Lev's Violin by Helena Attlee

Author:Helena Attlee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2021-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

Musica Popolare

Roma Fiddles and Italian Folk Music

Every region of Italy had its own musica popolare, its own sad tunes about bereavement, separation and thwarted love, and joyful ones about courtship, carnevale and Christmas. Music was integral to the rhythms of working life and the identities of different trades and jobs. The labourers toiling in Sicily’s sulphur mines had their own music, and so did the island’s tuna fishermen. The dockers at the port in Genoa sang, shepherds everywhere played their own tunes, and contadini – peasant farmers – had a different song for every task during the agricultural year. There were songs for sowing and reaping, picking fruit and gathering olives. Many of these jobs have been mechanized today in ways that make singing impossible, but if you happen to be in a Sicilian orange grove at harvest time, you will realize that some things never change. The pickers will throw their ladders against the trees in the morning and scramble in among their foliage. You would be lucky to glimpse even a hand or the top of a woolly hat after that, but you can always track their progress by following the sound of yet another rendition of the song they pass among the trees all day.

Music has always varied enormously from one small Italian village to the next, just like the recipe for bread, the flavour of olive oil, or the dialect spoken by the locals. There has always been such a contrast between the melodies played on the streets of Naples in the south and in the mountain villages of the north that it is hard to believe they were products of the same country. But of course Italy was never really a country in the political sense until Unification in the middle of the nineteenth century. This made travelling any distance a tedious process that involved stopping again and again at tatty customs posts to show your travel documents and have your luggage inspected by rapacious officials. And bad luck if you had already passed through an area afflicted by plague, because then you were obliged to spend a few bleak weeks in quarantine.

The difficulties that political divisions caused travellers were exacerbated by the natural contours of the landscape. The Apennines still split Italy in two by running like a spine down its centre from north to south, so that even now travelling from east to west is unexpectedly complicated. Go by train from Rome to Pesaro on the east coast, for example, and you will be obliged to travel north to Bologna, then board another train that will turn you round and take you south again down the east coast.

All this made travelling difficult, but it also helped to preserve the cultura popolare that was the fabric of society in every isolated community. Woven from music, songs and dances, cultura popolare also encompassed the instruments people played, the distinctive dialects or languages they spoke, the clothes people wore, the tools they used in fields and workshops, and the rituals and proverbs that made sense of their experiences.

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