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Music of Italy

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Musical genres, styles,
eras and events

                                 Music of Italy
       Genres:     Classical: Opera
                   Pop: Rock ( Hardcore) - Hip hop - Folk - jazz
                              History and Timeline
       Awards      Italian Music Awards
       Charts      Federation of the Italian Music Industry
      Festivals    Umbria Jazz Festival - Sanremo Festival - Ravello Festival -
                   Festival dei Due Mondi
        Media      Music media in Italy
   National anthem Il Canto degli Italiani
                                 Regional scenes
   Aosta Valley - Abruzzo - Basilicata - Calabria - Campania -
   Emilia-Romagna - Florence - Friuli-Venezia Giulia - Genoa - Latium -
   Liguria - Lombardy - Marche - Milan - Molise - Naples - Piedmont -
   Puglia - Rome - Sardinia - Sicily - Trentino-South Tyrol - Tuscany -
   Umbria - Veneto - Venice
                                 Related topics
   Opera houses - Music conservatories - Terminology

   The music of Italy ranges across a broad spectrum of opera and
   instrumental classical music, the traditional styles of the country's
   diverse regions, and a body of popular music drawn from both native and
   imported sources. Music has traditionally been one of the cultural
   markers of Italian national and ethnic identity and holds an important
   position in society and in politics. Italian innovation in musical
   scales, harmony, notation, and theatre enabled the development of opera
   in the late 16th century, and much of modern European classical music,
   such as the symphony and concerto.

   Instrumental and vocal classical music is an iconic part of Italian
   identity, spanning experimental art music and international fusions to
   symphonic music and opera. Opera is integral to Italian musical
   culture, and has become a major segment of popular music. The
   Neapolitan song, canzone Napoletana, and the cantautori
   singer-songwriter traditions are also popular domestic styles that form
   an important part of the Italian music industry, alongside imported
   genres like jazz, rock and hip hop. Italian folk music is an important
   part of the country's musical heritage, and spans a diverse array of
   regional styles, instruments and dances. The infrastructure that
   supports music as a profession includes conservatories, opera houses,
   radio and television stations, recording studios, music festivals, and
   centers of musicological research.

Characteristics

   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, 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 highy ornamented in Oriental style." Melody has
   typically been important in most Italian musical forms, even at the
   expense of text 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.

Social identity

   Italy was not unified politically until the 19th century. The drive
   towards unification led to efforts to create a sense of Italian
   identity, famously described by the Italian statesman Massimo
   d’Azeglio: “We have created Italy; now we have to create Italians.”
   Abroad, Italian culture and society are often stereotyped, associating
   all Italian music with certain styles. For example, some years ago the
   Mayor of Venice banned gondoliers from singing Neapolitan songs for the
   tourists, most of whom requested " ‘O sole mio" and other songs typical
   only of Naples but widely regarded abroad as characteristic of all
   Italian music.

   Allegiance to music is integrally woven into the social identity of
   Italians but no single style has been considered a characteristic
   "national style". Most folk musics are localized, and unique to a small
   region or city. Italy's classical legacy, however, is an important
   point of the country's identity, particularly opera; traditional
   operatic pieces remain a popular part of music and an integral
   component of national identity. The musical output of Italy remains
   characterized by "great diversity and creative independence (with) a
   rich variety of types of expression".

   With the growing industrialization that accelerated during the 20th
   century, Italian society gradually moved from an agricultural base to
   an urban and industrial centre. This change weakened traditional
   culture in many parts of society; a similar process occurred in other
   European countries, but unlike them, Italy had no major initiative to
   preserve traditional musics. Immigration from North Africa, Asia, and
   other European countries led to further diversification of Italian
   music. Traditional music came to exist only in small pockets,
   especially as part of dedicated campaigns to retain local musical
   identities.

Politics

   Music and politics have been intertwined for centuries in Italy. Just
   as many works of art in the Italian Renaissance were commissioned by
   royalty and the Roman Catholic Church, much music was likewise composed
   on the basis of such commissions—incidental court music, music for
   coronations, for the birth of a royal heir, royal marches, and other
   occasions. Composers who strayed ran certain risks. Among the best
   known of such cases was the Neapolitan composer Domenico Cimarosa, who
   composed the Republican hymn for the short-lived Neapolitan Republic of
   1799. When the republic fell, he was tried for treason along with other
   revolutionaries. Cimarosa was not executed by the restored monarchy,
   but he was exiled.

   Music also played a role in the unification of the peninsula. During
   this period, some leaders attempted to use music to forge a unifying
   cultural identity. One example is the chorus "Va Pensiero" from
   Giuseppe Verdi's opera Nabucco. The opera is about ancient Babylon, but
   the chorus contains the phrase "O mia Patria", ostensibly about the
   struggle of the Israelites, but also a thinly veiled reference to the
   destiny of a not-yet-united Italy; the entire chorus became the
   unofficial anthem of the Risorgimento, the drive to unify Italy in the
   19th century. Even Verdi's name was a synonym for Italian unity because
   "Verdi" could be read as an acronym for Vittorio Emanuele Re d'Italia,
   Victor Emanuel King of Italy, the Savoy monarch who eventually became
   Victor Emanuel II, the first king of united Italy. Thus, "Viva Verdi"
   was a rallying cry for patriots and often appeared in graffiti in Milan
   and other cities in what was then part of Austro-Hungarian territory.
   Verdi had problems with censorship before the unification of Italy. His
   opera Un ballo in maschera was originally entitled Gustavo III and was
   presented to the San Carlo opera in Naples, the capital of the Kingdom
   of the Two Sicilies, in the late 1850s . The Neapolitan censors
   objected to the realistic plot about the assassination of Gustav III,
   King of Sweden, in the 1790s. Even after the plot was changed, the
   Neapolitan censors still rejected it.

