one note at a time, or with the same note duplicated at the octave . If the entire melody is sung by two voices or a choir with an interval between the notes or in...
, polyphonic
Polyphony
In music, polyphony is a texture consisting of two or more independent melodic voices, as opposed to music with just one voice or music with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords ....
, and responsorial song, choral, instrumental and vocal music, 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
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
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
Italy's folk music is sometimes divided into several spheres of geographic influence, a classification system of three regions, southern, central and northern, proposed by Alan LomaxAlan Lomax
Alan Lomax was an American folklorist and ethnomusicologist. He was one of the great field collectors of folk music of the 20th century, recording thousands of songs in the United States, Great Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain.In his later career, Lomax advanced his theories of...
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
Pesaro
Pesaro is a town and comune in the Italian region of the Marche, capital of the Pesaro e Urbino province, on the Adriatic. According to the 2007 census, its population was 92,206....
and La Spezia
La Spezia
La Spezia , at the head of the Gulf of La Spezia in the Liguria region of northern Italy, is the capital city of the province of La Spezia. Located between Genoa and Pisa on the Ligurian Sea, it is one of the main Italian military and commercial harbours and hosts one of Italy's biggest military...
. The central, northern and southern parts of the peninsula each share certain musical characteristics, and are each distinct from the music of Sardinia
Music of Sardinia
Sardinia is probably the most culturally distinct of all the regions in Italy and, musically, is best known for the tenore polyphonic chant, sacred songs called gozos, and launeddas, an ancient instrument that consist in a set of three single-reed pipes, all three mouth-blown simultaneously using...
.
In the Piedmontese valleys and some Ligurian communities of northwestern Italy, the music preserves the strong influence of ancient Occitania
Occitania
Occitania , also sometimes lo País d'Òc, "the Oc Country"), is the region in southern Europe where Occitan was historically the main language spoken, and where it is sometimes still used, for the most part as a second language...
. The lyrics of the Occitanic troubadour
Troubadour
A troubadour was a composer and performer of Old Occitan lyric poetry during the High Middle Ages . Since the word "troubadour" is etymologically masculine, a female troubadour is usually called a trobairitz....
s are some of the oldest preserved samples of vernacular song, and modern bands like Gai Saber
Gai Saber
Gai Saber is an Italian folk group focused on the musical and dance traditions of Italian Occitania. Gai Saber draws its name from a medieval Occitan poetic academy that traces its roots to the regions influential troubadour culture. It is also the origin of Nietzsche's book on poetry, The Gay...
and Lou Dalfin
Lou Dalfin
Lou Dalfin is an Italian folk and folk-rock/folk-punk group focused on preserving and modernizing the traditions of Occitania. Founded in 1982 by hurdy-gurdy master Sergio Berardo, the band combines traditional Occitan sounds with modern rock instrumentation....
preserve and contemporize Occitan music. The Occitanian culture retains characteristics of the ancient Celtic influence, through the use of six or seven hole flutes (fifre) or the bagpipes (piva
Piva (bagpipe)
The piva is a type of bagpipe played in Northern Italy and the Italian-speaking areas of Switzerland, such as Ticino. The instrument has a single chanter and single drone....
). The music of Friuli-Venezia Giulia
Friuli-Venezia Giulia
Friuli–Venezia Giulia is one of the twenty regions of Italy, and one of five autonomous regions with special statute. The capital is Trieste. It has an area of 7,858 km² and about 1.2 million inhabitants. A natural opening to the sea for many Central European countries, the region is...
, in northeastern Italy, shares much more in common with Austria and Slovenia including variants of the waltz
Waltz
The waltz is a ballroom and folk dance in time, performed primarily in closed position.- History :There are several references to a sliding or gliding dance,- a waltz, from the 16th century including the representations of the printer H.S. Beheim...
and the polka
Polka
The polka is a Central European dance and also a genre of dance music familiar throughout Europe and the Americas. It originated in the middle of the 19th century in Bohemia...
. 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
Monody
In poetry, the term monody has become specialized to refer to a poem in which one person laments another's death....
of the south. In parts of Apulia (Grecìa Salentina
Grecìa Salentina
Grecia Salentina is an area in the peninsula of Salento in southern Italy, near the town of Lecce which is inhabited by the Griko people, an ethnic Greek minority living in southern Italy who traditionally spoke a Greek Language dialect also called Griko. It consists of eleven towns and belongs to...
, for example) the Griko dialect is commonly used in song. The Apulian city of Taranto
Taranto
Taranto is a coastal city in Apulia, Southern Italy. It is the capital of the Province of Taranto and is an important commercial port as well as the main Italian naval base....
is a home of the tarantella
Tarantella
The term tarantella groups a number of different southern Italian couple folk dances characterized by a fast upbeat tempo, usually in 6/8 time , accompanied by tambourines. It is among the most recognized of traditional Italian music. The specific dance name varies with every region, for instance...
, 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
Aramirè
Aramirè is music group from Salento, Italy, specializing in various forms of local traditional music:* The pizzica version of the Tarantella,* songs of the Grecìa Salentina region,* traditional love songs,* and polyphonic songs of love and labour....
.
The music of the island of Sardinia
Music of Sardinia
Sardinia is probably the most culturally distinct of all the regions in Italy and, musically, is best known for the tenore polyphonic chant, sacred songs called gozos, and launeddas, an ancient instrument that consist in a set of three single-reed pipes, all three mouth-blown simultaneously using...
is best known for the polyphonic chanting of the tenores
Tenores
Cantu a tenore is a style of polyphonic folk singing characteristic of the Barbagia region of the island of Sardinia , even though some other Sardinian sub-regions bear examples of such tradition....
. The sound of the tenores recalls the roots of Gregorian chant, and is similar to but distinctive from the Ligurian trallalero
Trallalero
Trallalero is a kind of polyphonic folk music from the Ligurian region of Genoa, in the north of Italy. It is traditionally performed by men, though there are some female performers in the modern era...
. Typical instruments include the launeddas
Launeddas
The launeddas is a typical Sardinian woodwind instrument, consisting of three pipes. It is polyphonic and played using circular breathing. An ancient instrument, dating back to at least the 8th century BC, launeddas are still played during religious ceremonies and dances...
, a Sardinian triplepipe used in a sophisticated and complex manner. Efisio Melis
Efisio Melis
Efisio Melis was a Sardinian folk musician.He was born in Villaputzu near the southeastern tip of the island of Sardinia. Melis is considered to have been the greatest performer ever on the traditional instrument, the launeddas, which is typically used in the music of southern Sardinia.Melis was a...
was a well-known master launeddas player of the 1930s.
Songs
Italian folk songs include balladBallad
A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads were particularly characteristic of British and Irish popular poetry and song from the later medieval period until the 19th century and used extensively across Europe and later the Americas, Australia and North Africa. Many...
s, lyrical
Lyrics
Lyrics are a set of words that make up a song. The writer of lyrics is a lyricist or lyrist. The meaning of lyrics can either be explicit or implicit. Some lyrics are abstract, almost unintelligible, and, in such cases, their explication emphasizes form, articulation, meter, and symmetry of...
songs, lullabies
Lullaby
A lullaby is a soothing song, usually sung to young children before they go to sleep, with the intention of speeding that process. As a result they are often simple and repetitive. Lullabies can be found in every culture and since the ancient period....
and children's songs, seasonal songs based around holidays such as Christmas
Christmas
Christmas or Christmas Day is an annual holiday generally celebrated on December 25 by billions of people around the world. It is a Christian feast that commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ, liturgically closing the Advent season and initiating the season of Christmastide, which lasts twelve days...
, 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-monostrofici) 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
Laude
The lauda or lauda spirituale was the most important form of vernacular sacred song in Italy in the late medieval era and Renaissance. Laude remained popular into the nineteenth century....
