A conference with words and pictures on Italian folk singing (…and more!)
curated by Ambra D’Amico and Marina Luzzoli
Voices that make themselves a space, wide or narrow, deserted or chaotic, contemplative or suffering: always folk song, in its unfolding, describes a space, and a space is always a complex landscape, which can also be observed, understood, interpreted through the voices that traverse it. The lecture recounts Italian folk singing from its origins to the present through different points of view: ethnomusicological, anthropological, and mythical/magical, noting how the different quality of songs is profoundly shaped by the symbolic dimension of the landscape in which they are formed.
Interwoven around the studies of Alan Lomax, Ernesto De Martino, Roberto De Simone and others are original field recordings of songs from northern to southern Italy and photographic images, which create a non-didactic relationship with the audio materials. There will be no shortage of references to the present. But the conference also tells of bizarre interweavings between the voices of the world: pygmies and yodelers, Tibetan monks and Sardinian shepherds, Great Britain and China, India and Spain… proving that peoples’ cultures transmigrate and have always created grafts, transforming and recreating modes and styles over time with wholly original results.
