Musica Mia: Italian Instrumental 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 Instrumental Music

The dominance of opera in Italian music tends to overshadow the important area of instrumental music.
Historically, such music includes the vast array of sacred instrumental music, instrumental concertos, and orchestral music in the works of Andrea Gabrielli, Giovanni Gabrielli, Tomaso Albinoni, Arcangelo Corelli, Antonio Vivaldi, Luigi Boccherini, Luigi Cherubini and Domenico Scarlatti. (Even opera composers occasionally worked in other forms—Giuseppe Verdi's String Quartet in E minor, for example. Even Donizetti, whose name is identified with the beginnings of Italian lyric opera, wrote 18 string quartets.)
In the early 20th century, instrumental music began growing in importance, a process that started around 1904 with Giuseppe Martucci's Second Symphony, a work that Malipiero called "the starting point of the renascence of non-operatic Italian music."
Several early composers from this era, such as Leone Sinigaglia, used native folk traditions.
The early 20th century is also marked by the presence of a group of composers called the generazione dell'ottanta (generation of 1880), including Franco Alfano, Alfredo Casella, Gian Francesco Malipiero, Ildebrando Pizzetti, and Ottorino Respighi.
These composers usually concentrated on writing instrumental works, rather than opera. Members of this generation were the dominant figures in Italian music after Puccini's death in 1924.
New organizations arose to promote Italian music, such as the Venice Festival of Contemporary Music and the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. Guido Gatti's founding of the periodical il Piano and then La ressegna musicale also helped to promote a broader view of music than the political and social climate allowed.
Most Italians, however, preferred more traditional pieces and established standards, and only a small audience sought new styles of experimental classical music.