Folk Music of Italy

The Italian traditional music has a deep and difficult history, because the national unification came late to the Italian peninsula, the traditional music of its many hundreds of traditions exhibits no homogeneous national character. Rather, each place and community possesses a special musical tradition that reflects the history, language, and ethnic composition of that particular locale. These cultures reflects Italy’s geographic position in southern Europe and in the center of the Mediterranean, Roma, Slavic and Celtic influences, as well as rough geography and the historic dominance of small city states, have all mixed to allow different musical patterns to coexist in close proximity.

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Italian folk patterns are very different and include the monophonic, polyphonic and responsorial song, choral, instrumental and vocal music, and other styles. Choral singing and polyphonic song forms are mainly found in the northern Italy, while south of Naples, solo singing is more common, and orchestras usually use unison singing in two or three segments carried by a sole musician. Northern ballad-singing is syllabic, with a strict tempo and intelligible lyrics, while the southern patterns use a rubato tempo, and a strained, tense vocal style. The folk artists use the language of their own place traditions; 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 representation.

The folk music is sometimes divided into many part of the geographic influence, a classification system of three areas, south, north and the central, proposed by Alan Lomax in the year 1956 and often repeated. Additionally, Curt Sachs proposed the existence of the two different types of folk music in Europe: continental and Mediterranean, and others have placed the transition zone from the former to the latter roughly in north-centrally Italy, approximately between Pesaro and La Spezia. The central southern and the northern parts of the peninsula each share certain musical characteristics and are each different from the music of Sardinia.

In the Piedmontese valleys and some Liguria communities of northwestern Italy, the music preserves the rigid influenced of olden Occitania. The lyrics of the Occitanic troubadours are some of the oldest preserved samples of dialect language and recent bands such as Gai Saber and Lou Dalfin preserved and contemporized Occitan music. The Occitanian culture retains characteristics of the olden Celtic influence, through the use of six or seven holes flutes (fifre) or the bagpipe (piva). The music of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, in northeastern Italy, shares much more in common with Austria and Slovenian, which include the variants of the polka and waltz. Much of northern Italy shares with places of Europe further to the north an interest in ballad singing (known as canto epico lirico in Italian) and choral singing. Even ballads is usually thought of as a vehicle for a solo voice and may be sung in choirs, in the region of Trento folk choirs are the most common form of music creation.

Clear musical differences in the southern type include the increased use of interval part singing and a greater variety of folk instruments, the Celtic and Slavic influences on the orchestra and open-voice choral works of the north yield to a rigid Arabic, Greek and African-influenced forceful monody of the south. In the parts of Apuila (Grecia Salentina for instance) 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 ethnomusicologists and by Aramire.

The music of the island of Sardinia is best known for the polyphony chanting of the tenores, the sound of the tenores recalls the roots of Gregorian chant, and is similar to but different from the Ligurian Tralalero. Typical instruments include the launeddas, a Sardinian tripplepipe used in a sophisticated and difficult manner. Efisio Melis was a popular master launeddas player of the 1930s.

Dance is an integral segment of the folk traditions in Italy, some of the dances are olden, and to a certain extent, persist now, there are magico-ritual dances of propitiation as well as harvest dances which include the sea-harvest dances of fishing communities in Calabria and the wine harvest dances in Tuscany. Popular dances include the southern tarantella; possible the most iconic of Italian dances, the tarantella is in 6/8 time, and it is a part of a folk ritual intended to cure the poison caused by tarantula bites. The famous Tuscan dances ritually act out the hunting of the hare, or display blades in weapon dances that stimulate the moves of combat or use the weapons as formalized instruments of the dance itself. For instance, in a few communities in the northern Italy, swords are replaced by the wooden half-hoops embroidered with green, similar to the so-known garland dances in the northern Europe. There are also dances of love and courting, like the duru-duru dance in Sardinia.

Several of these dances are orchestra activities, the group setting up in rows or circles that some love and courting dance include couples, either a single couple or more. The tammuriata (performed to the sound of the tambourine) is a couple dance performed in the southern Italy and followed by the lyric song known as a strambotto. Other couples dances are collectively referred to as saltarello, there are, though, also solo dances; most typical of these are the flag dances of different place of Italy, in which the performers passes a town flag or emblem around the neck, through the legs, behind the back, often tossing it high in the air and catching it. These dances can be also be done in orchestras of solo performers acting in unison or by coordinating flag passing between dancers, the northern Italy is also a home to the monferrina, an accompanied dance that was incorporated in the western art music by the composer like Muzio Clementi.