, sometimes in Latin, are still occasionally performed, and epic
Epic poetry
An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form...
songs are also known, especially those of the maggio
Maggio drammatico
Literally, "plays of May" the Maggio drammatico refers to medieval musical and dramatic rituals at planting time in central Italy, typical of many agrarian societies. Their origins, however, are certainly prehistoric...
celebration. Professional female singers perform dirge
Dirge
A dirge is a somber song expressing mourning or grief, such as would be appropriate for performance at a funeral. A lament. The English word "dirge" is derived from the Latin Dirige, Domine, Deus meus, in conspectu tuo viam meam , the first words of the first antiphon in the Matins of the Office...
s 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
Carnival
Carnaval is a festive season which occurs immediately before Lent; the main events are usually during February. Carnaval typically involves a public celebration or parade combining some elements of a circus, mask and public street party...
is associated with several song types, especially the Carnival of Bagolino
Bagolino
Bagolino is a comune in the province of Brescia, in Lombardy, Italy, in the valley of the river Caffaro, on the right side of Valle Sabbia. Bagolino is famous for the cheese named Bagòss and the carnival....
, Brescia
Brescia
Brescia is a city and comune in the region of Lombardy in northern Italy. It is situated at the foot of the Alps, between the Mella and the Naviglio, with a population of around 197,000. It is the second largest city in Lombardy, after the capital, Milan...
. Choirs and brass bands are a part of the mid-Lenten holiday, while the begging
Begging
Begging is to entreat earnestly, implore, or supplicate. It often occurs for the purpose of securing a material benefit, generally for a gift, donation or charitable donation...
song tradition extends through many holidays throughout the year.
Instrumentation
Zampogna
Zampogna is a generic term for a number of Italian double chantered pipes that can be found as far north as the southern part of the Marche, throughout areas in Abruzzo, Latium, Molise, Basilicata, Campania, Calabria, and Sicily...
bagpipe, typically heard only at Christmas. Italian folk instruments can be divided into string
String instrument
A string instrument is a musical instrument that produces sound by means of vibrating strings. In the Hornbostel-Sachs scheme of musical instrument classification, used in organology, they are called chordophones...
, wind
Wind instrument
A wind instrument is a musical instrument that contains some type of resonator , in which a column of air is set into vibration by the player blowing into a mouthpiece set at the end of the resonator. The pitch of the vibration is determined by the length of the tube and by manual modifications of...
and percussion
Percussion instrument
A percussion instrument is any object which produces a sound when hit with an implement or when it is shaken, rubbed, scraped, or otherwise acted upon in a way that sets the object into vibration...
categories. Common instruments include the organetto
Organetto
Organetto refers to two distinct instruments. The medieval organetto was a portable pipe instrument, while the modern organetto is a popular Italian folk instrument allied to the accordion....
, an accordion most closely associated with the saltarello
Saltarello
The saltarello was a lively, merry dance first mentioned in Naples during the 13th century. The music survives, but no early instructions for the actual dance are known. It was played in a fast triple meter and is named for its peculiar leaping step, after the Italian verb saltare .-History:The...
; the diatonic button organetto is most common in central Italy, while chromatic accordions prevail in the north. Many municipalities are home to brass band
Brass band
A brass band is a musical ensemble generally consisting entirely of brass instruments, most often with a percussion section. Ensembles that include brass and woodwind instruments can in certain traditions also be termed brass bands , but are usually more correctly termed military bands, concert...
s, which perform with roots revival groups; these ensembles are based around the clarinet
Clarinet
The clarinet is a musical instrument of woodwind type. The name derives from adding the suffix -et to the Italian word clarino , as the first clarinets had a strident tone similar to that of a trumpet. The instrument has an approximately cylindrical bore, and uses a single reed...
, accordion, violin and small drums, adorned with bells.
Flute
The flute is a musical instrument of the woodwind family. Unlike woodwind instruments with reeds, a flute is an aerophone or reedless wind instrument that produces its sound from the flow of air across an opening...
s. These include duct, globular and transverse flutes, as well as various variations of the pan flute
Pan flute
The pan flute or pan pipe is an ancient musical instrument based on the principle of the closed tube, consisting usually of five or more pipes of gradually increasing length...
. 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 found 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
Zampogna
Zampogna is a generic term for a number of Italian double chantered pipes that can be found as far north as the southern part of the Marche, throughout areas in Abruzzo, Latium, Molise, Basilicata, Campania, Calabria, and Sicily...
; dialect names for the bagpipe vary throughout Italy-- beghet in Bergamo
Bergamo
Bergamo is a town and comune in Lombardy, Italy, about 40 km northeast of Milan. The comune is home to over 120,000 inhabitants. It is served by the Orio al Serio Airport, which also serves the Province of Bergamo, and to a lesser extent the metropolitan area of Milan...
, piva in Lombardy
Lombardy
Lombardy is one of the 20 regions of Italy. The capital is Milan. One-sixth of Italy's population lives in Lombardy and about one fifth of Italy's GDP is produced in this region, making it the most populous and richest region in the country and one of the richest in the whole of Europe...
, müsa in Alessandria
Alessandria
-Monuments:* The Citadel * The church of Santa Maria di Castello * The church of Santa Maria del Carmine * Palazzo Ghilini * Università del Piemonte Orientale-Museums:* The Marengo Battle Museum...
, Genoa
Genoa
Genoa |Ligurian]] Zena ; Latin and, archaically, English Genua) is a city and an important seaport in northern Italy, the capital of the Province of Genoa and of the region of Liguria....
, Pavia
Pavia
Pavia , the ancient Ticinum, is a town and comune of south-western Lombardy, northern Italy, 35 km south of Milan on the lower Ticino river near its confluence with the Po. It is the capital of the province of Pavia. It has a population of c. 71,000...
and Piacenza
Piacenza
Piacenza is a city and comune in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy. It is the capital of the province of Piacenza...
, and so forth.
Numerous percussion instruments are a part of Italian folk music, including wood blocks, bell
Bell (instrument)
A bell is a simple sound-making device. The bell is a percussion instrument and an idiophone. Its form is usually a hollow, cup-shaped object, which resonates upon being struck...
s, castanet
Castanet
Castanets are a percussion instrument , used in Moorish, Ottoman, ancient Roman, Italian, Spanish, Sephardic Music, and Portuguese music. The instrument consists of a pair of concave shells joined on one edge by a string. They are held in the hand and used to produce clicks for rhythmic accents or...
s, drums. Several regions have their own distinct form of rattle
Rattle (percussion)
A rattle is a percussion instrument. It consists of a hollow body filled with small uniform solid objects, like sand or nuts. Rhythmical shaking of this instrument produces repetitive, rather dry timbre noises. In some kinds of music, a rattle assumes the role of the metronome, as an alternative to...
, including the raganella
Raganella
The raganella is a percussion instrument common in the folk music of Calabria in southern Italy. Technically, the raganella is a "cog rattle," producing a sound that is enough of a "croak" to have derived the folk name of the instrument from the Italian name of the common tree-frog.- Design :The...
cog rattle and the Calabrian conocchie
Conocchie
The conocchie is a percussion instrument used in the folk music of much of southern Italy. Technically, the instrument is a rattle and was originally crafted from a shepherd's staff or a distaff used in the craft of spinning. The staff has a permanently attached compartment on the top containing...
, a spinning or shepherd's staff with permanently attached seed rattles with ritual fertility significance. The Neapolitan rattle is the triccaballacca
Triccaballacca
The triccaballacca is a percussion instrument used in Neapolitan folk music and, generally speaking, in folk music throughout much of southern Italy...
, made out of several mallet
Mallet
A mallet is a kind of hammer, usually of rubber,or sometimes wood smaller than a maul or beetle and usually with a relatively large head.-Tools:Tool mallets come in different types, the most common of which are:...
s in a wooden frame. Tambourine
Tambourine
The tambourine or marine is a musical instrument of the percussion family consisting of a frame, often of wood or plastic, with pairs of small metal jingles, called "zils". Classically the term tambourine denotes an instrument with a drumhead, though some variants may not have a head at all....
s (tamburini, tamburello), as are various kinds of drums, such as the friction drum
Friction drum
Hornbostel-Sachs classification number 232.11-92A friction drum is a musical instrument found in various forms in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America...
putipù
Putipù
One of the most original instruments created by the folkloristic inventiveness, generally of the South of Italy and in a particular way Neapolitan, is the “Caccavella”, which for onomatopoeia,Is called by the populace “Putipu”....
. The Tamburello
Tamburello
Tamburello is a court game invented in the northern provinces of Italy during 16th century. It's a modification of the ancient game of pallone col bracciale...
, while appearing very similar to the contemporary western tambourine, is actually played with a much more articulate and sophisticated technique (influenced by Middle Eastern playing), giving it a wide range of sounds. The mouth-harp, scacciapensieri or care-chaser, is a distinctive instrument, found only in northern Italy and Sicily.
