Music Scholarship in Italy

The scholarship in the field of collecting, preserving and cataloguing all the variations of music is vast, Italy as elsewhere, these tasks are spread over a number of organization, most large music conservatories maintain departments has the research linked with their own collections. Such research is coordinated on a national and international scale via the internet. One prominent institution in Italy include IBIMUS (which means Istituto di Bibliografia Musicale) in Rome. Works with other organizations on an international scale through RISM, the Repetories International des Sources Musicales, an account and index of source material, also the discoteca di stato (which is the national archives of recording) in Rome, established in the year 1928, holds the largest public collection of record music in Italy with some 230,000 instance of classical music, jazz, rock, and folk music recorded on everything from antique wax cylinders to present electronic media.

The scholarly study of traditional Italian music stared in about 18560 with a orchestra of early philological ethnographers who studied the role of music on a pan-Italian national identity. A unified Italian identity only just began to establish after the political integration of the peninsula in 1860. The focus at that period was on the lyrical and literary value of music, rather than the instrumentation, this focus remained until the early 1960s. The two folkloric journals helped to inspired the burgeoning field of study, the Rivista Italian delle launeddas in the year 1913 to 1914 by Mario Giulio Fara; on Sicilian music, which was published in the year 1907 and 1921 by Alberto Favara and studied of the music of Emilia Romagna in the year 1941 by Francesco Balilla Pratella.

The earliest recording of the Italian traditional music came in the 1920s, but they were rare until the creation of Centro Nazionale Studi di Musica Popolare at the national Academy of Santa Cecilia in Rome. The Centre sponsored several song collection trips across the peninsula, especially to the southern and central Italy. Giorgio Nataletti was an instrumental figure in the center and also create several recordings himself. The American scholar Alan Lomax and the Italian Diego Carpitella, made an exhaustive survey of the peninsula in the year 1954. By the early 1960s a roots restoration inspired more study, especially of the northern musical traditions, which many scholar’s had previously assumed maintained little folk culture. The most prominent scholars of this period include Roberto Leydi, Ottavio Tiby and Leo Levi, during the 1970s, Leydi and Carpitella were appointed to the first chairs of ethnomusicology at the universities, with Carpitella at the University of Rome and Leydi at the University of Bologna. In the 1980s, Italian scholar started focusing less on making recordings and more on studying and synthesizing the information already collected other studies Italian music in the United States and Australia and the traditional music of the present settlers to Italy.