Music of Italy

The music of Italy is well-known and includes numerous musical types, ranging from parish street bands to symphony orchestras, modern rock and pop groups and opera houses. The people of Italy, situated at a crossroads between Europe, Africa, and Asia, have developed diverse and robust folk traditions, and due to Italy's relatively late unification and industrialization, much music of these traditions has survived intact long enough to be recorded in the field by early ethnomusicologists. Italy has also produced innovations that led directly to modern popular music, including modern musical scales, harmony, and advances in instrument technology.

Characteristics

Italian music is generally eclectic, like other elements of Italian culture. No parochial protectionist movement has ever attempted to 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 Germanic tribes, Arabs, French and Spanish.

Also, mass migrations of peoples to Sicily and the southern peninsula from elsewhere in the Mediterranean (the Balkans, Greece, North Africa) occurred over one thousand years ago (Charanis 1946). Thus, folk music on Sicily and at least the southern Italian mainland display what are often heard as "non-European" features. These include such things as excessive nasality in the voice and an extremely ornamental approach to pitch--that is, singing "around" a note before finally settling on it.

Another characteristic of Italian music is said to be the struggle between the importance of text versus melody. Modern popular singers and singer-songwrters (called cantautori) are prone to songs with important messages in the lyrics, while Italian opera, through the early 20th century, continued to focus more on melody, despite the historical importance of the plot in early Italian opera.

Music history

The modern state of Italy did not come into being until 1861, though the roots of music on the Italian penninsula can be traced back to the music of Ancient Rome. However, the underpinnings of much modern Italian music come from the Middle Ages.

Before 1500

For more details, see also Music of the trecento and Ars Nova

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Much of the European classical musical tradition, including opera and symphonic and chamber music. can be traced back to the music of Italy during the Middle Ages. Italy was also central in the development of musical notation, formal music education and several musical instruments.

Early Italian music was both secular and religious. Religious music was plainsong, a kind of monophonic, unaccompanied, early Christian singing performed by Roman Catholic monks and developed in Italy roughly between the seventh and twelfth centuries. There were different kinds of plainsong, including Gregorian, Ambrosian, and Gallican chant. Italian secular music was largely the province of jongleurs, troubadors and mimes. One important change during this period, in Italy and across Europe, was the gradual shift from writing strictly in Latin to the local language; this development extended to the lyrics of popular songs and forms such as the madrigal, meaning "in the mother tongue."

16th - 18th centuries

Claudio Monteverdi

The exact nature of ancient Greek musical drama is a matter of dispute. What is important, however, for the later development of Italian and European music is that poets and musicians of the Florentine Camerata in the late 1500s thought--in the words of one of them, Jacopo Peri--that the "ancient Greeks sang entire tragedies on the stage". Thus was born the musical version of the Italian Renaissance: paying tribute to classical Greece by inventing opera. Early opera emerged in this period with relatively simple melodies and texts about Greek mythology, sung in Italian. (Opera may have deeper roots in the Tuscan maggio drammatico tradition). Three cities are especially important in this period in Italy: Venice, as the birthplace of commercial opera; Rome, for Palestrina's school of Renaissance polyphony; and Naples as the birthplace of church-sponsored music conservatories. These conservatories evolved into training grounds, providing composers and musicians for Italy and, indeed, Europe as a whole. Claudio Monteverdi is considered the first great composer of the new musical form, opera, the person who turned Florentine novelty into a "unified musical drama with a planned structure."

The years 1600 to 1750 encompass the musical Baroque. A new dominance of melody within harmony at the expense of text led to great changes, including the expansion of instrumental resources of the orchestra. The keyboard was extended, and the making of stringed instruments by Antonio Stradivari became a great industry in Cremona. Instrumental music started to develop as a separate "track," quite apart from the traditional role of accompanying the human voice. Instrumental forms include such things as the sonata, symphony, and concerto. Important names in music within this period in Italy are Alessandro Scarlatti, and Antonio Vivaldi, representing the importance of Naples and Venice, respectively, within this period.

The San Carlo theater (building on right in photo) in Naples.

