The Music of Italy
Italian CDs in USA
Italian MP3, iTunes
Italian Radio
Italian CDs from Italy
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Italian Music Characteristics
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Like other elements of Italian culture, Italian music is generally eclectic. No parochial protectionist movement has ever attempted 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, Greeks, French and Spanish. The country's historical contributions to music are also an important part of
national pride. The relatively recent history of Italy includes the development of an opera tradition that has spread throughout the world; prior to the development of Italian identity or a unified Italian state, the Italian peninsula contributed to
important innovations in music including the development of musical notation and Gregorian chant.
Immigrant populations from around the Mediterranean, especially Greece, the Balkans and North Africa, have established large communities in the southern peninsula over the last thousand years. As a result, folk music on Sicily and the southern Italian
mainland display features typical of elsewhere in the Mediterranean. These include an excessive nasality in the voice and an extremely ornamental approach to pitch. Lomax's description of southern Italian singing is widely cited: "A voice as pinched and
strangulated and high-pitched as any in Europe. The singing expression is one of true agony, the throat is distended and flushed with strain, the brow knotted with a painful expression. Many tunes are long and highly ornamented in Oriental style." Melody
has typically been important in most Italian musical forms, even at the expense of lyrics and harmonic complexity. This is true in opera, popular music and even, to some extent, in modern text-centered styles such as Italian hip hop and the music of the
cantautori singer-songwriters. |
