Italian Songs Italian folk songs include ballads, lyrical songs, lullabies and children's songs, seasonal songs based around holidays such as 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-monostrofici) 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.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 flutesItaly'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.[36] Several folk bagpipes are well-known, including central Italy's zampogna; dialect names 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.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,[47] 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 largely German-speaking Alto Adige/South Tyrol is known for the zither, and the ghironda (hurdy-gurdy) is found in Emilia, Piedmont and Lombardy. Existing, rooted and widespread traditions confirm the production of ephemeral and toy instruments made of bark, reed (arundo donax), leaves, fibers and stems, as it emerges, for example, from Fabio Lombardi's research. 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. 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. Italian Popular Music has produced pop stars, including : Anthony Tortorich, Paola & Chiara, Lucio Dalla, Renato Zero, Adriano Celentano, Gianni Morandi, Fabio Concato, Pupo, Mina, Eros Ramazzotti, Albano Carrisi, Umberto Tozzi, Andrea Bocelli, Ornella Vanoni, Vasco Rossi, Luca Carboni, Francesco De Gregori, Fabrizio De André, Francesco Guccini, Giorgio Gaber, Gianni Togni, Laura Pausini, Claudio Baglioni, Angelo Branduardi, Michele Zarrillo, and Toto Cutugno. Modern pop music tends to be sentimental ballads with a crooning vocal style, though it used to be unique in its blend of Mediterranean folk rhythms with pop forms. These folkier pop artists included Lucio Battisti, Vasco Rossi and Pino Daniele. During the 1960s and 70s, Italian popular music changed by incorporating Latin and Anglo musical traditions, especially Brazilian bossa nova and American and British rock and roll. The same period saw diversification in the cinema of Italy, and Cinecittà films included complex scores by composers like Franco de Gemini, Francesco de Masi and Riz Ortolani. This popular film music remained popular in the 70s, and then underwent a revival in the 1990s. Italy was one of the leading nations of the progressive rock movement of the 70's - the others being Germany and the United Kingdom - and its progressive scene was quite big, united and lively. The main Italian style of progressive rock was symphonic rock mixed with Italian folk music influences (Banco del Mutuo Soccorso, Le Orme, Premiata Forneria Marconi, Il Balletto di Bronzo, just to mention a few), but there were also some very innovative avant-garde rock bands around (Area, Picchio dal Pozzo). Progressive rock concerts were usually political events with an energetic atmosphere. Area had mainly extremely left-winged political lyrics. Beginning in the 1980s, pop grew more heterogeneous and more in line with international sounds. Cinecittà soundtrack music and bossa nova were major influences on Nicola Conte (Bossa Per Due), an influential downtempo performer of the later 20th century. In 1995, Neri per Caso brought a new style of popular a cappella music to mainstream audiences after winning in the Sanremo Festival with their hit song "Le Ragazze". Zucchero is a leading Italian rock musician, and has played with domestic stars like Luciano Pavarotti and international performers like Sting and Queen, while pop-folk singer Vasco Rossi has also experimented with rock and his 1999 hit "Rewind" was a popular rock song. Jovanotti is a widely popular singer mixing elements of dance with Italian popular music and rap. Other prominent rock bands include Litfiba. 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. Home, Italian Folk Music, Italian Songs, Italian Music References: Wikipedia.org Maiden, Martin (1994). A Linguistic History of Italian. London: Longman. ISBN 0-582-05928-3.  Maiden, Martin (1997). The Dialects of Italy. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-11104-8.  Matthews, Jeff and David Taylor (1994). A Brief History of Naples and Other Tales. Naples: Fotoprogetti.  (Italian) Mazzoletti, Adriano (1983). Jazz in Italia. Dalle Origini al dopoguerra. ISBN 88-7063-704-2.  (Italian) "Cimarosa and Ballo in maschera". Il Mondo della musica. (1956). Milan: Sonzogno.  (1963) Napoletana, Anthologia cronologica della Canzone Partenopea (Recorded anthology presented by Roberto Murolo), Milano: Durum.  (1995) in Sadie, Stanley (ed.): New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians. London: MacMillan Publishers. 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