   Later, in the Fascist era of the 1920s and 30s, government censorship
   and interference with music occurred, though not on a systematic basis.
   Prominent examples include the notorious anti-modernist manifesto of
   1932 and Mussolini's banning of G.F. Malipiero's opera La favola del
   figlio cambiato after one performance in 1934. The music media often
   criticized music that was perceived as either politically radical or
   insufficiently Italian. General print media, such as the Enciclopedia
   Moderna Italiana, tended to treat traditionally favored composers such
   as Giacomo Puccini and Pietro Mascagni with the same brevity as
   composers and musicians that were not as favored—modernists such as
   Alfredo Casella and Ferruccio Busoni; that is, encyclopedia entries of
   the era were mere lists of career milestones such as compositions and
   teaching positions held. Even the conductor Arturo Toscanini, an avowed
   opponent of Fascism, gets the same neutral and distant treatment with
   no mention at all of his "anti-regime" stance. Perhaps the best-known
   episode of music colliding with politics involves Toscanini. He had
   been forced out of the musical directorship at La Scala in Milan in
   1929 because he refused to begin every performance with the fascist
   song, Giovinezza. For this insult to the regime, he was attacked and
   beaten on the street outside the Bologne opera after a performance in
   1931. During the Fascist era, political pressure stymied the
   development of classical music, although censorship was not as
   systematic as in Nazi Germany. A series of "racial Laws" was passed in
   1938, thus denying to Jewish composers and musicians membership in
   professional and artistic associations. Although there was not a
   massive flight of Italian Jews from Italy during this period (compared
   to the situation in Germany) composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, an
   Italian Jew, was one of those who emigrated. Some non-Jewish foes of
   the regime also emigrated—Toscanini, for one.

   More recently, in the later part of the 20th century, especially in the
   1970s and beyond, music became further emmeshed in Italian politics. A
   roots revival stimulated interest in folk traditions, led by writers,
   collectors and traditional performers. The political right in Italy
   viewed this roots revival with disdain, as a product of the
   "unprivileged classes". The revivalist scene thus became associated
   with the opposition, and became a vehicle for "protest against
   free-market capitalism". Similarly, the avant-garde classical music
   scene has, since the 1970s, been associated with and promoted by the
   Italian Communist Party, a change that can be traced back to the 1968
   student revolts and protests.

Classical music

   Italy has long been a centre 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 favour 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.

Opera

   Opera originated in Italy in the late 1500s during the time of the
   Florentine Camerata. Through the centuries that followed, opera
   traditions developed in Venice and Naples; the operas of Claudio
   Monteverdi, Alessandro Scarlatti, and, later, of Gioacchino Rossini,
   Vincenzo Bellini, and Gaetano Donizetti flourished. Opera has remained
   the musical form most closely linked with Italian music and Italian
   identity. This was most obvious in the 19th century through the works
   of Giuseppe Verdi, an icon of Italian culture and pan-Italian unity.
   Italy retained a Romantic operatic musical tradition in the early 20th
   century, exemplified by composers of the so-called Giovane Scuola,
   whose music was anchored in the previous century, including Arrigo
   Boito, Ruggiero Leoncavallo, Pietro Mascagni, and Francesco Cilea.

   After World War I, however, opera declined in comparison to the popular
   heights of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Causes included the
   general cultural shift away from Romanticism and the rise of the
   cinema, which became a major source of entertainment. A third cause is
   the fact that "internationalism" had brought contemporary Italian opera
   to a state where it was no longer "Italian". This was the opinion of at
   least one prominent Italian musicologist and critic, Fausto
   Terrefranca, who, in a 1912 pamphlet entitled Giaccomo Puccini and
   International Opera, accused Puccini of "commercialism" and of having
   deserted Italian traditions. Traditional Romantic opera remained
   popular; indeed, the dominant opera publisher in the early 20th century
   was Casa Ricordi, which focused almost exclusively on popular operas
   until the 30s, when the company allowed more unusual composers with
   less mainstream appeal. The rise of relatively new publishers such as
   Carisch and Suvini Zerboni also helped to fuel the diversification of
   Italian opera. Opera remains a major part of Italian culture; renewed
   interest in opera across the sectors of Italian society began in the
   1980s. Respected composers from this era include the well-known Aldo
   Clementi, and younger peers such as Marco Tutino and Lorenzo Ferrero.

Sacred Music

   Naturally Italy, being one of Catholicism's seminal nations, has a long
   and distinguished history of music for the Roman Catholic Church. Until
   approximately 1800, it was possible to hear Gregorian Chant and
   Renaissance polyphony, such as the music of Palestrina, Lasso, Anerio,
   and others. Approximately 1800 to approximately 1900 was a century
   during which a more popular, operatic, and entertaining type of church
   music was heard, to the exclusion of the aforementioned chant and
   polyphony. In the late 1800s, the Cecilian Movement was started by
   musicians who fought to restore this music. This movement gained
   impetus not in Italy but in Germany, particularly in Regensburg. The
   movement reached its apex around 1900 with the ascent of Don Lorenzo
   Perosi and his supporter (and future saint), Pope Pius X. The advent of
   Vatican II, however, nearly obliterated all Latin-language music from
   the Church, once again substituting it with a more popular style.

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 used native folk traditions, such as Leone
   Sinigaglia.

   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.

Ballet

   Italian contributions to ballet are less known and appreciated than in
   other areas of classical music. Italy, particularly Milan, was the
   European centre of court choreography as early as the 1400s in the form
   of such things as ritual masked balls. Early choreographers and
   composers of ballet include Fabrizio Caroso and Cesare Negri. The style
   of ballet known as the "spectacles all’italiana" imported to France
   from Italy caught on, and the first ballet performed in France (1581),
   Ballet comique de la Royn, was composed by an Italian, Baltazarini di
   Belgioioso, better known by the French version of his name, Balthasar
   de Beaujoyeulx. Early ballet was accompanied by considerable
   instrumentation, with the playing of horns, trombones, kettle drums,
   dulcimers, bagpipes, etc. Although the music has not survived, there is
   speculation that dancers, themselves, may have played instruments
   onstage. Then, in the wake of the French Revolution, Italy again became
   a centre of ballet, largely through the efforts of Salvatore Viganò, a
   choreographer who worked with some of the most prominent composers of
   the day. He was made the balletmaster of La Scala in 1812. The
   best-known example of Italian ballet from the 19th century is probably
   Excelsior, with music by Romualdo Marenco and choreography by Luigi
   Manzotti. It was composed in 1881 and is a lavish tribute to the
   scientific and industrial progress of the 19th century. It is still
   performed and was staged as recently as 2002.