Viggiano
Viggiano is a town and comune in the province of Potenza, in the Southern Italian region of Basilicata. It is bounded by the comuni of Calvello, Corleto Perticara, Grumento Nova, Laurenzana, Marsicovetere, Montemurro....
is home to a harp
Harp
The harp is a multi-stringed instrument which has the plane of its strings positioned perpendicularly to the soundboard. Organologically, it is in the general category of chordophones and has its own sub category . All harps have a neck, resonator and strings...
tradition, which has a historical base in Abruzzi, Lazio and Calabria
Calabria
Calabria , in antiquity known as Bruttium, is a region in southern Italy, south of Naples, located at the "toe" of the Italian Peninsula. The capital city of Calabria is Catanzaro....
.
Calabria, alone, has 30 traditional musical instruments, some of which have strongly archaic characteristics and are largely extinct elsewhere in Italy. It is home to the four- or five-stringed guitar
Guitar
The guitar is a plucked string instrument, usually played with fingers or a pick. The guitar consists of a body with a rigid neck to which the strings, generally six in number, are attached. Guitars are traditionally constructed of various woods and strung with animal gut or, more recently, with...
called the chitarra battente
Chitarra battente
The chitarra battente also known as "chitarra italiana" is a musical instrument, a chordophone of the lute family. At a casual glance, it is similar to the everyday classical guitar, but larger and typically strung with four steel strings...
, and a three-stringed, bowed fiddle called the lira
Calabrian lira
The Calabrian Lira is a traditional musical instrument characteristic of some areas of Calabria, region in southern Italy.- Characteristics :The Lira of Calabria is a bowed string instrument with three strings...
, which is also found in similar forms in the music of Crete
Music of Crete
The music of Crete is a traditional form of Greek folk music called κρητικά . The lyra is the dominant folk instrument on the island; there are three-stringed and four-stringed versions of this bowed string instrument, closely related to the medieval Byzantine lyra. It is often accompanied by the...
and Southeastern Europe
Music of Southeastern Europe
The music of Southeastern Europe or Balkan music is a type of music distinct from others in Europe. This is mainly because it was influenced by traditional music of Southeastern European ethnic groups and mutual music influences of these ethnic groups in the period of the Ottoman Empire...
. A one-stringed, bowed fiddle called the torototela, is common in the northeast of the country. The largely German-speaking area of South Tyrol
South Tyrol
South Tyrol , also known by its Italian name Alto Adige, is an autonomous province in northern Italy. It is one of the two autonomous provinces that make up the autonomous region of Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol. The province has an area of and a total population of more than 500,000 inhabitants...
is known for the zither
Zither
The zither is a musical string instrument, most commonly found in Slovenia, Austria, Hungary citera, northwestern Croatia, the southern regions of Germany, alpine Europe and East Asian cultures, including China...
, and the ghironda (hurdy-gurdy) is found in Emilia
Emilia (region of Italy)
Emilia is a historical region of northern Italy which approximately corresponds to the western and north-eastern portions of today’s Emilia-Romagna region...
, Piedmont
Piedmont
Piedmont is one of the 20 regions of Italy. It has an area of 25,402 square kilometres and a population of about 4.4 million. The capital of Piedmont is Turin. The main local language is Piedmontese. Occitan is also spoken by a minority in the Occitan Valleys situated in the Provinces of...
and Lombardy
Lombardy
Lombardy is one of the 20 regions of Italy. The capital is Milan. One-sixth of Italy's population lives in Lombardy and about one fifth of Italy's GDP is produced in this region, making it the most populous and richest region in the country and one of the richest in the whole of Europe...
.
Existing, rooted and widespread traditions confirm the production of ephemeral and toy instruments made of bark, reed (arundo donax), leaves, fibers and stems, as it emerges, for example, from Fabio Lombardi
Fabio Lombardi
Fabio Lombardi is an Italian ethnomusicologist and organologist who studied, at the Bologna University, with Roberto Leydi, Tullia Magrini and the organologist Febo Guizzi....
's research.
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. Famous dances include the southern tarantellaTarantella
The term tarantella groups a number of different southern Italian couple folk dances characterized by a fast upbeat tempo, usually in 6/8 time , accompanied by tambourines. It is among the most recognized of traditional Italian music. The specific dance name varies with every region, for instance...
; 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
Tarantula
Tarantulas comprise a group of often hairy and often very large arachnids belonging to the family Theraphosidae, of which approximately 900 species have been identified. Some members of the same Suborder may also be called "tarantulas" in the common parlance. This article will restrict itself to...
bites. Popular Tuscan dances ritually act out the hunting of the hare, or display blades in weapon dance
Weapon dance
The weapon dance employs weapons—or stylized versions of weapons—traditionally used in combat in order to simulate, recall, or reenact combat or the moves of combat in the form of dance, usually for some ceremonial purpose. Such dancing is quite common to folk ritual in many parts of the world...
s that simulate or recall the moves of combat, or use the weapons as 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
Saltarello
The saltarello was a lively, merry dance first mentioned in Naples during the 13th century. The music survives, but no early instructions for the actual dance are known. It was played in a fast triple meter and is named for its peculiar leaping step, after the Italian verb saltare .-History:The...
. 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
Monferrina
-Italian folk dance:Monferrina is a lively Italian folk dance in 6/8 time named after the place of its origin, Montferrat, in the Italian region of Piedmont. It has spread from Piedmont throughout Northern Italy, in Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna, Friuli-Venezia Giulia and even into Switzerland...
, an accompanied dance that was incorporated in Western art music by the composer Muzio Clementi
Muzio Clementi
Muzio Clementi was a celebrated composer, pianist, pedagogue, conductor, music publisher, editor, and piano manufacturer. Born in Italy, he spent most of his life in England. He is best known for his piano sonatas, and his collection of piano studies, Gradus ad Parnassum...
.
Academic interest in the study of dance from the perspectives of sociology and anthropology has traditionally been neglected in Italy but is currently showing renewed life at the university and post-graduate level.
Popular music
The earliest Italian popular music was the opera of the 19th century. Opera has had a lasting effect on Italy's folk, classical and popular musics. Opera tunes spread through brass bandBrass band
A brass band is a musical ensemble generally consisting entirely of brass instruments, most often with a percussion section. Ensembles that include brass and woodwind instruments can in certain traditions also be termed brass bands , but are usually more correctly termed military bands, concert...
s and itinerant ensembles. Canzone Napoletana
Canzone Napoletana
Canzone Napoletana, sometimes referred to as Neapolitan song, is a generic term for a traditional form of music sung in the Neapolitan language, ordinarily for the male voice singing solo, although well-represented by female soloists as well, and expressed in familiar genres such as the lover's...
, 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
Café-chantant
Café chantant is a type of musical establishment associated with the belle époque in France. Although there is much overlap of definition with cabaret, music hall, vaudeville, etc. the café chantant was originally an outdoor café where small groups of performers performed popular music for the...
in the 1890s and then the arrival of American jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
in the 1910s. Until Italian Fascism became officially "allergic" to foreign influences in the late 1930s, American dance music and musicians were quite popular; jazz great Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong , nicknamed Satchmo or Pops, was an American jazz trumpeter and singer from New Orleans, Louisiana....
toured Italy as late as 1935 to great acclaim. In the 1950s, American styles became more prominent, especially rock. The singer-songwriter
Singer-songwriter
Singer-songwriters are musicians who write, compose and sing their own musical material including lyrics and melodies. As opposed to contemporary popular music singers who write their own songs, the term singer-songwriter describes a distinct form of artistry, closely associated with the...
cantautori tradition was a major development of the later 1960s, while the Italian rock scene soon diversified into progressive
Progressive rock
Progressive rock is a subgenre of rock music that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s as part of a "mostly British attempt to elevate rock music to new levels of artistic credibility." John Covach, in Contemporary Music Review, says that many thought it would not just "succeed the pop of...
, punk
Punk rock
Punk rock is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in garage rock and other forms of what is now known as protopunk music, punk rock bands eschewed perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock...
, funk
Funk
Funk is a music genre that originated in the mid-late 1960s when African American musicians blended soul music, jazz and R&B into a rhythmic, danceable new form of music. Funk de-emphasizes melody and harmony and brings a strong rhythmic groove of electric bass and drums to the foreground...
and folk-based styles.
