Music & musicians in nineteenth-century Italy
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Music & musicians in nineteenth-century Italy
Batsford, 1991
Available at 4 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Bibliography: p. 153-156
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This book presents a grassroots view of the daily musical life of the Italian people throughout the 19th century. The author demonstrates that Italians of all walks of life, from Sicilian fisherfolk to Venetian aristocrats, shared a common and eclectic musical tradition that ranged from the rustic shepherd's pipe tunes to the greatest opera arias. This book deals with such questions as: how did ordinary people learn such music, how were musicians trained and organized, how true is it that the Italians were wholly taken up with opera, a supposedly popular and nationalistic art? Some of the conclusions of this book are that folk music in the period remained fragmented, with little notice taken of it by the educated, but that art music was unified even when the country was split up into small states. Unity and continuity were ensured, first by a strongly traditional musical profession, based on family and apprenticeship and on craft methods of work, and secondly by musicians' ceaseless travels along a circuit that took in not only many Italian towns, but also many European and American towns under Italian influence.
This traditional world was severely shaken by the political and economic changes of mid-19th century. With exceptions like semi-commercial Neopolitan song, Italian music became more European and less distinctively Italian.
by "Nielsen BookData"