   Currently, major Italian opera theaters maintain ballet companies. They
   exist to provide incidental and ceremonial dancing in many operas, such
   as Aida or La Traviata. These dance companies usually maintain a
   separate ballet season and perform the standard repertoire of classical
   ballet, little of which is Italian. There is no Italian equivalent of
   the Russian Bolshoi Ballet and similar companies that exist only to
   perform ballet, independent of a parent opera theatre. Since 1979,
   however, there has existed in Italy a modern dance company, the
   Alterballetto. It is based in Reggio Emilia and is the first permanent
   ballet-producing organization independent of an opera house in Italy.
   The company performs worldwide under the leadership of choreographer
   Mauro Bigonzetti.

Experimental music

   Experimental music is a broad, loosely-defined field encompassing
   musics created by abandoning traditional classical concepts of melody
   and harmony, and by using the new technology of electronics to create
   hitherto impossible sounds. In Italy, one of the first to devote his
   attention to experimental music was Ferruccio Busoni, whose 1907
   publication, Sketch for a New Aesthetic of Music, discussed the use of
   electrical and other new sounds in future music. He spoke of his
   dissatisfaction with the constraints of traditional music:

          “We have divided the octave into twelve equidistant degrees…and
          have constructed our instruments in such as way that we can
          never get in above or below or between them…our ears are no
          longer capable of hearing anything else…yet Nature created an
          infinite gradation—infinite! Who still knows it nowadays?”

   Similarly, Luigi Russolo, the Italian Futurist painter and composer,
   wrote of the possibilities of new music in his 1913 manifestoes The Art
   of Noises and Musica Futurista. He also invented and built instruments
   such as the intonarumori, mostly percussion, which were used in a
   precursor to the style known as musique concrète. One of the most
   influential events in early 20th century music was the return of
   Alfredo Casella from France in 1915; Casella founded the Società
   Italiana di Musica Moderna, which promoted several composers in
   disparate styles, ranging from experimental to traditional. After a
   dispute over the value of experimental music in 1923, Casella formed
   the Corporazione delle Nuove Musiche to promote modern experimental
   music.

   In the 1950s, Luciano Berio experimented with instruments accompanied
   by electronic sounds on tape. In modern Italy, one important
   organization that fosters research in avantgarde and electronic music
   is CEMAT, the Federation of Italian Electroacoustic Music Centers. It
   was founded in 1996 in Rome and is a member of the CIME, the
   Confédération Internationale de Musique Electroacoustique. CEMAT
   promotes the activities of the “Sonora” project, launched jointly by
   the Department for Performing Arts, Ministry for Cultural Affairs and
   the Directorate for Cultural Relations, Ministry for Foreign Affairs
   with the object of promoting and diffusing Italian contemporary music
   abroad.

Classical music in society

   Italian classical music grew gradually more experimental and
   progressive into the mid-20th century, while popular tastes have tended
   to stick with well established composers and compositions of the past.
   The 2004-2005 program at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples is typical of
   modern Italy: of the eight operas represented, the most recent was
   Puccini. In symphonic music, of the 26 composers whose music was
   played, 21 of them were from the 19th century or earlier, composers who
   use the melodies and harmonies typical of the Romantic era. This focus
   is common to other European traditions, and is known as postmodernism,
   a school of thought that draws on earlier harmonic and melodic concepts
   that pre-date the conceptions of atonality and dissonance. This focus
   on popular historical composers has helped to maintain a continued
   presence of classical music across a broad spectrum of Italian society.
   When music is part of a public display or gathering, it is often chosen
   from a very eclectic repertoire that is as likely to include well-known
   classical music as popular music.

   A few recent works have become a part of the modern repertoire,
   including scores and theatrical works by composers such as Luciano
   Berio, Luigi Nono, Franco Donatoni, and Sylvano Bussotti. These
   composers are not part of a distinct school or tradition, though they
   do share certain techniques and influences. By the 1970s, avant-garde
   classical music had become linked to the Italian Communist Party, while
   a revival of popular interest continued into the next decade, with
   foundations, festivals and organization created to promote modern
   music. Near the end of the 20th century, government sponsorship of
   musical institutions began to decline, and several RAI choirs and city
   orchestras were closed. Despite this, a number of composers gained
   international reputations in the early 21st century.

Folk music

   Italian folk music has a deep and complex history. Because national
   unification came late to the Italian peninsula, the traditional music
   of its many hundreds of cultures exhibit no homogeneous national
   character. Rather, each region and community possesses a unique musical
   tradition that reflects the history, language, and ethnic composition
   of that particular locale. These traditions reflect Italy's geographic
   position in southern Europe and in the centre of the Mediterranean Sea;
   Arabic, African, Celtic, Persian, Roma, and Slavic influences, as well
   as rough geography and the historic dominance of small city states,
   have all combined to allow diverse musical styles to coexist in close
   proximity.