Early popular song
Italian operaItalian opera
Italian opera is both the art of opera in Italy and opera in the Italian language. Opera was born in Italy around the year 1600 and Italian opera has continued to play a dominant role in the history of the form until the present day. Many famous operas in Italian were written by foreign composers,...
became immensely popular in the 19th century and was 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 band
Brass band
A brass band is a musical ensemble generally consisting entirely of brass instruments, most often with a percussion section. Ensembles that include brass and woodwind instruments can in certain traditions also be termed brass bands , but are usually more correctly termed military bands, concert...
s, focused in a local village. These civic bands (banda communale) used instruments to perform operatic arias, with trombone
Trombone
The trombone is a musical instrument in the brass family. Like all brass instruments, sound is produced when the player’s vibrating lips cause the air column inside the instrument to vibrate...
s or fluegelhorns for male vocal parts and cornet
Cornet
The cornet is a brass instrument very similar to the trumpet, distinguished by its conical bore, compact shape, and mellower tone quality. The most common cornet is a transposing instrument in B. It is not related to the renaissance and early baroque cornett or cornetto.-History:The cornet was...
s for female parts.
Regional music in the 19th century also became popular throughout Italy. Notable among these local traditions was the Canzone Napoletana
Canzone Napoletana
Canzone Napoletana, sometimes referred to as Neapolitan song, is a generic term for a traditional form of music sung in the Neapolitan language, ordinarily for the male voice singing solo, although well-represented by female soloists as well, and expressed in familiar genres such as the lover's...
—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
'O Sole Mio
"O sole mio" is a globally known Neapolitan song written in 1898. The lyrics were written by Giovanni Capurro and the melody was composed by Eduardo di Capua. Though there are versions in other languages, "'O sole mio" is usually sung in the original Neapolitan language...
", "Torna a Surriento", and "Funiculi Funicula". In the 18th century, many composers, including Alessandro Scarlatti
Alessandro Scarlatti
Alessandro Scarlatti was an Italian Baroque composer especially famous for his operas and chamber cantatas. He is considered the founder of the Neapolitan school of opera. He was the father of two other composers, Domenico Scarlatti and Pietro Filippo Scarlatti.-Life:Scarlatti was born in...
, Leonardo Vinci
Leonardo Vinci
Leonardo Vinci was an Italian composer, best known for his operas.He was born at Strongoli and educated at Naples under Gaetano Greco in the Conservatorio dei Poveri di Gesù Cristo. He first became known for his opere buffe in Neapolitan dialect in 1719; he also composed many opere serie...
, and Giovanni Paisiello
Giovanni Paisiello
Giovanni Paisiello was an Italian composer of the Classical era.-Life:Paisiello was born at Taranto and educated by the Jesuits there. He became known for his beautiful singing voice and in 1754 was sent to the Conservatorio di S. Onofrio at Naples, where he studied under Francesco Durante, and...
, contributed to the Neapolitan tradition by using the local language for the texts of some of their comic opera
Comic opera
Comic opera denotes a sung dramatic work of a light or comic nature, usually with a happy ending.Forms of comic opera first developed in late 17th-century Italy. By the 1730s, a new operatic genre, opera buffa, emerged as an alternative to opera seria...
s. Later, others—most famously Gaetano Donizetti
Gaetano Donizetti
Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti was an Italian composer from Bergamo, Lombardy. His best-known works are the operas L'elisir d'amore , Lucia di Lammermoor , and Don Pasquale , all in Italian, and the French operas La favorite and La fille du régiment...
—composed Neapolitan songs that garnered great renown in Italy and abroad. The Neapolitan song tradition became formalized in the 1830s through an annual songwriting competition for the yearly Piedigrotta
Piedigrotta
Piedigrotta Literally, "at the foot of the grotto". A section of the Mergellina quarter of Naples, Italy, so-called for the presence of the Church of the Madonna of Piedigrotta near the entrance to an ancient Roman tunnel...
festival, dedicated to the Madonna of Piedigrotta
Piedigrotta
Piedigrotta Literally, "at the foot of the grotto". A section of the Mergellina quarter of Naples, Italy, so-called for the presence of the Church of the Madonna of Piedigrotta near the entrance to an ancient Roman tunnel...
, a well-known church in the Mergellina
Mergellina
.Mergellina is a section of the city of Naples in the Campania region of Italy. It is at the west end of the seaside road, via Caracciolo, one mile away from the main port of Naples.-Overview:...
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
Neapolitan language
Neapolitan is the language of the city and region of Naples , and Campania. On October 14, 2008 a law by the Region of Campania stated that the Neapolitan language had to be protected....
, the regional minority language of Campania
Campania
Campania is a region in southern Italy. The region has a population of around 5.8 million people, making it the second-most-populous region of Italy; its total area of 13,590 km² makes it the most densely populated region in the country...
. 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 joyful one minute and melancholy the next.
The music of Francesco Tosti was popular at the turn of the 20th century, and is remembered for his light, expressive songs. His style became very popular during the Belle Époque
Belle Époque
The Belle Époque or La Belle Époque was a period in European social history that began during the late 19th century and lasted until World War I. Occurring during the era of the French Third Republic and the German Empire, it was a period characterised by optimism and new technological and medical...
and is often known as salon music. His most famous works are Serenata, Addio and the popular Neapolitan song, Marechiaro, the lyrics of which are by the prominent Neapolitan dialect poet, Salvatore di Giacomo
Salvatore Di Giacomo
Salvatore Di Giacomo was a Neapolitan poet, songwriter and playwright.Di Giacomo is credited as being one of those responsible for renewing Neapolitan dialect poetry at the beginning of the 20th century...
.
Recorded popular music began in the late 19th century, with international styles influencing Italian music by the late 1910s; however, the rise of autarchia
Autarky
Autarky is the quality of being self-sufficient. Usually the term is applied to political states or their economic policies. Autarky exists whenever an entity can survive or continue its activities without external assistance. Autarky is not necessarily economic. For example, a military autarky...
, the Fascist policy of cultural isolationism in 1922 led to a retreat from international popular music. During this period, popular Italian musicians traveled abroad and learned elements of jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
, Latin American music
Latin American music
Latin American music, found within Central and South America, is a series of musical styles and genres that mixes influences from Spanish, African and indigenous sources, that has recently become very famous in the US.-Argentina:...
and other styles. These musics influenced the Italian tradition, which spread around the world and further diversified following liberalization after World War II.
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
Alberto Rabagliati
Alberto Rabagliati was an Italian singer.- Early career:Rabagliati was born in Milan.In 1927 he moved to Hollywood as the winner of a Rudolph Valentino look-alike contest...
, who became known for a swinging style. Elements of harmony and melody from both jazz and blues
Blues
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...
were used in many popular songs, while rhythms often came from Latin dances like the tango
Tango (dance)
Tango dance originated in the area of the Rio de la Plata , and spread to the rest of the world soon after....
, rumba
Rumba (dance)
Rumba is a dance term with two quite different meanings.In some contexts, "rumba" is used as shorthand for Afro-Cuban rumba, a group of dances related to the rumba genre of Afro-Cuban music. The most common Afro-Cuban rumba is the guaguancó...
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 musicians of the last few decades are Domenico ModugnoDomenico Modugno
Domenico Modugno was an Italian singer, songwriter, actor, and later in life, a member of the Italian Parliament. He is known for his 1958 international hit song "Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu "...
, Mina
Mina (singer)
Anna Maria Quaini, Grand Officer , known as Mina, is an Italian pop singer. She was a staple of Italian television variety shows and a dominant figure in Italian pop music from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s known for her three-octave vocal range, the agility of her soprano voice, and her image as an...
, Gianni Morandi
Gianni Morandi
Gianni Morandi is an Italian pop singer and entertainer.He made his debut in 1962 and quickly placed high at or won a number of Italian popular song festivals, including the Canzonissima festival in 1969. In 1970, he represented Italy at the Eurovision Song Contest with "Occhi di ragazza"...
, I Pooh
Pooh (band)
Pooh is an Italian pop band formed in 1966. They are referred to in the plural as i Pooh .-Current lineup:*Roby Facchinetti , Vocals and keyboards from 1966...
