Barwick, Linda. (2012). Italian Traditional Music in Adelaide in the 1970s and 1980s. In L. Barwick & M. Sorce Keller (Eds.), Italy in Australia's Musical Landscape (pp. 65–82). Melbourne: Lyrebird Press. This is a postprint version (author’s submitted manuscript), with the page numbers adjusted to match the published version. FOUR Italian Traditional Music in Adelaide in the 1970s and 1980s Linda Barwick To begin, I’d like to raise a few issues that I hope will be clarified by this paper.1 They relate to the general theme under which this paper was requested for the Second National Folklore Conference in Sydney in October 1986: “multicultural influences upon the Australian folk heritage”. The questions I want to raise are these: • In what sense it is useful to talk about “the Australian folk heritage” in the singular? • In what avenues might any “multicultural” influences operate? • How would it be possible to identify such influences after the event? In the interests of decentring the debate a little, I’d like to turn the theme around and consider instead the Australian influence on Italian traditional culture in Adelaide. But in order to do that, we need to ask: what is Italian traditional culture? Italy has a number of historical and geographical features that make its traditional popular culture extremely diverse. Political unification did not occur until 1861, and the national language remained largely literary and bureaucratic in use until the twentieth century.2 Because of this relatively recent political and linguistic unification of the country, regional cultures characterised by diverse dialects3 and rich oral traditions thrived until quite recently, when the impact of mass media began increasingly to overwhelm the underlying cultural diversity. Some aspects of these traditions have survived more strongly in Australia than 1 This is an updated version of an article originally published in Australian Folklore 1, which is now hard to find. It is reprinted here by request of various scholars, and with permission of the original editor, Graham Seal (Curtin University). Linda Barwick, “Italian Traditional Music in Adelaide”, Australian Folklore 1 (1987): 44–67, http://hdl.handle.net/2123/7711. I have edited the title to include the time period of my closest engagement with Italian music in Adelaide, 1969–1987, and added commentary and additional references in the footnotes. 2 Bruno Migliorini, Storia della lingua italiana, Biblioteca di grandi saggi, 5th ed. (Firenze: Sansoni, 1978). 3 Giacomo Devoto and Gabriella Giacomelli, I dialetti delle regioni d’Italia (Firenze: Sansoni, 1972). 65 in Italy because of lack of competition from the national language, while others have died out due to changes in social structures in Australia.4 Before going on to discuss the Australian situation, it will be helpful to illustrate the diversity of regional cultures by considering some examples of traditional musical styles.5 In the south of Italy there has been extensive contact with Greek and Arab traders and settlers over many centuries, and this can be heard in the Islamic features of their traditional music, as in the text of a cartdriver’s song, “canzune”, recorded by Elsa Guggino at Capaci, Palermo (Sicily), in 1964: Maiden you came to me in my sleep three sweet words and you went away and when I woke in the morning and felt that you were at my side I turn towards you and see no-one; cry, my wife, for your lost husband.6 4 Camilla Bettoni, “L’italiano in Australia: trasformazioni di una lingua o trasferimenti linguistici?”, in L’Australia, gli australiani e la migrazione italiana, ed. Gianfranco Cresciani (Milano: Franco Angeli, 1984); Camilla Bettoni and John Gibbons, “Linguistic Purism and Language Shift: A Guise-Voice Study of the Italian Community in Sydney”, International Journal of the Sociology of Language 72 (1988): 15–36; Linda Barwick, “Australia: Music of Immigrants: Italians”, in Encyclopedia of World Music (Oceania Volume), ed. Adrienne Kaeppler and J. Wainwright Love (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998) 79–82. 5 Full versions of the song texts quoted here are available on various published recordings with textual transcriptions in accompanying booklets, or in many cases with musical transcriptions in the principal reference for Italian traditional musical styles, Roberto Leydi, I canti popolari italiani: 120 testi e musiche (Milano: Mondadori, 1973). Another illustrated summary, in English, of the diversity of Italian traditional music can be found in Marcello Sorce Keller, “Reflections of Continental and Mediterranean Tradition in Italian Folk Music”, in Music Cultures in Contact: Convergences and Collisions, ed. Margaret Kartomi and Steven Blum (Sydney: Currency Press, 1994) 40–47. Although the examples are mentioned here primarily for their musical characteristics, I hope that something of the flavour of their subject matter and poetic structures are conveyed by the English translations. The original texts, in various dialects, and often a translation into standard Italian, are included in the cited sources, but for reasons of copyright, only English translations of the song texts are reproduced here (unless otherwise indicated, all English translations are my own). 