Musica Mia: Italian classical music

Musica Mia, My Music is a little guide to Italian music available in the United States and imported from Italy. We have selected Italian music from Amazon.com featuring CDs from Italy like Festival of Sanremo and Greatest Hits by Italian singers and groups. You will also find a selection of websites that carry Italian MP3 songs and albums as well as iTunes of Italian artists. If you prefer to order directly from Italy, ibs.it will ship your Italian music, movies, books and video games anywhere in the world. We hope you'll enjoy Musica Mia and find it useful, we encourage you to suggest this site to your friends and to include it in your favorite websites. Grazie!

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Italian Classical Music

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.
As typified by the operas of Verdi, it was music in which "... The vocal lines always dominate the tonal complex and are never overshadowed by the instrumental accompaniments..."
Italian classical music had resisted the "German harmonic juggernaut"—that is, the dense harmonies of Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss.
Italian music also had little in common with the French reaction to that German music—the impressionism of Claude Debussy, for example, in which melodic development is largely abandoned for the creation of mood and atmosphere through the sounds of individual chords.
European classical music changed greatly in the 20th century. New music abandoned much of the historical, 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. Important composers of the period include Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, Luigi Dallapiccola, Carlo Jachino, Gian Carlo Menotti, Jacopo Napoli, and Goffredo Petrassi.

Italian Classical Music at Wikipedia