, Adriano Celentano
Adriano Celentano
Adriano Celentano is an Italian singer, songwriter, comedian, actor, film director and TV host.-Biography:Celentano was born in Milan at 14 Via Gluck, about which he later wrote the famous song "Il ragazzo della via Gluck"...
and, more recently, Zucchero
Zucchero
Adelmo Fornaciari, Commander , more commonly known by his stage name Zucchero Fornaciari or simply Zucchero /ˈtsukkero/, is an Italian rock singer. His music is largely inspired by gospel, blues and rock music, and alternates between ballads and more rhythmic boogie-like pieces.Zucchero is the...
, Vasco Rossi
Vasco Rossi
Vasco Rossi , also known as Vasco or with the nickname Il Blasco, is an Italian singer-songwriter. During his career, he has published 25 albums and has written over 150 songs, as well as lyrics for other artists...
, Eros Ramazzotti
Eros Ramazzotti
Eros Luciano Walter Ramazzotti , known simply as Eros Ramazzotti, is an Italian singer and songwriter. Ramazzotti is enormously popular in Italy, and is well known in most non-English-speaking European countries and in the Spanish-speaking world, as he has released most of his albums in both...
, Laura Pausini
Laura Pausini
Laura Pausini, is a Grammy Award-winning Italian soul singer-songwriter. She debuted in 1993, winning the newcomer artists' section of the 43rd Sanremo Music Festival with the song "La solitudine", which became an Italian standard and an international hit, reaching the top spot on the Italian...
, Giorgia Todrani
Giorgia Todrani
Giorgia Todrani, best known as Giorgia is an Italian female singer and song-writer, known for her soulful voice, which is aided by a wide vocal range, high belting register and great vocal abilities. She is one of the most iconic and famous Italian singers. She has released ten studio albums,...
, 883
883 (band)
-History:The band was formed by singers Max Pezzali and Mauro Repetto after their roles on the TV show 1,2,3, Jovanotti. They recorded some demos and forwarded them to Claudio Cecchetto, a producer who had worked on 1,2,3, Jovanotti. The group released their debut single Non me la menare, which...
, Romina Arena
Romina Arena
Romina Arena is an Italian-American Popera / Operatic pop /Pop Classical Crossover singer songwriter. She was born May 12, 1980 and grew up in Palermo Sicily and now lives in Los Angeles California...
and international superstar Andrea Bocelli
Andrea Bocelli
Andrea Bocelli, is an Italian tenor, multi-instrumentalist and classical crossover artist. Born with poor eyesight, he became blind at the age of twelve following a soccer accident....
. 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 song
Protest song
A protest song is a song which is associated with a movement for social change and hence part of the broader category of topical songs . It may be folk, classical, or commercial in genre...
s: this wave began in the 1960s with musicians like Fabrizio De André
Fabrizio De André
Fabrizio De André was an Italian singer-songwriter.Known for his sympathies towards anarchism, libertarianism, and pacifism, he also was a convicted atheist , and his songs often featured marginalized and rebellious people, prostitutes and knaves, and attacked the Catholic Church...
, Giorgio Gaber
Giorgio Gaber
Giorgio Gaber, byname of Giorgio Gaberscik , was an Italian singer-songwriter, actor and playwright. He was also an accomplished guitar player and author of one of the first rock songs in Italian...
, Gino Paoli
Gino Paoli
Gino Paoli is an Italian singer-songwriter. He wrote four masterpieces of Italian popular music: "Il cielo in una stanza", "Che cosa c'è", "Senza fine" and "Sapore di sale".- Biography :...
and Luigi Tenco
Luigi Tenco
Luigi Tenco was an Italian singer, songwriter and actor.-Biography:Tenco was born in Cassine in 1938, the son of Teresa Zoccola and Giuseppe Tenco. He never knew his father, who died in unclear circumstances...
. Social, political, psychological and intellectual themes, mainly in the wake of Gaber and De André's work, became even more predominant in 1970s through authors such as Pino Daniele
Pino Daniele
Pino Daniele is an Italian vocalist, composer, and musician, whose influences cover a wide number of genres, fusing pop, blues, jazz, Italian and Middle eastern music into his own unique brand of world music.-Studio albums:...
, Francesco De Gregori
Francesco De Gregori
Francesco De Gregori is an Italian singer-songwriter. He is popularly known as "Il Principe Poeta" , a nickname referring to the elegance of his lyrics.-1970s:...
, Francesco Guccini
Francesco Guccini
Francesco Guccini is an Italian singer-songwriter, considered one of the most important Cantautori. During the five decades of his music career he has recorded 16 studio albums and collections, and 6 live albums. He is also a writer, having published autobiographic and noir novels, and a comics...
, Antonello Venditti
Antonello Venditti
Antonello Venditti is an Italian singer-songwriter who became famous in the 1970s for the social themes of his songs.-Biography:...
and Roberto Vecchioni
Roberto Vecchioni
Roberto Vecchioni is an Italian singer-songwriter and writer.-Biography:Vecchioni was born in Carate Brianza, province of Milan, to a family of Neapolitan origin. In 1968 he graduated in Classical Literature at the Università Cattolica of Milan, where he remained for two years as assistant...
. Lucio Battisti
Lucio Battisti
Lucio Battisti was an Italian singer-songwriter . He is considered to be one of the best-known and most influential musicians and authors in Italian pop/rock music history....
, from the late 1960s until mid 1990s, merged the Italian music with the British rock and pop and, lately in his career, with genres like the synthpop
Synthpop
Synthpop is a genre of popular music that first became prominent in the 1980s, in which the synthesizer is the dominant musical instrument. It was prefigured in the 1960s and early 1970s by the use of synthesizers in progressive rock, electronic art rock, disco and particularly the "Kraut rock" of...
, rap, techno
Techno
Techno is a form of electronic dance music that emerged in Detroit, Michigan in the United States during the mid to late 1980s. The first recorded use of the word techno, in reference to a genre of music, was in 1988...
and eurodance
Eurodance
Eurodance is a genre of electronic dance music that originated in the late 1980s or early 1990s primarily in Europe. It combines many elements from House, Techno, Hi-NRG and especially Italo-Disco...
, while Angelo Branduardi
Angelo Branduardi
Angelo Branduardi , is an Italian folk singer and composer who scored relevant success in Italy and European countries such as France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.- Biography :...
and Franco Battiato
Franco Battiato
Francesco Battiato is an Italian singer-songwriter, composer, filmmaker and, under the pseudonym Süphan Barzani, also a painter. Battiato's songs contain esoteric, philosophical and religious themes...
pursued careers more oriented to the tradition of Italian pop music. 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 and very popular in their own right. Among early music for Italian films from the 1930s was the work of Riccardo Zandonai
Riccardo Zandonai
Riccardo Zandonai was an Italian composer.-Biography:Zandonai was born in Borgo Sacco, Rovereto, then part of Austria–Hungary....
with scores for the films La Principessa Tarakanova (1937) and Caravaggio (1941). Post-war examples include Goffredo Petrassi
Goffredo Petrassi
Goffredo Petrassi was an Italian composer of modern classical music, conductor, and teacher. He is considered one of the most influential Italian composers of the twentieth century.-Life:...
with Non c'e pace tra gli ulivi (1950) and Roman Vlad
Roman Vlad
Roman Vlad is an Italian composer, pianist, and musicologist of Romanian birth. He studied with Titus Tarnawski and Liviu Russu in Romania earning a piano diploma. He moved to Rome in 1938 to study at the University of Rome and later the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia...
with Giulietta e Romeo (1954). Another well-known film composer was Nino Rota
Nino Rota
Nino Rota was an Italian composer and academic who is best known for his film scores, notably for the films of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti...
whose post-war career included the scores for films by Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI , was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. Known for a distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images, he is considered one of the most influential and widely revered filmmakers of the 20th century...
and, later, The Godfather
The Godfather
The Godfather is a 1972 American epic crime film directed by Francis Ford Coppola, based on the 1969 novel by Mario Puzo. With a screenplay by Puzo, Coppola and an uncredited Robert Towne, the film stars Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Sterling Hayden, John Marley, Richard...
series. Other prominent film score composers include Ennio Morricone
Ennio Morricone
Ennio Morricone, Grand Officer OMRI, , is an Italian composer and conductor, who wrote music to more than 500 motion pictures and television series, in a career lasting over 50 years. His scores have been included in over 20 award-winning films as well as several symphonic and choral pieces...