The physical resources for music advanced greatly during the 1700s. The great opera houses in Naples and Milan were built: the San Carlo Theater and La Scala, respectively. It is the age, as well, of the rise to prominence of the Neapolitan—and then Italian—Comic opera. Important, too, is the restoring of balance between text and music in opera, largely through the librettos of Metastasio.

Important Italian composers in this century are: Domenico Scarlatti, Benedetto Marcello, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Niccolò Piccinni, Giovanni Paisiello, Luigi Boccherini, Domenico Cimarosa, and Luigi Cherubini. It is also the age in which Italian music became international, so to speak, with many Italian composers beginning to work abroad.

19th century

Giuseppe Verdi

The 19th century is the age of Romanticism in European literature, art, and music. Italian opera forsakes the Comic opera for the more serious fare of Italian lyric Romanticsm. Although the generally light-hearted and ever-popular Rossini was certainly an exception to that, Italian music of the 19th century is dominated at the beginning by the likes of Bellini, Donizetti, giving to Italian music the lyrical melodies that have remained associated with it ever since. Then, the last fifty years of the century were dominated by Giuseppe Verdi, the greatest musical icon in Italian history. Verdi's music "sought universality within national character"; that is, much of what he composed in terms of historical themes could be related to his pan-Italian vision. Verdi was the composer of the Italian Risorgimento, the movement to unify Italy in the 19th century. Later in the century is also the time of the early career of Giacomo Puccini, perhaps the greatest composer of pure melody in the history of Italian music.

Frontispiece from the score of Cavalleria Rusticana, a masterpiece of Italian Verismo from 1890.

Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of Italian musical form in the 19th century, and that which distinguishes it from musical developments elsewhere, is that it remained primarily operatic. All significant Italian composers of the century wrote opera almost to the exclusion of other forms, such as the symphony. There are no Italian symphonists in this century, the way one might speak of Brahms in Germany, for example. Many Italian composers, however, did write significant sacred music, however, well-known examples of which are the Stabat Mater and Messa solenne by Rossini and the Requiem Mass by Giuseppe Verdi.

Romanticism in all European music certainly held on through the turn of the century. In Italy, the music of Verdi and Puccini continued to dominate for a number of years. Even the realistic plots and more modern compositional techniques of the operas of Italian Verismo, such as Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana did not greatly affect the extremely melodic nature of Italian music.

Classical music

Main article: Italian classical music

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The auditorium, in Torino, of the National Symphony Orchestra of the RAI, the Italian Radio and Television network.

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, "...exploiting the achievement of Verdi without significant advancement..." in the opinions of some. Italian classical music had resisted the "German harmonic juggernaut"—that is, the dense harmonies of Wagner, Mahler and R. Strauss. Italian music also had little in common with the French reaction to that German music—the delicate impressionism of Debussy, for example.

European classical music changed greatly in the 20th century. The new music was characterized by the abandonment of historically and 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. Italy did retain, however, a Romantic musical tradition in the early 20th century, exemplified by composers whose music was anchored in the previous century, including Arrigo Boito, Ruggiero Leoncavallo, Pietro Mascagni, Francesco Cilea, and Ottorino Respighi. Then, however, after World War 1 and the death of Puccini (1924), Italian music became more European and less distinctly Italian. Important modern composers of 20th–century Italian music are Luciano Berio, Luigi Dallapiccola, Carlo Jachino, Gian Carlo Menotti, Jacopo Napoli, Goffredo Petrassi and Ildebrando Pizzetti.

Current tastes in classical music do value these modern composers, but opera and symphonic music programming in any major city in Italy show how much attention is still paid to the traditional tastes of those who buy the tickets. The 2004/5 program at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples is typical: of the eight composers whose operas were presented, 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. Thus, there continues to be a desire for earlier music and even neo-Romantic music in Italy, that is, composers whose tastes run to the melodies and harmonies of the Romantic era. Modern Italian classical music has entered the same phase as other European musics, post-Modernism— that is, a style not devoted to the "modernisms" of atonality and dissonance, but one that reaches back, as well, to ealier harmonic and melodic concepts. It is very much a consolidation phase in classical music.

Folk music

Main article: Italian folk music

Some common geographical names used as points of reference in Italy.

