Music Venues, Festivals and Holidays in Italy

The venues for music in Italy include the shows at the several music conservatories, symphony halls and opera houses. Italy also has several popular international music festivals in each year, including the festival of Spoleto, the festival Puccini and the Wagner festival in Ravbello. Some festivals offer venues to the younger composers in the classical music by producing and staging winning entries in the contests, the winner, for instance of the Orpeus international contest for new opera and chamber music besides winning the considerable prize money also gets to see his or her musical work performed at the Spoleto festival. There are also dozens of private sponsored master classes in music in each year that put on shows for the public, Italy is also a common destination for renowned groups from abroad; at almost any given period during the busiest season, at least one major group from elsewhere in Europe or North America is playing a show in Italy. In addition, public music may be heard at dozens for rock and pop shows all over the year, open-air opera may even be heard, for instance, at the olden Roman amphitheater, the Arena of Verona. Military ensembles too, are well-known in Italy. At a national level, one of the best-known of these is the show band of the Guardia di Finanza (Italian customs/border police), performs many times in a year.

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Many theatres also routinely stage not just Italian translations of American musical, but true Italian musical comedy, which are known by the English term musical. In Italian, that term means a kind of musical drama not native to Italy, a form that employs the American idioms of jazz pop and rock based music and rhythms to move a story along in a mixture of songs and dialogue.

Music in the religious rituals, especially in the Roman Catholic, manifests itself in a number of ways; parish ensembles for instance are quite common throughout Italy. They may be as small as four or five members to as many as 30. They commonly perform at religious festivals specific top a particular town, usually in honor of the town’s patron saint. The historic orchestral/ choral masterpieces performed in church by the professional are well-known; these include the works as the Stabat Mater by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi and Verdi’s requiem. The second Vatican council from 1962 to 1965 restoration music in the Roman Catholic Church leads to an increase in the number of amateur choirs that perform regularly for services; the council also inspired the congregational singing of hymns, and a vast range of new hymns has been composed in the last 40 years.

There is not a great deal of native Italian Christmas music, the most famous Italian Christmas carol is the Tu scendi dale stele, the present Italian words to which were written by Pop 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 culture (Silent Night for instance). There is no local Italian secular Christmas music that accounts for the fame of Italian- language versions of Jingle Bells and white Christmas.

The festival of Italian song is also known as the Sanremo music festival, which is an important venue for famous music in Italy. This had been held yearly since 1951 and is presently staged at the Teatro Ariston in Sanremo. It runs for one week in February and gives veteran and new artists a chance to present new songs. Winning the competition has often been a springboard to industry success. The festival is televised nationally for three hours a night; it is hosted by the best-known Italian television personalities, and has been a vehicle for such artists as Domenico Modugno possibly the best-known Italian pop singer of the last 50 years.

Television variety concerts are the widest venues for the famous music, they change often, but Buona Domenica, Domenica on and I raccomandati are well-known. The longest running musical broadcast in Italy is La Corrida, a three-hour weekly program of amateurs and world-be artists. This began on the radio in the year 1968 and moved to television in the year 1988. The studio viewer bring cow-bells and sirens and are inspired to show good-natured disapproval, the city with the highest number of rock shows of the national and international musicians is Milan, with a number close to the other European music capitals, as Paris, berlin and London.