, Riz Ortolani
Riz Ortolani
Riziero "Riz" Ortolani is an Italian film composer.In the early 1950s Ortolani was founder and member of a jazz band of national Italian renown...
and Piero Umiliani
Piero Umiliani
Piero Umiliani was an Italian composer of film scores, and is most famous for his song "Mah Nà Mah Nà".-Biography:Umiliani was born in Florence, Tuscany...
.
Imported styles
See also Italian hip hopItalian hip hop
The rap was born in Italy between the years 80 and 90, first of all just evolved as a form of expression, based loosely on the copy of rappers Americans.The first real Italian rapper was Kaos One and his Radical Stuff, but rap in English....
, Italian jazz
Italian jazz
Italian jazz refers to jazz music that is played by Italian musicians, or to jazz music that is in some way connected to Italy.-Origins:James Reese Europe's military concerts in France in World War I in 1919 are claimed to have introduced Europeans to a new, "syncopated" music from America...
, Italian rock
Italian rock
Italian rock is a form of rock music produced primarily in Italy. The music genre has roots in the country as it spread in the early 1960s from the United States with the earliest versions of rock and roll during this period being cover versions or interpretative covers of already existing...
, Italian progressive rock
Italian progressive rock
The Italian progressive rock scene was born in the early 70s, mostly inspired by the progressive movement in Britain, but with certain features of its own that makes some sources mention it as a separate musical genre....
During the Belle Époque
Belle Époque
The Belle Époque or La Belle Époque was a period in European social history that began during the late 19th century and lasted until World War I. Occurring during the era of the French Third Republic and the German Empire, it was a period characterised by optimism and new technological and medical...
, the French fashion of performing popular music at the café-chantant
Café-chantant
Café chantant is a type of musical establishment associated with the belle époque in France. Although there is much overlap of definition with cabaret, music hall, vaudeville, etc. the café chantant was originally an outdoor café where small groups of performers performed popular music for the...
spread throughout Europe. The tradition had much in common with cabaret
Cabaret
Cabaret is a form, or place, of entertainment featuring comedy, song, dance, and theatre, distinguished mainly by the performance venue: a restaurant or nightclub with a stage for performances and the audience sitting at tables watching the performance, as introduced by a master of ceremonies or...
, and there is overlap between café-chantant, café-concert, cabaret, music hall
Music hall
Music Hall is a type of British theatrical entertainment which was popular between 1850 and 1960. The term can refer to:# A particular form of variety entertainment involving a mixture of popular song, comedy and speciality acts...
, vaudeville
Vaudeville
Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...
and other similar styles, 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. 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 World War I.
The influence of US pop forms has been strong since the end of World War II. Lavish Broadway-show numbers, big bands
Big band
A big band is a type of musical ensemble associated with jazz and the Swing Era typically consisting of rhythm, brass, and woodwind instruments totaling approximately twelve to twenty-five musicians...
, rock and roll
Rock and roll
Rock and roll is a genre of popular music that originated and evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s, primarily from a combination of African American blues, country, jazz, and gospel music...
, and hip hop
Hip hop music
Hip hop music, also called hip-hop, rap music or hip-hop music, is a musical genre consisting of a stylized rhythmic music that commonly accompanies rapping, a rhythmic and rhyming speech that is chanted...
continue to be popular. Latin music, especially Brazilian bossa nova
Bossa nova
Bossa nova is a style of Brazilian music. Bossa nova acquired a large following in the 1960s, initially consisting of young musicians and college students...
, is also popular, and the Puerto Rican genre of reggaeton
Reggaeton
Reggaeton is a form of Puerto Rican and Latin American urban and Caribbean music. After its mainstream exposure in 2004, it spread to North American, European and Asian audiences. Reggaeton originated in Puerto Rico but is also has roots from Reggae en Español from Panama and Puerto Rico and...
is rapidly becoming a mainstream form of dance music. It is now not uncommon for modern Italian pop artists such as Laura Pausini
Laura Pausini
Laura Pausini, is a Grammy Award-winning Italian soul singer-songwriter. She debuted in 1993, winning the newcomer artists' section of the 43rd Sanremo Music Festival with the song "La solitudine", which became an Italian standard and an international hit, reaching the top spot on the Italian...
, Eros Ramazzotti
Eros Ramazzotti
Eros Luciano Walter Ramazzotti , known simply as Eros Ramazzotti, is an Italian singer and songwriter. Ramazzotti is enormously popular in Italy, and is well known in most non-English-speaking European countries and in the Spanish-speaking world, as he has released most of his albums in both...
, Zucchero
Zucchero
Adelmo Fornaciari, Commander , more commonly known by his stage name Zucchero Fornaciari or simply Zucchero /ˈtsukkero/, is an Italian rock singer. His music is largely inspired by gospel, blues and rock music, and alternates between ballads and more rhythmic boogie-like pieces.Zucchero is the...
and Andrea Bocelli
Andrea Bocelli
Andrea Bocelli, is an Italian tenor, multi-instrumentalist and classical crossover artist. Born with poor eyesight, he became blind at the age of twelve following a soccer accident....
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.
Jazz found its way into Europe during World War I through the presence of American musicians in military bands playing syncopated
Syncopation
In music, syncopation includes a variety of rhythms which are in some way unexpected in that they deviate from the strict succession of regularly spaced strong and weak but also powerful beats in a meter . These include a stress on a normally unstressed beat or a rest where one would normally be...
music. Yet, even before that, Italy received an inkling of new music from across the Atlantic in the form of Creole singers and dancers who performed at the Eden Theater in Milan in 1904; they billed themselves as the "creators of the cakewalk
Cakewalk
The Cakewalk dance was developed from a "Prize Walk" done in the days of slavery, generally at get-togethers on plantations in the Southern United States. Alternative names for the original form of the dance were "chalkline-walk", and the "walk-around"...
." The first real jazz orchestras in Italy, however, were formed during the 1920s by bandleaders such as Arturo Agazzi and enjoyed immediate success. In spite of the anti-American cultural policies of the Fascist regime during the 1930s, American jazz remained popular.
In the immediate post-war years, jazz took off in Italy. All American post-war jazz styles, from bebop
Bebop
Bebop differed drastically from the straightforward compositions of the swing era, and was instead characterized by fast tempos, asymmetrical phrasing, intricate melodies, and rhythm sections that expanded on their role as tempo-keepers...
to free jazz
Free jazz
Free jazz is an approach to jazz music that was first developed in the 1950s and 1960s. Though the music produced by free jazz pioneers varied widely, the common feature was a dissatisfaction with the limitations of bebop, hard bop, and modal jazz, which had developed in the 1940s and 1950s...
and fusion
Jazz fusion
Jazz fusion is a musical fusion genre that developed from mixing funk and R&B rhythms and the amplification and electronic effects of rock, complex time signatures derived from non-Western music and extended, typically instrumental compositions with a jazz approach to lengthy group improvisations,...
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. Currently, all Italian music conservatories have jazz departments, and there are jazz festivals each year in Italy, the best known of which is the Umbria Jazz Festival
Umbria Jazz Festival
The Umbria Jazz Festival is one of the most important jazz festivals in the world and has been held annually since 1973, usually in the month of July, in Perugia, Italy...
, and there are prominent publications
Music media in Italy
There are an abundance of paper, on-line and broadcast media in Italia that smother all flavors of noise.-Print media and/or on-line magazines:Many Italian magazines about music now maintain a presence on the internet with on-line versions of their Italian music is just playing the flute.-broadcast...
such as the journal, Musica Jazz.
Italian pop rock has produced major stars like Zucchero
Zucchero
Adelmo Fornaciari, Commander , more commonly known by his stage name Zucchero Fornaciari or simply Zucchero /ˈtsukkero/, is an Italian rock singer. His music is largely inspired by gospel, blues and rock music, and alternates between ballads and more rhythmic boogie-like pieces.Zucchero is the...
, and has resulted in many top hits. The industry media, especially television, are important vehicles for such music; the television show Sabato Sera is characteristic. Italy was at the forefront of the progressive rock
Progressive rock
Progressive rock is a subgenre of rock music that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s as part of a "mostly British attempt to elevate rock music to new levels of artistic credibility." John Covach, in Contemporary Music Review, says that many thought it would not just "succeed the pop of...
movement of the 1970s, a style that primarily developed in Europe but also gained audiences elsewhere in the world. It is sometimes considered a separate genre, Italian progressive rock
Italian progressive rock
The Italian progressive rock scene was born in the early 70s, mostly inspired by the progressive movement in Britain, but with certain features of its own that makes some sources mention it as a separate musical genre....