Italian folk music has a deep and complex history. Because national unification came late to the Italian peninsula, the traditonal 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 center of the Mediterranean Sea; Arabic, African, Celtic, Persian, Roma, and Slavic influences, as well as her rough geography and the historic dominance of small city states have all combined to allow notably diverse musical styles to coexist in close proximity. (It is common in Italian to use historic, traditional geographic names as well as the names of towns or modern administrative units of province and region; thus, one speaks, for example, of the "music of Cilento", an area in the province of Salerno in the region of Campania. The enlarged thumbnail insert map displays some of these names.)

Today, Italy's folk music is somtimes divided into several spheres of geographic influence, a classification system proposed by Alan Lomax in 1956^[1] and often repeated. Additionally, Curt Sachs proposed the existence of two quite distinct kinds of folk music in Europe: continental and Mediterranean, while others have placed the transition zone from the former to the latter roughly in north-central Italy. Noticeable musical differences in the Mediterranean type include increased use of interval part singing and a greater variety of folk instruments.

Regional styles of folk music

The many regions of Italy each have their own distinct styles of folk music. One trait that the widely disparate Italian folk music traditions have in common is their use of regional dialect. Musicians use the dialect of their own tradition; this rejection of the standard Italian language in folk song is nearly universal. Standard Italian is much more commonly used in modern popular music than in traditional folk song.

In the Piedmontese valleys and some Ligurian communities of northwestern Italy, the music preserves the strong influcence of ancient Occitania. The lyrics of the Occitanic Troubadours are some of the oldest preserved samples of vernacular song, and modern bands like Gai Saber and Lou Dalfin preserve and contemporize the Occitan music. The Occitanian culture retains characteristics of the ancient Celtic influence and the music does as well, 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 Austrian and Slovenia including variants of the waltz and the polka. 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 rythmic 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. As well, typical instruments include the launeddas, a Sardinian triplepipe used in a sophisticated and complex manner. Efisio Melis was a master launeddas player of the 1930s, and other modern Sardinian folk revivalists include Elena Ledda and Tancaruja.

Folk instruments

The zampogna, a folk bagpipe.

As a general statement, Guizzi has pointed out:

1. the great variety of folk instruments in Italy;
2. that they have often retained the "pre-classical" form rather than changing as they were "upgraded" into establishment music as was sometimes the case elsewhere in Europe;
3. some instruments are specific to certain rituals (such as the southern Italian zampogna bagpipe, typically heard only at Christmas).

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A folk accordion

Instruments in all music can be divided into three categories, based on how sound is produced: string , wind, and percussion . (For purposes of this description, we exclude electronic instruments. For alternate systems of classification, see Musical instruments and Hornbostel-Sachs.) Within this system, strings may be struck (ex: piano), bowed (violin) or plucked (guitar). Wind instruments may be single mechanical reed (clarinet) or double mechanical reed (oboe); also, wind instruments may be lip reed (trumpet), air reed (flute), vocal-cord reed (voice) and tuned, free reed (accordion). Percussion instruments may produce either a definite pitch (bell) or an indefinite pitch (bass drum). Although, not all categories are represented in the descriptions below, the range of type is very broad.

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A selection of folk flutes

• Wind air-reed includes the quartara, a ceramic pitcher, blown across the opening in the narrow neck (common in eastern Sicily and Campania), as well as various sizes of cane flutes with cut wedge openings, held straight in front and having many different names throughout Italy.

• Wind mechanical-reed instruments include the single zampogna (a folk bagpipe) and even a double version, where two instruments are joined and played simultaneously. Almost all wind instruments have double versions, and there is even a triple clarinet. As well, we find the firlinfò, the pipes of Pan, i.e. joined tuned cane pipes in Bergamo and the far north.

• Percussion instruments are numerous: wood blocks, drums, and rattles, the most fascinating example of which is the connochie, the spinning or shepherd's staff with permanently attached seed rattles. They have magical and fertility significance and are used mainly in Calabria.

The conch: a sea-shell with a cut opening serving as a mouthpiece.

• Conches (large sea-shells) as well as animal horns are cut to provide a mouthpiece opening (similar to a trumpet) and are widely played.

