Research Guides: International Music Resources by Country: Italy

Map of Italy

Citation (3)

Books

Made in Italy by Goffredo Plastino (Editor); Franco Fabbri (Editor) Made in Italynbsp;serves as a comprehensive and rigorous introduction to the history, sociology, and musicology ofnbsp;contemporary Italian popular music. Each essay, written by a leading scholar of Italian music, covers the major figures, styles, and social contexts of pop music in Italy and provides adequate context so readers understand why the figure or genre under discussion is of lasting significance to Italian popular music. The book first presents a general description of the history and background of popular music, followed by essays organized into thematic sections: Themes; Singer-Songwriters; and Stories.
Call Number: ML3494 .M23 2013
Monteverdi's Unruly Women by Bonnie Gordon Monteverdi's Unruly Women examines the composer's madrigals and music dramas for what they can tell us about the musical and cultural world of singing and the voice in early modern Italy. Monteverdi's music demanded trained, female voices to make dramatic and expressive statements. At a time when singing was not entirely acceptable for respectable women his music allowed women to use their voices to gain power. Bonnie Gordon also explores the social and musical environment in which the singers lived and worked. Using key primary source material such as singing treatises and Renaissance writings on medicine and acoustics, Gordon contributes to two distinct disciplines: she brings an increased engagement with medical and literary representations of the female body to the growing field of scholarship treating gender and music, and adds to a well-established industry of scholarship devoted to the perception of gender and the body in early modern Europe.
Call Number: ML82 .G67 2004
Music and Culture in Late Renaissance Italy by Iain Fenlon This collection of essays is unified by a number of concerns: one is the way in which musical activity of all kinds was instrumentalized by those in power, in Italy, during the Sixteenth Century. A second expressed through the chornological concentration on the second half of the century, is with a period which is still often regarded as one of decline and degeneracy after the achievements of the Quattrocento and the decades before the calam�t� d'Italia. This book implicitly argues that Italian culture did not lose its vigor after 1530, but underwent a transformation, as both individuals and institutions reacted to new economic, political, and religious circumstances.
Call Number: ML290.2 .F45 2002
Singing Games in Early Modern Italy by Paul Schleuse In Italy during the late cinquecento, printed music could be found not only in the homes of the wealthy or the music professional, but also in lay homes, courts, and academies. No longer confined to the salons of the elite, music took on the role of social play and recreation. Paul Schleuse examines these new musical forms through a study of the music books of Italian priest, poet, and composer, Orazio Vecchi. Composed for minor patrons and the wider music-buying public, Vecchi's madrigals took as their subjects game-playing, drinking, hunting, battles, and the life of the street. Schleuse looks at how music and game-playing allowed singers and performers to play the roles of exemplary pastoral characters and also comic, foreign, and "rustic" others in ways that defined and ultimately reinforced social norms of the times. His findings reposition Orazio Vecchi as one of the most innovative composers of the late 16th century.
Call Number: ML410.V32 S35 2015
Singing to the Lyre in Renaissance Italy by Blake Wilson A primary mode for the creation and dissemination of poetry in Renaissance Italy was the oral practice of singing and improvising verse to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument. Singing to the Lyre is the first comprehensive study of this ubiquitous practice, which was cultivated by performers ranging from popes, princes, and many artists, to professionals of both mercantile and humanist background. Common to all was a strong degree of mixed orality based on a synergy between writing and the oral operations of memory, improvisation, and performance. As a cultural practice deeply rooted in language and supported by ancient precedent, cantare ad lyram (singing to the lyre) is also a reflection of Renaissance cultural priorities, including the status of vernacular poetry, the study and practice of rhetoric, the oral foundations of humanist education, and the performative culture of the courts reflected in theatrical presentations and Castiglione's Il cortegiano.
Call Number: ML1433.2 .W55 2020

Italian Music

Garland Encyclopedia of World Music-Italy

Italy
Read more about Italian music!

Facts in Brief

Capital: Rome

Official Language: Italian

Current Population: 59,257,566

Area: 301,336

Climate: The climate is temperate in the north and Mediterranean in the south, with mild winters and long, dry summers. The average temperature in Rome is 7.9°C (46°F) in January and 24.9°C (77°F) in July.

Main Religion: Roman Catholic

Citation (2)

Traditional Italian Music

General Features

Oral musical traditions were first studied in Italy in the 19th century. It goes without saying that while the research was being undertaken, profound changes in musical life were taking place in tandem with fundamental changes in the country’s social and economic conditions. Many traditional music practices became obsolete, entire repertories fell into disuse, and where music was preserved, it was often associated with the shoring up of cultural identity in individual communities and the need to hold on to alternatives to mass-produced music. Unlike other European countries, Italy saw the appearance of no broad initiatives, either in the mass media or under state auspices, to promote oral musical traditions, nor is there any folk music genre or idiom that is felt to express national identity. The musical picture is one of great diversity and creative independence; there is a rich variety of types of expression, which generally highlight specific regional quality.

Narrative Singing

Several principal narrative repertories can be identified: the ballad in the oral tradition, traditionally a major presence in the north, becoming increasingly rare towards the south; the broadside ballad (found in the north and centre); the narrative song in ottava rima (in central Italy; and the southern storia. Some types of religious songs, like the orazioni and Sicilian orbi songs, are also narrative pieces. In Italy ballads have been documented as an essentially female repertory, and the very circulation of ballads and creation of variants can be linked to the mobility of women under the virilocal system found in the north...Ballads can thus be considered the product of a totally female way of representing and interpreting reality, expressing women's perceptions of themselves and how they relate to the world. As well as this repertory, linked to collective performing practice, there are also ballads that are clearly monodic, often based on a minor scale, or, in rare cases, on a different mode.

Music in Ritual

Of the principal life-cycle events, birth is not connected in Italy to any specific musical repertory, but marriage was often accompanied by songs and music for the bridal pair. Among the different traditions is the sonata per la sposa performed in the pastoral communities of Alta Sabina. This includes three pieces played on the ciaramella (here a bagpipe with two chanters and no drone): the piagnereccia, played while waiting for the bride outside her father's house, and expressing in music the bride's grief at leaving her family, the camminareccia, which accompanies the bride's journey to the church, and the crellareccia, a dance performed by the newly-weds as they leave the church. Music plays an important role in a large number of rites that may be either religious or seasonal, or both, varying by region.

Citation (4)

Composer Highlight: Antonio Vivaldi

Antonio Vivaldi

1678-1741

Venice, 4 March 1678; Vienna, 27/8 July 1741

Italian composer. The most original and influential Italian composer of his generation, he laid the foundations for the mature Baroque concerto. His contributions to musical style, violin technique, and the practice of orchestration were substantial, and he was a pioneer of orchestral programme music.

Listen to Vivaldi: The Four Seasons Antonio Vivaldi: Les 4 Saisons

International Music Resources by Country: Italy