Conference Agenda

Printed song repertoires circulating in sixteenth-century Italy supplemented and increasingly supplanted unwritten song traditions, to the point that monody collections appearing around 1600 have overshadowed earlier accompanied song practices in historical narratives. While monody’s innovative aspects have dominated discussion, its relationship to preexisting practices such as the oral performance of poetry to instruments like the lute and lira da braccio remain underexplored. By approaching monody collections as a site of transition from oral to literate forms of culture underway in Early Modern Italy, I examine how musical notation can act as an “archive” of unwritten practices.

Examples from a variety of genres illustrate the co-influence of oral and literate traditions throughout the long first century of the print industry. The standardization of solo and accompaniment notation found in monody and musical drama provide a new format for poetic recitation, in which previously oral song traditions can become fixed in notation as modi di cantar, or appear mimetically, to stage a poet character. Decades earlier, villanesche and polyphonic comedies also employed notation and mimesis of regional practices to create a rusticizing approximation of vernacular performance. Even in the first days of Italian music printing, Petrucci engaged with the currency of oral practices by including poetic formulae in his songbooks. Ultimately, as I argue, taking an archival perspective to the notation itself helps us navigate its imperfection as a data source, among other pitfalls of using written documents to study unwritten traditions.

In 1739 Charles de Brosses wrote “Naples est la capitale du monde musicien.” And yet, very little has been written on the music of Naples’s streets, outside of churches, theaters, and courts. Because as an oral tradition it left little written traces, most studies on Neapolitan (popular) music quickly dismiss anything before the Golden Age of Neapolitan song, inaugurated in 1835 with “Te voglio bene assaje” (De Simone, Gargano, Sabatini, Paliotti). Reconstructing the soundscape, in the dialect, of the vicoli and homes, of street festivals, and of working people is indeed very difficult, but not impossible. This three-part paper first contextualizes the repertoire and presents what is known, clearing the facts from the debris accumulated around them in successive generations of studies (such as the canard introduced by an early scholar of Boccaccio mentioning a song in the Decamerone, and perpetuated as a fact in the literature)—3-4’. The central part (12-13’) discusses the repertoire, analyzing genres (such as the tammurriata, tarantella, narrative strophic songs, and “a’ ffigliola” songs) and sonorities (including instruments unique to the area like calascione, tamburello, tricchebballacche, and putipù), and evincing central themes and topics. Besides the themes of love and relationships, there is a very strong current of political commentary, overt and covert, as well as some sort of origin story, and a good dose of humor. One peculiar example are songs lamenting the departure of the Anjou in the 1440s and the arrival of the Aragonese regime, at least one song allegedly by Isabella d’Anjou herself, bemoaning the loss of her Naples. The analysis will be illustrated by musical examples performed by musicians who since the 1970s have sought to present philologically accurate performances, like Roberto Murolo and the Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare. The last part (3-4’) concludes the presentation by bringing all the elements together to form a coherent picture, if necessarily partial, and briefly putting it into dialogue with other genres, such as the villanella alla napoletana (Cardamone).

Italian operetta has long held a marginal role in histories of both Italian music and operetta – its origins as a foreign importation (via translations of Offenbach) exposing it to accusations of being insufficiently Italian and artistically negligible alike. Yet already from the 1870s onwards, discussions about Italian operetta circled around its relationship with earlier musical traditions and the musical forms an Italian operetta should adopt. For some, this meant a return to Paisiello and Rossini, re-energising a comic tradition seen as flagging even with the recent successes of Ricci and Usiglio (Izzo, 2013). Yet for others it meant developing operetta via a smaller-scale but equally local genre: Neapolitan song.

This paper examines the relationship between Italian operetta and Neapolitan song, focusing particularly on operetta and song composers Vincenzo Valente (1855-1921) and Mario Pasquale Costa (1858-1933). Valente’s I granatieri (1889) has regularly been described in later accounts as the first truly Italian operetta, building on the use of canzone napolitana in the earliest Italian adaptations of foreign operettas (Sorba, 2006). Costa was similarly acclaimed, his Neapolitan operetta Scugnizza (1922) hailed as “Italian twice over” during the 1920s. Regionalism was a common feature of Italian operetta production, as witnessed by hits such as Pietri’s L’acqua cheta (1920), and offered a domestic counterpart to the trend for exoticism and Parisian-set works. Yet Naples - with its prestigious artistic history - proved a particularly strong thread, one that could even seem to stand in for Italian operetta as a whole.

Famously institutionalised at the Piedigrotta Festival in the 1830s, Neapolitan song had long occupied an ambivalent space between folk music and art song, made more complex by its international dissemination from the 1880s onwards. The operettistic turn to Neapolitan song, I argue, ultimately indicated both a concern for national character and a broader engagement with an emerging popular music industry, and the vexed question of where operetta should fit into developing aesthetic hierarchies. Focusing on operetta can thus offer a specifically Italian contribution to discussions around the “middlebrow” (Guthrie, Chowrimootoo, 2022), while offering a new perspective on debates about regionalism in post-unification Italy.