   Italian folk styles are very diverse, and include monophonic,
   polyphonic, and responsorial song, choral, instrumental and vocal
   music, and other styles. Choral singing and polyphonic song forms are
   primarily found in northern Italy, while south of Naples, solo singing
   is more common, and groups usually use unison singing in two or three
   parts carried by a single performer. Northern ballad-singing is
   syllabic, with a strict tempo and intelligible lyrics, while southern
   styles use a rubato tempo, and a strained, tense vocal style. Folk
   musicians use the dialect of their own regional tradition; this
   rejection of the standard Italian language in folk song is nearly
   universal. There is little perception of a common Italian folk
   tradition, and the country's folk music never became a national symbol.
   Some common geographical names used as points of reference in Italy.
   Enlarge
   Some common geographical names used as points of reference in Italy.

Regions

   Italy's folk music is sometimes divided into several spheres of
   geographic influence, a classification system of three regions,
   southern, central and northern, proposed by Alan Lomax in 1956 and
   often repeated. Additionally, Curt Sachs proposed the existence of two
   quite distinct kinds of folk music in Europe: continental and
   Mediterranean, and others have placed the transition zone from the
   former to the latter roughly in north-central Italy, approximately
   between Pesaro and La Spezia. The central, northern and southern parts
   of the peninsula each share certain musical characteristics, and are
   each distinct from the music of Sardinia.

   In the Piedmontese valleys and some Ligurian communities of
   northwestern Italy, the music preserves the strong influence of ancient
   Occitania. The lyrics of the Occitanic troubadours are some of the
   oldest preserved samples of vernacular song, and modern bands like Gai
   Saber and Lou Dalfin preserve and contemporize Occitan music. The
   Occitanian culture retains characteristics of the ancient Celtic
   influence, through the use of six or seven hole flutes ( fifre) or the
   bagpipes ( piva). The music of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, in northeastern
   Italy, shares much more in common with Austria and Slovenia including
   variants of the waltz and the polka. Much of northern Italy shares with
   areas of Europe further to the north an interest in ballad singing
   (called canto epico lirico in Italian) and choral singing. Even
   ballads—usually thought of as a vehicle for a solo voice—may be sung in
   choirs. In the province of Trento "folk choirs" are the most common
   form of music making.

   Noticeable musical differences in the southern type include increased
   use of interval part singing and a greater variety of folk instruments.
   The Celtic and Slavic influences on the group and open-voice choral
   works of the north yield to a stronger Arabic, Greek, and
   African-influenced strident monody of the south. In parts of Apulia (
   Grecìa Salentina, for example) the Griko dialect is commonly used in
   song. The Apulian city of Taranto is a home of the tarantella, a
   rhythmic dance widely performed in southern Italy. Apulian music in
   general, and Salentine music in particular, has been well researched
   and documented by ethnomusicologists and by Aramirè.

   The music of the island of Sardinia is best known for the polyphonic
   chanting of the tenores. The sound of the tenores recalls the roots of
   Gregorian chant, and is similar to but distinctive from the Ligurian
   trallalero. Typical instruments include the launeddas, a Sardinian
   triplepipe used in a sophisticated and complex manner. Efisio Melis was
   a well-known master launeddas player of the 1930s.

Songs

   Italian folk songs include ballads, lyrical songs, lullabies and
   children's songs, seasonal songs based around holidays like Christmas,
   life-cycle songs that celebrate weddings, baptisms and other important
   events, dance songs, cattle calls and occupational songs, tied to
   professions such as fishermen, shepherds and soldiers. Ballads (canti
   epico-lirici) and lyric songs (canti lirico-monostrifici) are two
   important categories. Ballads are most common in northern Italy, while
   lyric songs prevail further south. Ballads are closely tied to the
   English form, with some British ballads existing in exact
   correspondence with an Italian song. Other Italian ballads are more
   closely based on French models. Lyric songs are a diverse category that
   consist of lullabies, serenades and work songs, and are frequently
   improvised though based on a traditional repertoire.

   Other Italian folk song traditions are less common than ballads and
   lyric songs. Strophic, religious laude, sometimes in Latin, are still
   occasionally performed, and epic songs are also known, especially those
   of the maggio celebration. Professional female singers perform dirges
   similar in style to those elsewhere in Europe. Yodeling exists in
   northern Italy, though it is most commonly associated with the folk
   musics of other Alpine nations. The Italian Carnival is associated with
   several song types, especially the Carnival of Bagolino, Brescia.
   Choirs and brass bands are a part of the mid-Lenten holiday, while the
   begging song tradition extends through many holidays throughout the
   year.

Instrumentation

   A folk accordion.
   Enlarge
   A folk accordion.

   Instrumentation is an integral part of all facets of Italian folk
   music. There are several instruments that retain older forms even while
   newer models have become widespread elsewhere in Europe. Many Italian
   instruments are tied to certain rituals or occasions, such as the
   zampogna bagpipe, typically heard only at Christmas. Italian folk
   instruments can be divided into string, wind and percussion categories.
   Common instruments include the organetto, an accordion most closely
   associated with the saltarello; the diatonic button organetto is most
   common in central Italy, while chromatic accordions prevail in the
   north. Many municipalities are home to brass bands, which perform with
   roots revival groups; these ensembles are based around the clarinet,
   accordion, violin and small drums, adorned with bells.
   A selection of folk flutes
   Enlarge
   A selection of folk flutes

   Italy's wind instruments include most prominently a variety of folk
   flutes. These include duct, globular and transverse flutes, as well as
   various variations of the pan flute. Double flutes are most common in
   Campania, Calabria and Sicily. A ceramic pitcher called the quartara is
   also used as a wind instrument, by blowing across an opening in the
   narrow bottle neck; it is found in eastern Sicily and Campania. Single-
   (ciaramella) and double-reed (piffero) pipes are commonly played in
   groups of two or three. Several folk bagpipes are well-known, including
   central Italy's zampogna; dialect nams for the bagpipe vary throughout
   Italy-- beghet in Bergamo, piva in Lombardy, müsa in Alessandria,
   Genoa, Pavia and Piacenza, and so forth.