• Important string instruments include various sizes and shapes of harps, bowed lyres, and the chitarra battente (somewhat smaller than a classical guitar, now usually played with four or five metal strings and used mainly in Calabria to accompany the voice.)

• As well, there are anomalous instruments, difficult to fit into categories. Among these are various kazoo-like instruments; that is, membranes that alter the human voice (similar to the familiar "tissue-paper and comb"); in Sicily, mouth-harps are common— metal tines held between the teeth and struck, the changing shape of the oral cavity providing a tuneable resonating chamber.

Music of the Mafia

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Album cover of the last CD in the trilogy.

A curious sidelight in the field of folk music is the recent release of the final CD in a trilogy entitled "Music of the Mafia" —in this case, the 'ndrangheta, the Calabrian underworld. The English title, Music of the Mafia, was supplied by the German company originally involved in the project in 1999. The CDs are:

• Il Canto Di Malavita (2000)
• Omerta, Onuri E Sangu (2002)
• Le Canzoni Dell‘ Onorata Società (2005)

The songs are about violence in the name of honor, the "honorable society" being the outlaws who—in the terminology of the ads for the CDs— protected southern Italy from northern landlords after the unification of Italy in 1861. The songs have contemporary relevance, the last one in the anthology being about the assassination of the police chief of Palermo, General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, in 1982. The mere existence of these CDs—freely available on the market—that "glorify" the life of crime has caused considerable debate in Italy.

Popular music

Main article: Italian popular music

Before the advent of recorded music, that is, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the most popular form of non-operatic music in Italy was certainly the light, melodic air of the kind composed by Paolo Tosti.

It is impossible to overstate the influence and importance of American popular music in Italy since the early 1900s and especially since 1950. All US pop forms, from lavish Broadway-show numbers to big-bands to Rock 'n' Roll to Rap have been—and continue to be—popular in Italy. Latin music, especially Brazilian bossa nova is also popular, and the Puerto Rican genre of reggaeton is rapidly become a popular form of dance music. It is now not uncommon for modern Italian pop artists such as Laura Pausini, Eros Ramazzotti, and Zucchero 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.

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Recent album by Massimo Ranieri

Among the best-known Italian pop singers of the last few decades are Domenico Modugno, Mina (stage name of Anna Maria Mazzini), Gianni Morandi, Adriano Celentano, and Al Bano. The repertoire may characteristically combine some American popular songs (in English or Italian) or songs from a vast selection of home-grown Italian pop songs. The latter would include songs such as Blu dipinto di blu (comp. Domenico Modugno), Azzurro (comp. Adriano Celentano), Insieme (comp. Mina). Musicians who compose and sing their own songs are called cantautori (singer-songwriters). Their compositions typically have texts of social relevance or even protest. These musicians include Gino Paoli, Lucio Battisti, Pino Daniele and Gigi d'Alessio.

Recently, Italy has also become a catalyst in a number of Mediterranean fusion projects. For example, Al Darawish is 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 Neapolitan songs sung with North African rhythms and instruments.

Canzone napoletana

Main article: Canzone Napoletana

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The most authoritative recorded anthology of Neapolitan Song is this 12-LP/CD collection, researched and sung by Roberto Murolo

Canzone napoletana, or Neapolitan song consists of a large body of composed popular music—such songs as 'O sole mio, Torna a Surriento, Funiculì Funiculà. The music is, thus, identified with Naples, but is famous abroad, having been exported on the great waves of emigration from Naples and southern Italy, in general, roughly between 1880 and 1920. This has led to non-Italians misidentifying it as, simply, "Italian music".

The Neapolitan song became a formal institution in the 1830s through an annual song writing competition for the yearly Festival of Piedigrotta, dedicated to the Madonna of Piedigrotta, a well-known church in the Mergellina area of Naples. The festival ran regularly until 1950 when it was abandoned. A subsequent Festival of Neapolitan Song on Italian state radio enjoyed some success in the 1950s. The period since 1950 has produced such songs as Malafemmina by Totò and Carmela by Sergio Bruni. Although separated by some decades from the earlier classics of this genre, they have now become "classics" in their own right.

