17 - Folk music and popular song from the nineteenth century to the 1990s

Summary

In 1954, when the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax (1915- ) took a six-month trip to Italy together with Diego Carpitella to record original folk music, the country that he found was scarred by the Second World War and still dominated, in large areas of the southern countryside, by a rural and archaic culture. For the purpose of his research, however, Italy was an untouched paradise, as precious to an ethnomusicologist as Hungary had been to Bartó and Kodály.' ‘The tradition of Italian folk music is arguably one of the least spoiled, most vigorous, and varied of Western Europe’, he wrote. And yet Lomax realized that the situation was changing:

So far as the Italian amusement industry is concerned, the only worthwhile native song traditions are those of Naples and the Alps. The combined battery of radio, television, and the jukebox pours out a steady barrage of Neapolitan song, American jazz, and opera, day in and day out, as if some unseen musical administrators had resolved to wipe out the enemy, folk music, as quickly as possible.

It is true that, as Italy underwent a major transformation from rural economy to city-based industry, folk music reminded urban people of the oppressive peasant life that they were eager to leave behind. In his massive study of the origins of the tarantella as a medicine ritual, the anthropologist Ernesto De Martino (1908–65) could still experience the richness of southern lore in connection with music. But in the new soundscape provided by radios, the jukebox and public television (which was introduced in 1954), folk music was non-existent.