   Numerous percussion instruments are a part of Italian folk music,
   including wood blocks, bells, castanets, drums. Several regions have
   their own distinct form of rattle, including the raganella cog rattle
   and the Calabrian conocchie, a spinning or shepherd's staff with
   permanently attached seed rattles with ritual fertility significance.
   The Neapolitan rattle is the triccaballacca, made out of several
   mallets in a wooden frame. Tambourines (tamburini, tamburello) are
   common, as are various kinds of drums, such as the friction drum
   putipù. The mouth-harp, scacciapensieri or care-chaser, is a
   distinctive instrument, found only in northern Italy and Sicily.
   The zampogna, a folk bagpipe.
   Enlarge
   The zampogna, a folk bagpipe.

   String instruments vary widely depending on locality, with no
   nationally prominent representative. Viggiano is home to a harp
   tradition, which has a historical base in Abruzzi, Lazio and Calabria.
   Calabria, alone, has 30 traditional musical instruments, some of which
   have strongly archaic characteristics and are largely extinct elsewhere
   in Italy. It is home to the four- or five-stringed guitar called the
   chitarra battente, and a three-stringed, bowed fiddle called the lira,
   which is also found in similar forms in the music of Crete and
   Southeastern Europe. A one-stringed, bowed fiddle called the
   torototela, is common in the northeast of the country. The
   German-speaking Alto Aldige is known for the zither, and the ghironda (
   hurdy-gurdy) is found in Emilia, Piedmont and Lombardy.

Dance

   Dance is an integral part of folk traditions in Italy. Some of the
   dances are ancient and, to a certain extent, persist today. There are
   magico-ritual dances of propitiation as well as harvest dances,
   including the “sea-harvest” dances of fishing communities in Calabria
   and the wine harvest dances in Tuscany. Famous dances include the
   southern tarantella; perhaps the most iconic of Italian dances, the
   tarantella is in 6/8 time, and is part of a folk ritual intended to
   cure the poison caused by tarantula bites. Popular Tuscan dances
   ritually act out the hunting of the hare, or display blades in weapon
   dances that simulate or recall the moves of combat, or use the weapons
   as stylized instruments of the dance itself. For example, in a few
   villages in northern Italy, swords are replaced by wooden half-hoops
   embroidered with green, similar to the so-called "garland dances" in
   northern Europe. There are also dances of love and courting, such as
   the duru-duru dance in Sardinia.

   Many of these dances are group activities, the group setting up in rows
   or circles; some—the love and courting dances—involve couples, either a
   single couple or more. The tammuriata (performed to the sound of the
   tambourine) is a couple dance performed in southern Italy and
   accompanied by a lyric song called a strambotto. Other couples dances
   are collectively referred to as saltarello.There are, however, also
   solo dances; most typical of these are the “flag dances” of various
   regions of Italy, in which the dancer passes a town flag or pennant
   around the neck, through the legs, behind the back, often tossing it
   high in the air and catching it. These dances can also be done in
   groups of solo dancers acting in unison or by coordinating flag passing
   between dancers. Northern Italy is also home to the monferrina, an
   accompanied dance that was incorporated in Western art music by the
   composer Muzio Clementi.

   Academic interest in the study of dance from the perspectives of
   sociology and anthropology has traditionally been neglected in Italy
   but is currently showing renewed life at the university and
   post-graduate level.

Popular music

   The earliest Italian popular music was the opera of the 19th century.
   Opera has had a lasting effect on Italy's folk, classical and popular
   musics. Opera tunes spread through brass bands and itinerant ensembles.
   Canzone Napoletana, or Neapolitan song, is a distinct tradition that
   became a part of popular music in the 19th century, and was an iconic
   image of Italian music abroad by the end of the 20th century.

   Imported styles have also become an important part of Italian popular
   music, beginning with the French Café-chantant in the 1890s and then
   the arrival of American jazz in the 1910s. Until Italian Fascism became
   officially "allergic" to foreign influences in the late 1930s, American
   dance music and musicians were quite popular; jazz great Louis
   Armstrong toured Italy as late as 1935 to great acclaim. In the 1950s,
   American styles became more prominent, especially rock. The
   singer-songwriter cantautori tradition was a major development of the
   later 1960s, while the Italian rock scene soon diversified into
   progressive, punk, funk and folk-based styles.

Early popular song

   Italian opera became immensely popular in the 19th century and was
   known across even the most rural sections of the country. Most villages
   had occasional opera productions, and the techniques used in opera
   influenced rural folk musics. Opera spread through itinerant ensembles
   and brass bands, focused in a local village. These civic bands (banda
   communale) used instruments to perform operatic arias, with trombones
   or fluegelhorns for male vocal parts and cornets for female parts.

   Besides opera, some regional music in the 19th century also became
   popular throughout Italy. Notable among these local traditions was the
   Canzone Napoletana—the Neapolitan Song. Although there are anonymous,
   documented songs from Naples from many centuries ago, the term, canzone
   Napoletana now generally refers to a large body of relatively recent,
   composed popular music—such songs as " 'O sole mio", "Torna a
   Surriento", and " Funiculi Funicula". In the 18th century, many
   composers, including Alessandro Scarlatti, Leonardo Vinci, and Giovanni
   Paisiello, contributed to the Neapolitan tradition by using the local
   language for the texts of some of their comic operas. Later,
   others—most famously Gaetano Donizetti—composed Neapolitan songs that
   garnered great renown in Italy and abroad. The Neapolitan song
   tradition became formalized in the 1830s through an annual songwriting
   competition for the yearly Piedigrotta festival, dedicated to the
   Madonna of Piedigrotta, a well-known church in the Mergellina area of
   Naples. The music is identified with Naples, but is famous abroad,
   having been exported on the great waves of emigration from Naples and
   southern Italy roughly between 1880 and 1920. Language is an extremely
   important element of Neapolitan song, which is always written and
   performed in Neapolitan, the regional minority language of Campania.
   Neapolitan songs typically use simple harmonies, and are structured in
   two sections, a refrain and narrative verses, often in contrasting
   relative or parallel major and minor keys. In non-musical terms, this
   means that many Neapolitan songs can sound joyful one minute and
   melancholy the next.