6 Recording published in Roberto Leydi, Italia, volume 3: il canto lirico e satirico, la polivocalità (Milano: Vedette-Albatros, VPA8126, 1971), 12-inch 33rpm disc, with notes. Text and music in Leydi, I canti popolari italiani 187–89. 66 Along the Adriatic coast, there are vocal styles that show affinities with those from Balkan countries. One such style is called in Umbria and Le Marche canto a vatoccu “bell-clapper song”, in which two voices move more or less in contrary motion, finishing an octave apart. Related styles are found in Romagna in Italian-dialect speaking areas of Dalmatia (Croatia). An Umbrian example of this style is a diaphonic canto a vatoccu recorded by L. Gennero at Pretola, Perugia (Umbria), in 1969. With you my sweet I have never sung before and for the first time I greet you. We have arrived at the very top my love, if you love me tell me first. My love, don’t sing me so many verses I am still young and can’t remember them all. Let this lovely couple keep singing they remind me of two frogs. If the lady of the house doesn’t bring us wine tomorrow we’ll go somewhere else. Sing, all you over there, because we are singing if you don’t we’ll make fun of you.7 Because the north of the country was traversed by major trade and pilgrimage routes, there was considerable interaction in this area with mainland European traditions, a factor reflected in dialect as well as in traditional culture. In the north of Italy, there is a varied repertoire that includes many of the pan-European ballads as well as other ballads that are unique to Italy. Choral performance style predominates. An Italian version of Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight (Child 4), “El fiol del signor conte”, performed in Alpine choral style by the “Gruppo di Santa Croce”, was recorded by Roberto Leydi and Alberto Fumagalli at Santa Croce di San Pellegrino, Bergamo (Lombardia), in 1966. The son of the count wanted to take a wife he wanted to marry the Englishwoman, the daughter of a knight. In the evening he proposed and in the night he married her and early in the morning he set off for France. He covered thirty miles and the Englishwoman never spoke he covered thirty more and she begins to sigh. Why do you sigh Englishwoman whyever do you sigh? I sigh for my mother for I’ll never see her again. 7 Recording published in Leydi, Italia, volume 3; text and music in Leydi, I canti popolari italiani 199–200. 67 If you sigh for that there’s no harm in it but if you sigh for anything else the knife is ready. I pray you sir count to lend me your sword I want to cut a branch to shade my horse. When she had his sword she plunged it into his heart and then mounted her horse and returned home.8 In many parts of the North, the popular tradition has seen the development of Alpine choirs that compete in festivals rather like the Welsh eisteddfod. In Genova, in the north-east, teams were formed in taverns to compete in the local style of “trallallero” singing, an example of which, “Ea m’ou dixeiva unna votta me nonna”, was recorded in a Genoa tavern by Edward Neill in 1968, performed in a simplified form by three male singers: Puexellu, Geppe and Bacellà. My grandmother once told me while she was lighting the fire if you want to find a wife here make sure she doesn’t speak Latin. Make sure she doesn’t have a man’s voice or eyebrows joined together or two points on her nose and make sure she hasn’t lost her mind. Make sure she’s not bowed down with age and that she doesn’t bind her breasts.9 The existence of related vocal styles in other parts of the country including Tuscany and Sardinia, and outside Italy in Georgia and Brittany, has led some musicologists to suggest that these styles may be remnants of an archaic polyvocal singing practice that predated the development of diatonic harmony in art music .10 8 The recording is published in Alberto Fumagalli and Roberto Leydi, Montanari di Val Brembana. Il gruppo di Santa Croce, 12-inch 33rpm disc, with notes (Milano: Vedette Albatros, VPA 8428 RL, 1978). Text and music in Leydi, I canti popolari italiani 262–64. 9 The recording is published in Edward Neill, Canti popolari di Liguria vol. 2: La polivocalità valligiana, il trallalero, 12-inch 33rpm disc, with notes (Milano: Vedette- Albatros, VPA 8313, 1976).