ITALIAN FOLKLORE: GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

Italian version

The traditional songs of a nation are a mirror of its soul. Every population has its own way of singing, its rhythms and its instruments. The differences between the music of one population and another has much to teach us about their mentality, whilst the similarities tell us that they are culturally close. This also goes for the Italian folklore music: every Italian region conserves unique musical traditions, most of the time very different from the others. The fact has to remain in mind that Italian folklore music, nowadays, is nearly lost, because it is extremely hard to maintain in existence , especially with the new generations, the oral tradition on which the traditional songs are based on. Once, in-fact, people sung together whilst working in the fields and reuniting at night at parties. This way everyone learnt the same songs directly from their parents and the traditional melodies were passed down throughout time. The script could be modified by the collectivity utilizing or variating melodies. Even the traditional dances are passed down throughout the generations: the young learn movements and steps by the older. In the traditional Italian dances you hold hand in big circles. This way of dancing and making music together helped people to socialize, not like what happens in discos, where everyone tends to move by themselves, not looking for dialogue but just an immediate way to be together. A last consideration goes to the language used in the traditional music, the dialect. Every Italian region has it’s own dialect, and every country knows, inside the region, different variants of the roots: today the TV has safeguarded everything, music and language, but one time it was the dialect that peoples own territorial and cultural roots were expressed with pride. Even though dialect is not trusted, during the last few years, above everything, dialect in Italy has become vital: young Napoletans or young people from the more difficult places of Palermo, also as the journalist Eugenio Arcidiacono recounts, prefer dialect to sing about their emotions and express the desire for a better life, creating a new stile of music, half way between traditional and popular music, rock, hip hop and reggae. Giovanna Marini e Teresa De Sio are two Italian musicians that defend forcefully, from the top of their experience, the tradition of their music using dialect convinced that this, if it doesn’t become branded as a weapon to say “I am different to you”, can be an extraordinary bridge between two different generations, an instrument of exchange and enrichment.