   The music of Francesco Tosti was popular at the turn of the 20th
   century, and is remembered for his light, expressive songs. His style
   became very popular during the Belle Époque and is often known as salon
   music. His most famous works are Serenata, Addio and the popular
   Neapolitan song, Marechiaro, the lyrics of which are by the prominent
   Neapolitan dialect poet, Salvatore di Giacomo.

   Recorded popular music began in the late 19th century, with
   international styles influencing Italian music by the late 1910s;
   however, the rise of autarchia, the Fascist policy of cultural
   isolationism in 1922 led to a retreat from international popular music.
   During this period, popular Italian musicians traveled abroad and
   learned elements of jazz, Latin American music and other styles. These
   musics influenced the Italian tradition, which spread around the world
   and further diversified following liberalization after World War II.

   Under the isolationist policies of the fascist regime, which rose to
   power in 1922, Italy developed an insular musical culture. Foreign
   musics were suppressed while Mussolini's government encouraged
   nationalism and linguistic and ethnic purity. Popular performers,
   however, travelled abroad, and brought back new styles and techniques.
   American jazz was an important influence on singers such as Alberto
   Rabagliati, who became known for a swinging style. Elements of harmony
   and melody from both jazz and blues were used in many popular songs,
   while rhythms often came from Latin dances like the tango, rumba and
   beguine. Italian composers incorporated elements from these styles,
   while Italian music, especially Neapolitan song, became a part of
   popular music across Latin America.

Modern pop

   Among the best-known Italian pop singers of the last few decades are
   Domenico Modugno, Mina, Gianni Morandi, Adriano Celentano, and Al Bano.
   The repertoire combines American popular songs (in English or Italian)
   and home-grown Italian pop songs, such as: "Nel blu dipinto di blu"
   (best known as " Volare"), "Azzurro" and "Insieme". Musicians who
   compose and sing their own songs are called cantautori
   (singer-songwriters). Their compositions typically focus on topics of
   social relevance and are often protest songs: this wave began in the
   1960s with musicians like Fabrizio De André, Giorgio Gaber, Gino Paoli
   and Luigi Tenco. Social, political, psychological and intellectual
   themes, mainly in the wake of Gaber and De André's work, became even
   more predominant in 1970s though authors such as Pino Daniele,
   Francesco De Gregori, Francesco Guccini, Antonello Venditti and Roberto
   Vecchioni. At the same time Lucio Battisti, Angelo Branduardi and
   Franco Battiato pursued careers more oriented to the tradition of
   Italian pop music. There is some genre cross-over between the
   cantautori and those who are viewed as singers of "protest music".

   Film scores, although they are secondary to the film, are often
   critically acclaimed and very popular in their own right. Among early
   music for Italian films from the 1930s was the work of Riccardo
   Zandonai with scores for the films La Principessa Tarakanova (1937) and
   Caravaggio (1941). Post-war examples include Goffredo Petrassi with Non
   c'e pace tra gli ulivi (1950) and Roman Vlad with Giulietta e Romeo
   (1954). Another well-known film composer was Nino Rota whose post-war
   career included the scores for films by Federico Fellini and, later,
   The Godfather series. Other prominent film score composers include
   Ennio Morricone, Riz Ortolani and Piero Umiliani.

Imported styles

   During the Belle Époque, the French fashion of performing popular music
   at the café-chantant spread throughout Europe. The tradition had much
   in common with cabaret, and there is overlap between café-chantant,
   café-concert, cabaret, music hall, vaudeville and other similar styles,
   but at least in its Italian manifestation, the tradition remained
   largely apolitical, focusing on lighter music, often risqué, but not
   bawdy. The first café-chantant in Italy was the Salone Margherita,
   which opened in 1890 on the premises of the new Galleria Umberto in
   Naples. Elsewhere in Italy, the Gran Salone Eden in Milan and the Music
   Hall Olympia in Rome opened shortly thereafter. Café-chantant was
   alternately known as the Italianized caffè-concerto. The main
   performer, usually a woman, was called a chanteuse in French; the
   Italian term, sciantosa, is a direct coinage from the French. The
   songs, themselves, were not French, but were lighthearted or slightly
   sentimental songs composed in Italian. That music went out of fashion
   with the advent of WWI.

   The influence of US pop forms has been strong since the end of World
   War II. Lavish Broadway-show numbers, big bands, rock and roll, and hip
   hop continue to be popular. Latin music, especially Brazilian bossa
   nova, is also popular, and the Puerto Rican genre of reggaeton is
   rapidly becoming a mainstream form of dance music. It is now not
   uncommon for modern Italian pop artists such as Laura Pausini, Eros
   Ramazzotti, and Zucchero to release new songs in English or Spanish in
   addition to, or instead of, Italian. Thus, musical revues, which are
   standard fare on current Italian television, can easily go, in a single
   evening, from a big-band number with dancers to an Elvis impersonator
   to a current pop singer doing a rendition of a Puccini aria.

   Jazz found its way into Europe during WWI through the presence of
   American musicians in military bands playing syncopated music. Yet,
   even well before that, Italy received an inkling of new music from
   across the Atlantic in the form of Creole singers and dancers who
   performed at the Eden Theatre in Milan in 1904; they billed themselves
   as the "creators of the cakewalk." The first real jazz orchestras in
   Italy, however, were formed during 1920s by bandleaders such as Arturo
   Agazzi and enjoyed immediate success. In spite of the anti-American
   cultural policies of the Fascist regime during the 1930s, American jazz
   remained popular.

