THE TRADITIONAL ITALIAN AND "MARCHIGIANA" MUSIC

Italian version

The science that studies the musical traditions transmitted orally, called folk music and the music of the “primitive” population, is called ethnomusicology. This doesn’t only study the sounds, but also the ways to produce them. Ethnomusicology has contributed also to clarify some problem regarding the origins of the music: it’s impossible that a complex phenomenon like music has only one root and that the polyphony was born exclusively in Europe. Ethnomusicology asked itself if there existed “universal characters” of making music, general music elements used by all the human race. The answer is that there are universal ways of making music used by numerous ethnic groups or cultures. Ethnomusicology was born at the end of the ninth century in Germany; in Italy it started somewhat later , between 1930 and 1940. The patrimony of Italian folk music, very rich and diverse from region to region , until now has always been out to one side, because it was of the more poor social classes(farmers and laborers), snobbishly thought “inferior” and not worth of consideration. The traditional music of our region, Le Marches, was studied and evaluated during the thirties, thanks to musicians like Adriano Ariani, that was the first to try and bring together all the songs of this region, by then participating in the national coral and Italian peoples dance show, and Giulio Fara, teacher at the “G. Rossini” conservatory in Pesaro, pubbliced some studies on the regions ethnophony. 1939 was the annus mirablis for the musical literature of our region, because many artists went looking for these songs, writing new magazines a publishing studies and collections. Between these there were Leopanto De Angelis, Giovanni Ginobli, Orieste Liviabella, Mariano Silvestri, Ottorino Svampi. In those years there was a great disclosure of folklore music because of the formation of competitions for poetry and the regions songs and also the foundation of coral folklore groups like that of Apiro, Castelraimondo and Sarnano, that even today exist. After the second world war ENAL was an important entity of Macerata that revived the folklore musical traditions. Even though today the Marchegian folklore music is more popular than before and there are numerous musical manifestations dedicated to it, the specialized studies and the musical publications on the subject are still scarce and old.