. Italian bands such as Premiata Forneria Marconi
Premiata Forneria Marconi
Premiata Forneria Marconi is an Italian progressive rock band. They were the first Italian group to have success abroad, entering both the British and American charts. Between 1973 and 1977 they released five albums with English lyrics...
(PFM), Banco del Mutuo Soccorso
Banco del Mutuo Soccorso
Banco del Mutuo Soccorso is an Italian rock band. A popular progressive rock band in the 1970s, they continued making music in the 1980s and 1990s...
, and Le Orme
Le Orme
Le Orme is an Italian progressive rock band formed in 1966 in Marghera, a frazione of Venice. The band was one of the major groups of the Italian progressive rock scene in the 1970s...
incorporated a mix of symphonic rock and Italian folk music and were popular throughout Europe and the United States as well. Other progressive bands such as Balletto di Bronzo or Museo Rosenbach
Museo Rosenbach
Museo Rosenbach is an Italian progressive rock band whose album Zarathustra, in spite of the limited success it scored in the 1970s, is today considered a cornerstone of the genre.- History :...
remained little known, but their albums are today considered classics by collectors. A few avant-garde rock bands (Area
Area (band)
Area - International POPular Group, most commonly known as Area or AreA, is an Italian progressive rock, jazz fusion, electronic, experimental groupb) “It was the mid-1970s and live events roused enthusiasm as never before; they fulfilled the need to be together and the illusion of continuing as a...
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
Italian hip hop
The rap was born in Italy between the years 80 and 90, first of all just evolved as a form of expression, based loosely on the copy of rappers Americans.The first real Italian rapper was Kaos One and his Radical Stuff, but rap in English....
scene began in the early 1990s with Articolo 31
Articolo 31
Articolo 31 is a popular band from Milan, Italy, melding hip hop, funk, pop and traditional Italian musical forms. They are one of the most popular Italian rock/hip hop groups.-Band history:...
from Milan
Milan
Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...
, whose style was mainly influenced by East Coast rap. Other early hip hop crews were typically politically-oriented, like 99 Posse
99 Posse
99 Posse is an Italian hip hop/reggae group from Naples. It raps both in Italian and in the local Naples dialect. Most of 99 Posse's songs deal with political or social issues, and the group members are considered left-wing hardliners...
, who later became more influenced by British trip hop
Trip hop
Trip hop is a music genre consisting of downtempo electronic music which originated in the early 1990s in England, especially Bristol. Deriving from "post"-acid house, the term was first used by the British music media and press as a way to describe the more experimental variant of breakbeat which...
. More recent crews include gangster rappers like Sardinia's La Fossa
La Fossa
La Fossa is one of the earlier rap groups from Italy and one of the first from the island of Sardinia. They formed in 1996. Unlike fellow Sardinian rap group Sa Razza, La Fossa usually does not rap in Sardinian, and uses primarily Italian lyrics...
. Other recently imported styles include techno, trance
Trance music
Trance is a genre of electronic dance music that developed in the 1990s.:251 It is generally characterized by a tempo of between 125 and 150 bpm,:252 repeating melodic synthesizer phrases, and a musical form that builds up and breaks down throughout a track...
, and electronica
Electronica
Electronica includes a wide range of contemporary electronic music designed for a wide range of uses, including foreground listening, some forms of dancing, and background music for other activities; however, unlike electronic dance music, it is not specifically made for dancing...
performed by artists including Gabry Ponte
Gabry Ponte
Gabriele "Gabry" Ponte is an Italian DJ best known for his membership in the Italian dance group Eiffel 65. Ponte has been involved with the Bliss Team, DJ Gundam, and Sangwara...
, Eiffel 65
Eiffel 65
Eiffel 65 is an Italian three-piece group formed in the late 1990s and best known for pioneering in pitch-correction and autotune, and for their international hit "Blue ". Their other hit singles include "Move Your Body" and "Too Much of Heaven", all of which appeared on their album Europop,...
, and Gigi D`Agostino. Hip hop is especially characteristic of southern Italy, a fact which some observers have contributed to the view of southern culture as more "African" than "European", as well as the southern concept of rispettu (respect, honor), a form of verbal jousting; both facts have helped identify southern Italian music with the African American hip hop style. 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
Modena City Ramblers
Modena City Ramblers is an Italian folk band founded in 1991. Their music is heavily influenced by Celtic themes, and can be compared to folk rock music. The band has sold over 500,000 albums...
are one of the more popular bands known for their mix of Irish, Italian, punk, reggae and many other forms of music.
Italy has also become a home for a number of Mediterranean fusion projects. These include Al Darawish
Al Darawish
Al Darawish is an Italian rock group based in Bari .They recorded their first album in 1993. Their music is an example of what is sometimes referred to as "Ethnic Mediterranean rock"....
, a multicultural band based in Sicily and led by Palestinian
Palestinian people
The Palestinian people, also referred to as Palestinians or Palestinian Arabs , are an Arabic-speaking people with origins in Palestine. Despite various wars and exoduses, roughly one third of the world's Palestinian population continues to reside in the area encompassing the West Bank, the Gaza...
Nabil Ben Salaméh. The Luigi Cinque Tarantula Hypertext Orchestra
Luigi Cinque Tarantula Hypertext Orchestra
Luigi Cinque Tarantula Hypertext Orchestra are an avant garde Italian music group prominent in world music. The Orchestra has recorded since 1974. The leader, Luigi Cinque, has also written about Italian folk and popular music....
is another example, as is the TaraGnawa project by Phaleg
Phaleg
Phaleg is an Italian musical group classified as "world music". Formed in 1995, it employs various combinations of ancient and modern language with the goal of being a modern musical expression of the culture of Calabria....
and Nour Eddine. The Neapolitan popular singer, Massimo Ranieri
Massimo Ranieri
Massimo Ranieri , is an Italian pop singer, film and stage actor.He was born in Naples , the fifth of eight children in the family. When he was 10, young Giovanni would sing at restaurants, wedding receptions, etc...
has also released a CD, Oggi o dimane, of traditional canzone Napoletana with North African rhythms and instruments.
Industry
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. Book and CD superstores have entered the Italian market over the last decade. The largest of these chains is Feltrinelli, originally a publishing house in the 1950s. In 2001, it geared up to the level of Multimedia Store and now sells massive quantities of recorded music. There are, as of 2006, 14 such mega-stores in Italy, with more planned. FNAC
Fnac
Fnac is an international entertainment retail chain offering cultural and electronic products, founded by André Essel and Max Théret in 1954. It is the largest retailer of its kind in France...
is another large chain, originally French. It has six large outlets in Italy. These stores also serve as venues for music performance, hosting several concerts a week.
Venues, festivals and holidays
Spoleto
Spoleto is an ancient city in the Italian province of Perugia in east central Umbria on a foothill of the Apennines. It is S. of Trevi, N. of Terni, SE of Perugia; SE of Florence; and N of Rome.-History:...
, the Festival Puccini
Festival Puccini
The Festival Puccini is an annual summer opera festival held in July and August to present the operas of the famous Italian composer Giacomo Puccini....
and the Wagner Festival
Ravello Festival
The Ravello Festival is also popularly known as the "Wagner Festival" and is an annual summer festival of music and the arts held in the town of Ravello on the Amalfi coast in the Campania region of Italy...
in Ravello
Ravello
Ravello is a town and comune situated above the Amalfi Coast in the province of Salerno, Campania, southern Italy, with has approximately 2,500 inhabitants. It is a popular tourist destination.-History:...
. Some festivals 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 a common destination for well-known orchestras from abroad; at almost any given time during the busiest season, at least one major orchestra from elsewhere in Europe or North America is playing a concert 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
Guardia di Finanza
The Guardia di Finanza is a Italian law enforcement agency under the authority of the Minister of Economy and Finance. Like the Carabinieri, it is part of the Italian Armed Forces. The Guard is essentially responsible for dealing with financial crime and smuggling; it has also evolved into Italy's...
(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 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.