   In the immediate post-war years, jazz took off in Italy. All American
   post-war jazz styles, from bebop to free jazz and fusion have their
   equivalents in Italy. The universality of Italian culture ensured that
   jazz clubs would spring up throughout the peninsula, that all radio and
   then television studios would have jazz-based house bands, that Italian
   musicians would then start nurturing a home grown kind of jazz, based
   on European song forms, classical composition techniques and folk
   music. Currently, all Italian music conservatories have jazz
   departments, and there are jazz festivals each year in Italy, the
   best-known of which is the Umbria Jazz Festival, and there are
   prominent publications such as the journal, Musica Jazz.

   Italy was at the forefront of the progressive rock movement of the
   1970s, a style that primarily developed in Europe but also gained
   audiences elsewhere in the world. Italian bands such as Premiata
   Forneria Marconi (PFM), Banco del Mutuo Soccorso, and Le Orme
   incorporated a mix of symphonic rock and Italian folk music and were
   popular throughout Europe and the United States as well. Other
   progressive bands such as Balletto di Bronzo or Museo Rosenbach
   remained little known, but their albums are today considered classics
   by collectors. A few avantgarde rock bands ( Area or Picchio dal Pozzo)
   gained notoriety for their innovative sound. Progressive rock concerts
   in Italy tended to have a strong political undertone and an energetic
   atmosphere.

   The Italian hip hop scene began in the early 1990s with Articolo 31
   from Milan. Their style was mainly influenced by East Coast rap. Other
   early hip hop crews were typically politically-oriented, like 99 Posse,
   who later became more influenced by British trip hop. More recent crews
   include gangster rappers like Sardinia's La Fossa. Other recently
   imported styles include techno, trance, and electronica performed by
   artists including Gabry Ponte, Eiffel 65, and Gigi D`Agostino.
   Additionally, there are many bands in Italy that play a style called
   patchanka, which is characterized by a mixture of traditional music,
   punk, reggae, rock and political lyrics. Modena City Ramblers are one
   of the more popular bands known for their mix of Irish, Italian, punk,
   reggae and many other forms of music .

   Italy has also become a home for a number of Mediterranean fusion
   projects. These include Al Darawish, a multicultural band based in
   Sicily and led by Palestinian Nabil Ben Salaméh. The Luigi Cinque
   Tarantula Hypertext Orchestra is another example, as is the TaraGnawa
   project by Phaleg and Nour Eddine. The Neapolitan popular singer,
   Massimo Ranieri has also released a CD, Oggi o dimane, of traditional
   canzone Napoletana with North African rhythms and instruments.

Industry

   Inside a music superstore.
   Enlarge
   Inside a music superstore.

   A recent economics report says that the music industry in Italy made
   2.3 billion € in 2004. That sum refers to the sale of CDs, music
   electronics, musical instruments, and ticket sales for live
   performances; it represents a 4.35% growth over 2004. The actual sale
   of music albums has decreased slightly, but there has been a
   compensatory increase in paid-for digitally downloaded music from
   industry-approved sites. By way of comparison, the Italian recording
   industry ranks eighth in the world; Italians own 0.7 music albums per
   capita as opposed to the USA, in first-place with 2.7. The report cites
   a 20% increase in 2004 over 2003 in paid royalties for on-air as well
   as live music.

   Nationwide, there are three state-run and three private TV networks.
   All provide live music at least some of the time, thus giving work to
   musicians, singers, and dancers. Many large cities in Italy have local
   TV stations, as well, which may provide live folk or dialect music
   often of interest only to the immediate area. Book and CD superstores
   have entered the Italian market over the last decade. The largest of
   these chains is Feltrinelli, originally a publishing house in the
   1950s. In 2001, it geared up to the level of Multimedia Store and now
   sells massive quantities of recorded music. There are, as of 2006, 14
   such mega-stores in Italy, with more planned. FNAC is another large
   chain, originally French. It has six large outlets in Italy. These
   stores also serve as venues for music performance, hosting several
   concerts a week.

Venues, festivals and holidays

   An Italian army Military band
   Enlarge
   An Italian army Military band
   The annual Festival of Ravello is a popular music venue in Italy. Here,
   an orchestra starts to set up on a stage overlooking the Amalfi coast.
   Enlarge
   The annual Festival of Ravello is a popular music venue in Italy. Here,
   an orchestra starts to set up on a stage overlooking the Amalfi coast.

   Venues for music in Italy include concerts at the many music
   conservatories, symphony halls and opera houses. Italy also has many
   well-known international music festivals each year, including the
   Festival of Spoleto and the Wagner Festival in Ravello. Some festivals
   offer venues to younger composers in classical music by producing and
   staging winning entries in competitions. The winner, for example, of
   the "Orpheus" International Competition for New Opera and Chamber
   music—besides winning considerable prize money—gets to see his or her
   musical work performed at The Spoleto Festival. There are also dozens
   of privately sponsored master classes in music each year that put on
   concerts for the public. Italy is also a common destination for
   well-known orchestras from abroad; at almost any given time during the
   busiest season, at least one major orchestra from elsewhere in Europe
   or North America is playing a concert in Italy. Additionally, public
   music may be heard at dozens of pop and rock concerts throughout the
   year. Open-air opera may even be heard, for example, at the ancient
   Roman amphitheater, the Arena of Verona. Military bands, too, are
   popular in Italy. At a national level, one of the best-known of these
   is the concert band of the Guardia di Finanza (Italian Customs/Border
   Police); it performs many times a year.

   Many theaters also routinely stage not just Italian translations of
   American musicals, but true Italian musical comedy, which are called by
   the English term musical. In Italian, that term describes a kind of
   musical drama not native to Italy, a form that employs the American
   idiom of jazz-pop-and rock-based music and rhythms to move a story
   along in a combination of songs and dialogue.

   Music in religious rituals, especially Roman Catholic, manifests itself
   in a number of ways. Parish bands, for example, are quite common
   throughout Italy. They may be as small as four or five members to as
   many as 20 or 30. They commonly perform at religious festivals specific
   to a particular town, usually in honour of the town's patron saint. The
   historic orchestral/choral masterpieces performed in church by
   professionals are well-known; these include such works as the Stabat
   Mater by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi and Verdi's Requiem. The Second
   Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965 revolutionized music in the Roman
   Catholic church, leading to an increase in the number of amateur choirs
   that perform regularly for services; the Council also encouraged the
   congregational singing of hymns, and a vast repertoire of new hymns has
   been composed in the last 40 years.