Extremely important in defining what makes a Neapolitan song is the matter of language. All such songs are written and performed in Neapolitan dialect. They are never translated into standard Italian (although there are versions of many of the songs in other languages). Anyone in Italy—Neapolitan or not—who sings these songs has to sing them in Neapolitan.

Rock and hip hop

Main articles: Italian hip hop and Italian rock

Italy was at the forefront of the progressive rock movement of the 1970s, a style that primarily developed in Europe but also gained airplay and popularity elsewhere in the world. Italian bands like 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 (in case of PFM) the United States as well. A few avantgarde-rock bands (Area, 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. Their style was mainly influenced by East Coast rap. Other early rap groups are typically politically-oriented crews like 99 Posse (who later became influenced by British trip hop). More recent crews include gangster rappers like Sardinia's La Fossa. Other related forms include techno, trance, and electronica performed by artists including Gabry Ponte, Eiffel 65, and Gigi D`Agostino. Additionally, there are many bands in Italy that play patchanka style music, characterized by a mixture of traditional music, punk, reggae, rock and political lyrics. Modena City Ramblers are one of the more popular bands; they mix Irish, Italian, punk, reggae and many other forms of music.

Jazz

Jazz found its way into Europe during WW1 through the presence of American musicians in military bands playing "syncopated" music. The first Italian jazz orchestras were formed during 1920s by musicians such as Arturo Agazzi with his Syncopated Orchestra and enjoyed immediate success. In spite of the anti-American cultural policies of the Fascist regime during the 1930s, American jazz remained popular. (Even Benito Mussolini's son, Romano, was a great jazz fan and then prominent jazz pianist.)

In the immediate post-war years jazz took off in Italy. All American post-war jazz styles, from be-bop 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 (for example, in Sicily, where Enzo Rao and his group Shamal have added native Sicilian and Arab influences to American jazz). Currently, all Italian music conservatories have jazz departments; 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.

Film music

Film scores, although they are secondary to the film, are often critically acclaimed 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). Well-known, too, is Nino Rota whose post-war career included the scores for a number of films by Federico Fellini and, later, The Godfather series. Other prominent film score composers include Ennio Morricone, Riz Ortolani and Piero Umiliani.

Music industry

Inside a music superstore.

A recent economics report says that the music industry in Italy made 2.3 billion euros 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. Thus, the recording industry in Italy is, as elsewhere, in somewhat of an uncertain stage in the CD vs Download struggle. By way of comparison, the Italian recording industry ranks eighth in the world; i.e. 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.

The age of Book & CD superstores has come to Italy in the last decade. The largest of these chains is Feltrinelli, originally a publishing house started in the 1950s. In 2001, it geared up to the "Multimedia Store," massive department stores full of music. There are, at present, 14 such mega-stores in Italy, with more on the way. Other large chains include FNAC, originally a French concern. It operates internationally and currently has six large outlets in Italy. These stores also serve as venues for music performance, providing on the premises several live concerts a week of all genres of music.

Music venues, festivals and holidays

The annual Festival of Ravello is a popular music venue in Italy. Here, an orchestra starts to set up on a stage overlooking the Amalfi coast.

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 and the Wagner Festival in Ravello. Some festivals also 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 on the "must play" list for well-known orchestras from abroad; at almost any given time during the "high season", some major orchestra from elsewhere in Europe or North America is playing a concert somewhere 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 della Finanza; it performs many times a year.

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A current Italian musical based on a traditional theme.

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 now 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.

Attention should be paid to the religious venue for music in Italy, a predominantly Roman Catholic nation. Music in religious rituals 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—a real marching band. They commonly perform at religious festivals specific to a particular town, usually in honor of the patron saint of the town. Well-known, too, are the historic orchestral/choral masterpieces performed in church by professionals; these include such works as the Stabat Mater by Pegolesi and Verdi's Requiem. At the level of participation in music by church-goers, 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 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.

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At festival time, Italian TV guides concentrate on San Remo.

The Festival of Italian Song (also known as the Festival of San Remo) is the most important venue for popular music in Italy. It has been held annually since 1951 and is currently staged at the Teatro Ariston in San Remo. It is held in late February and runs for one week; it is, essentially, a gigantic popular music contest, giving veterans and newcomers a chance to present new songs. Winning the contest, though not a guarantee of subsequent fame and fortune, has often been a springboard to success for many performers. 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, currently, 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.