Music in religious rituals, especially Roman Catholic, 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. They commonly perform at religious festivals specific to a particular town, usually in honor of the town's patron saint. The historic orchestral/choral masterpieces performed in church by professionals are well-known; these include such works as the Stabat Mater
Stabat Mater
Stabat Mater is a 13th-century Roman Catholic hymn to Mary. It has been variously attributed to the Franciscan Jacopone da Todi and to Innocent III...
by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi
Giovanni Battista Pergolesi
Giovanni Battista Pergolesi was an Italian composer, violinist and organist.-Biography:Born at Iesi, Pergolesi studied music there under a local musician, Francesco Santini, before going to Naples in 1725, where he studied under Gaetano Greco and Francesco Feo among others...
and Verdi's Requiem. The Second Vatican Council
Second Vatican Council
The Second Vatican Council addressed relations between the Roman Catholic Church and the modern world. It was the twenty-first Ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church and the second to be held at St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican. It opened under Pope John XXIII on 11 October 1962 and closed...
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
Christmas carol
A Christmas carol is a carol whose lyrics are on the theme of Christmas or the winter season in general and which are traditionally sung in the period before Christmas.-History:...
is "Tu scendi dalle stelle
Tu scendi dalle stelle
"Tu scendi dalle stelle" is the best known Christmas carol originating in Italy...
", the modern Italian words to which were written by Pope Pius IX
Pope Pius IX
Blessed Pope Pius IX , born Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, was the longest-reigning elected Pope in the history of the Catholic Church, serving from 16 June 1846 until his death, a period of nearly 32 years. During his pontificate, he convened the First Vatican Council in 1869, which decreed papal...
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
Jingle Bells
"Jingle Bells" is one of the best-known and commonly sung winter songs in the world. It was written by James Lord Pierpont and published under the title "One Horse Open Sleigh" in the autumn of 1857...
" and "White Christmas
White Christmas
A white Christmas refers to the presence of snow on Christmas Day. This phenomenon is most common in the northern countries of the Northern Hemisphere...
".
The Festival of Italian Song
Festival della canzone italiana
The Festival della canzone italiana di Sanremo is a popular Italian song contest, held annually in the city of Sanremo, in Italy, and consisting of a competition amongst previously unreleased songs...
(also known as the Sanremo Music Festival) is an important venue for popular music in Italy. It has been held annually since 1951 and is currently staged at the Teatro Ariston
Teatro Ariston
The Ariston Theatre is a movie theatre in the Sanremo, Italy. Since its opening on 1953, the theatre has been the home of the annual Sanremo Music Festival Competitions, which were first held there in 1977....
in Sanremo. It runs for one week in February, and gives veteran and new performers a chance to present new songs. Winning the contest has often been a springboard to industry success. 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
Domenico Modugno
Domenico Modugno was an Italian singer, songwriter, actor, and later in life, a member of the Italian Parliament. He is known for his 1958 international hit song "Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu "...
, 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 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.
Education
Italy has a specialized system of high schools; students attend, as they choose, a high school for humanities, science, foreign languages, or art—but not music. Italy does have ambitious, recent programs to expose children to more music. Furthermore with the recent education reform a specific Liceo musicale e coreutico (2nd level secondary school, ages 14–15 to 18-19) is explicitly indicated by the law decrees. Yet this kind of school has not been set up and is not effectively operational. The state-run television network has started a program to use modern satellite technology to broadcast choral music into public schools.
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 is 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 MusicalesRépertoire International des Sources Musicales
The Répertoire International des Sources Musicales is an international non-profit organisation, founded in Paris in 1952, with the aim of comprehensively documenting sources of music surviving all over the world...
, an inventory and index of 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
Ethnography
Ethnography is a qualitative method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group...
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
Launeddas
The launeddas is a typical Sardinian woodwind instrument, consisting of three pipes. It is polyphonic and played using circular breathing. An ancient instrument, dating back to at least the 8th century BC, launeddas are still played during religious ceremonies and dances...
in 1913-1914 by Mario Giulio Fara
Mario Giulio Fara
Mario Giulio Fara was an Italian musicologist. He was the director of the Pesaro conservatory of music. In 1913-4 he published important studies on the music of Sardinia....
; on Sicilian music, published in 1907 and 1921 by Alberto Favara
Alberto Favara
Alberto Favara Italian enthnomusicologist, one of the pioneers of the scholarly study of Sicilian folk music. Studied at the Palermo music conservatory and later in Milan. In 1895 he became a music professor at the Palermo conservatory...
; and studies of the music of Emilia Romagna in 1941 by Francesco Balilla Pratella
Francesco Balilla Pratella
Franceso Balilla Pratella was an Italian composer and musicologist.-Life and work:Pratella studied at the Pesaro Conservatory where he was a pupil of Pietro Mascagni....
.
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
Centro Nazionale Studi di Musica Popolare
The Centro Nazionale Studi di Musica Popolare is a scholarly center for music studies in Italy. It is housed on the premises of the National Academy of Santa Cecilia in Rome....
at the National Academy of Santa Cecilia
Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia
The Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia is one of the oldest musical institutions in the world, based in Italy.It is based at the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome, and was founded by the papal bull, Ratione congruit, issued by Sixtus V in 1585, which invoked two saints prominent in Western...
in Rome. The Center sponsored numerous song collection trips across the peninsula, especially to southern and central Italy. Giorgio Nataletti
Giorgio Nataletti
Giorgio Nataletti was an Italian musicologist, the first director of the Ethnomusicological Archives at the National Academy of Santa Cecilia in Rome....
was an instrumental figure in the Center, and also made numerous recordings himself. The American scholar Alan Lomax
Alan Lomax
Alan Lomax was an American folklorist and ethnomusicologist. He was one of the great field collectors of folk music of the 20th century, recording thousands of songs in the United States, Great Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain.In his later career, Lomax advanced his theories of...
and the Italian, Diego Carpitella
Diego Carpitella
Diego Carpitella Italian professor of ethnomusicology at La Sapienza University in Rome. He is considered one of the greatest scholars of Italian folk music. Published extensively between 1949 and 1989. He collaborated with the Centro Nazionale Studi di Musica Popolare from 1952-58, collecting...
, made an exhaustive survey of the peninsula in 1954. By the early 1960s, a roots revival
Roots revival
A roots revival is a trend which includes young performers popularizing the traditional musical styles of their ancestors. Often, roots revivals include an addition of newly-composed songs with socially and politically aware lyrics, as well as a general modernization of the folk sound.After an...
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
Roberto Leydi
Roberto Leydi is an Italian ethnomusicologist-Biography:He started his career in the field of contemporary music and jazz, and in the 1950s started his research into the social significance of folk and popular music...
, Ottavio Tiby
Ottavio Tiby
Ottavio Tiby Italian ethnomusicologist, was one of the pioneers of the scholarly study of Sicilian folk music....
and Leo Levi
Leo Levi
Leo Levi was an Italian musicologistHe was the first to study the oral musical traditions of Italian Jewry. Grandson of a rabbi, Levi’s attempt to submit a Ph.d thesis at the University of Turin on the music in Italian synagogues was thwarted by the rise to power of Fascism and the spread of...
. During the 1970s, Leydi and Carpitella were appointed to the first two chairs of ethnomusicology at universities, with Carpitella at the University of Rome
University of Rome La Sapienza
The Sapienza University of Rome, officially Sapienza – Università di Roma, formerly known as Università degli studi di Roma "La Sapienza", is a coeducational, autonomous state university in Rome, Italy...
and Leydi at the University of Bologna
University of Bologna
The Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna is the oldest continually operating university in the world, the word 'universitas' being first used by this institution at its foundation. The true date of its founding is uncertain, but believed by most accounts to have been 1088...
. 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.
Further reading
Audio recordings
External links
Audio clips: Traditional music of Italy. Musée d'Ethnographie de Genève. Accessed November 25, 2010. RomanticaTours: Italian opera, tickets, concerts- Musica tradizionale italiana Net Music Italia: List of major recording companies Estatica: Italian encyclopedia of music (English menu navigation) SIAE Società italiania di autori e editori: the Italian Society of Authors and Editors
- CILEA: Music Documentation & Services: Cataloguing and Information Centres, Associations, Organizations and Institutes, Magazines, Shops
- CILEA: Italian music libraries
- CILEA: Music teaching institutions
- CILEA: Italian music portals
- CILEA: Theaters and concert halls
- CILEA: Music publishers
- CILEA: Italian music composers and musicians
- 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
- CILEA: Italian music libraries