   There is not a great deal of native Italian Christmas music. The most
   popular Italian Christmas carol is " Tu scendi dalle stelle", the
   modern Italian words to which were written by Pope Pius IX in 1870. The
   melody is a major-key version of an older, minor-key Neapolitan carol
   "Quanno Nascette Ninno". Other than that, Italians largely sing
   translations of carols that come from the German and English tradition
   (" Silent Night", for example). There is no native Italian secular
   Christmas music, which accounts for the popularity of Italian-language
   versions of " Jingle Bells" and " White Christmas".

   The Festival of Italian Song (also known as the Sanremo Music Festival)
   is an important venue for popular music in Italy. It has been held
   annually since 1951 and is currently staged at the Teatro Ariston in
   Sanremo. It runs for one week in February, and gives veteran and new
   performers a chance to present new songs. Winning the contest has often
   been a springboard to industry success. The festival is televised
   nationally for three hours a night, is hosted by the best-known Italian
   TV personalities, and has been a vehicle for such performers as
   Domenico Modugno, perhaps the best-known Italian pop singer of the last
   50 years.

   Television variety shows are the widest venue for popular music. They
   change often, but Buona Domenica, Domenica In, and I raccomandati are
   popular. The longest running musical broadcast in Italy is La Corrida,
   a three-hour weekly program of amateurs and would-be musicians. It
   started on the radio in 1968 and moved to TV in 1988. The studio
   audience bring cow-bells and sirens and are encouraged to show
   good-natured disapproval. The city with the highest number of rock
   concerts (of national and international artists) is Milan, with a
   number close to the other European music capitals, as Paris, London and
   Berlin. In the Metro Area of Milan there were more than 700 concerts
   each year.

Education

   Within the courtyard of the Naples Music Conservatory
   Enlarge
   Within the courtyard of the Naples Music Conservatory

   There are many institutes of higher music education in Italy. About 75
   music conservatories provide advanced training for future professional
   musicians. There are also dozens of private music schools and workshops
   for instrument building and repair. Private teaching is also quite
   frequent in Italy. Elementary and high school students can expect to
   have one or two weekly hours of music teaching, generally in choral
   singing and basic music theory, though extracurricular opportunities
   are rare. Though most Italian universities have classes in related
   subjects such as music history, there is nothing related to
   performance. Italy has a specialized system of high schools; students
   attend, as they choose, a high school for humanities, science, foreign
   languages, or art—but not music. Italy does have ambitious, recent
   programs to expose children to more music. Furthermore with the recent
   education reform a specific Liceo musicale e coreutico (2nd level
   secondary school, ages 14-15 to 18-19) is explicitly indicated by the
   law decrees. Yet this kind of school has not been set up and is not
   effectively operational. The state-run television network has started a
   program to use modern satellite technology to broadcast choral music
   into public schools.

Scholarship

   Scholarship in the field of collecting, preserving and cataloguing all
   varieties of music is vast. In Italy, as elsewhere, these tasks are
   spread over a number of agencies and organizations. Most large music
   conservatories maintain departments that oversee the research connected
   with their own collections. Such research is coordinated on a national
   and international scale via the internet. One prominent institution in
   Italy is IBIMUS, the Istituto di Bibliografia Musicale in Rome. It
   works with other agencies on an international scale through RISM, the
   Répertoire International des Sources Musicales, an inventory and index
   of source material. Also, the Discoteca di Stato (National Archives of
   Recordings) in Rome, founded in 1928, holds the largest public
   collection of recorded music in Italy with some 230,000 examples of
   classical music, folk music, jazz, and rock, recorded on everything
   from antique wax cylinders to modern electronic media.

   The scholarly study of traditional Italian music began in about 1850,
   with a group of early philological ethnographers who studied the impact
   of music on a pan-Italian national identity. A unified Italian identity
   only just started to develop after the political integration of the
   peninsula in 1860. The focus at that time was on the lyrical and
   literary value of music, rather than the instrumentation; this focus
   remained until the early 1960s. Two folkloric journals helped to
   encourage the burgeoning field of study, the Rivista Italiana delle
   Tradizioni Popolari and Lares, founded in 1894 and 1912, respectively.
   The earliest major musical studies were on the Sardinian launeddas in
   1913-1914 by Mario Giulio Fara; on Sicilian music, published in 1907
   and 1921 by Alberto Favara; and studies of the music of Emilia Romagna
   in 1941 by Francesco Balilla Pratella.

   The earliest recordings of Italian traditional music came in the 1920s,
   but they were rare until the establishment of the Centro Nazionale
   Studi di Musica Popolare at the National Academy of Santa Cecilia in
   Rome. The Centre sponsored numerous song collection trips across the
   peninsula, especially to southern and central Italy. Giorgio Nataletti
   was an instrumental figure in the Centre, and also made numerous
   recordings himself. The American scholar Alan Lomax and the Italian,
   Diego Carpitella, made an exhaustive survey of the peninsula in 1954.
   By the early 1960s, a roots revival encouraged more study, especially
   of northern musical cultures, which many scholars had previously
   assumed maintained little folk culture. The most prominent scholars of
   this era included Roberto Leydi, Ottavio Tiby and Leo Levi. During the
   1970s, Leydi and Carpitella were appointed to the first two chairs of
   ethnomusicology at universities, with Carpitella at the University of
   Rome and Leydi at the University of Bologna. In the 1980s, Italian
   scholars began focusing less on making recordings, and more on studying
   and synthesizing the information already collected. Others studied
   Italian music in the United States and Australia, and the folk musics
   of recent immigrants to Italy.
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