Music education

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Within the courtyard of the Naples Music Conservatory

In Italy, there are about 75 music conservatories, schools that provide advanced training for future professional musicians. There are also dozens of private music schools and workshops for things such as instrument building and repair. At the level, then, of higher education, there is no shortage of places to study music. However, Italy has virtually no extra-curricular music instruction at any level. That is to say, you don't go to high school or college and sign up for band. Elementary and high school students can expect to have one or two hours of musical instruction per week, generally in choral singing, and though most Italian universities have classes in related subjects such as music history, there is nothing in the way of performance. Thus, public education at any level is not a training ground or "feeder system" into amateur or professional music. True, Italy has a specialized system of high schools; students attend, as they choose, a high school for the classics, for science, for foreign languages, or for art--but not music. Italy does have ambitious, recent programs to expose children to more music; the state-run television network has started, for example, a program to use modern satellite technology to broadcast fine choral music into public schools (see External Links, below).

References

• Boccardi, Donald. (2001) The History of American Catholic Hymnals since Vatican II, Chicago: GIA Publications.
• Charanis, Peter. (1946) "On the Question of Hellenization of Sicily and Southern Italy during the Middle Age" in The American Historical Review, No. 52.
• Crocker, Richard L. (1966) A History of Musical Style. New York: McGraw-Hill.
• di Giacomo, Salvatore. (1924) I quattro antichi conservatori di musica a Napoli [The Four Ancient Music Conservatories of Naples], Milan: Sandron.
• Farmer, Henry George. (1957) "The Music of Islam" in The New Oxford History of Music; vol 1, Ancient and Oriental Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Foil, David. (1995) Gregorian Chant and Polyphony, New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers.
• Gallo, Alberto. (1995) Music in the Castle. Troubadours, Books and Orators in Italian Courts of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Guizzi, Febo (1990) "Gli strumenti della musica poplare in Italia" in Le tradizioni popolari: Canti e musiche popolari, Milan; Electa.
• Levarie, Siegmund. (1963). Musical Italy Revisited", New York: MacMillan.
• Leydi, Robert. (1990). "Efisio Melis" in Le tradizioni popolari in Italia; canti e musiche popolari, Milano: Electa.
• Lomax, Alan (1956). "Folk Song Style: Notes on a Systematic Approach to the Study of Folk Song." Journal of the International Folk Music Council, VIII, 48-50.
• Mazzoletti, Adriano. (1963) Jazz in Italia. Dalle Origini al dopoguerra. Rome.
• Magrini, Tullia. (1990) Le tradizioni popolari: Canti e musiche popolari, Milan; Electa.
• Magrini, Tullia (ed.) (1992). Il maggio drammatico: una tradizione di teatro in musica. Bologna; Edizioni Analisi.
• Maiden, Martin. (1994) A Linguistic History of Italian, London: Longman.
• Olson, Harry F. (1967) Music, Physics and Engineering, New York: Dover reprint.
• Paliska, Calude V. (1985) Humanism in Italian Musical Thought", New Haven; Yale University Press.
• Sachs, Curt. (1943)" "The Road to Major" in The Rise Of Music In The Ancient World East And West, New York: Norton.
• Sassu, P. (1978) La musica sarda, 3 LPs and booklet, Albatros VPA 8150-52, Milano.
• Ulrich, Homer and Paul Pisk. (1963) A History of Music and Musical Style. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanoich.

External links

• Major recording companies in Italy.
• SIAE Società italiania di autori e editori (the Italian Society of Authors and Editors), the organization that pays royalties in Italy.
• Services on Music in Italy
• Italian music libraries
• International Directory of Music Instrument Collections, Italy
• Music Teaching Institutions
• Italian Music Portals
• Theaters and Concert Halls
• Music Publishers
• Italian music composers and musicians
• National Symphony Orchestra of the RAI (Italian Radio and Television network).
• Verdincanto, a program to broadcast choral music into public schools.
• Music of the Mafia
• CEMAT Organization to promote computer music research.
• SIBMAS International Directory of Performing Arts Collections and Institutions, Italy.