Folk After Empire E-Book

Maher Asaad Baker

• Herausgeber: tredition
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 204

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Folk After Empire is a journey into the hidden heartbeat of Italy, where music is not just heard, but lived. Long before nationhood, before cities and empires, the land itself sang: the jagged Alps whispered to shepherds, the Sicilian shores carried echoes of Africa, and mountain caves kept the voices of the dead alive. This book peels back the layers of Italy’s soundscape like an ancient palimpsest. It reveals how folk traditions absorbed the footsteps of invaders and travelers, Greeks, Arabs, Byzantines, and Normans, yet never lost their intimacy with the soil. In these pages, tarantella dances are more than lively steps; they are healing rituals. A simple lullaby might carry traces of a Greek hymn, a Roman lament, and an Arab improvisation, all unknowingly woven into one melody. From sacred chants that resisted empires to street performers who transformed piazzas into living newspapers, Folk After Empire tells the story of music as a means of survival, memory, and defiance. It shows how Italy’s fragmented geography shaped not one, but countless folk traditions, each tied to its own valley, village, and voice. This is not a nostalgic museum of lost songs. It is an invitation to listen deeply—to hear the silence between the notes, the echoes of forgotten gods, and the resilience of a people whose history was always sung rather than written. For lovers of music, history, and cultural memory, this book is a revelation: an unforgettable portrait of a land where the past still sings.

Leseprobe

Maher Asaad Baker

Folk After Empire

© 2025 Maher Asaad Baker

Verlagslabel: Maher Asaad Baker

Druck und Distribution im Auftrag des Autors:

tredition GmbH, Heinz-Beusen-Stieg 5, 22926 Ahrensburg, Deutschland

Das Werk, einschließlich seiner Teile, ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Für die Inhalte ist der Autor verantwortlich. Jede Verwertung ist ohne seine Zustimmung unzulässig. Die Publikation und Verbreitung erfolgen im Auftrag des Autors, zu erreichen unter: Maher Asaad Baker, Main 1, 28195 Osterholz-Scharmbeck, Germany.

Kontaktadresse nach EU-Produktsicherheitsverordnung: [email protected]

Contents

Introduction

The Foundations

Weaving Sonic Empires

The Unheard Renaissance

Songs Of the Unmaking

Fascism’s Folk War

The Great Archival Hunt

Songs Of the Earth

Sacred Noise

Disclaimer

About the Author

Introduction

Italy lives music even before it is heard. It still exists in the form of its territory, in the outline of its beaches, in the interrupted beats of mountains across valleys and leaving the people hanging between the ground and the heavens. To read its music is to listen to the landscape itself, since long before men set fingers to strings, or lifted voice in song or acclamation, the very ground itself prescribed tone, cadence, and silence. Italy is not one voice, is a thousand murmurs one above another. The jagged Alps overlooking the world of Central Europe, the sun-dried Sicilian countryside looking towards the African continent, had always been transitional, had always been pivotal, a bridge and at the same time a barrier and a point of collision and convergence and again breaking apart. This geography did not only determine the trade patterns and wars, but even the acoustics of life. Within the confines of mountain villages, the songs grew close, nasal, inwards like prayers, secrets. That was the country of the open plains, where the songs were long and wild as the wind that is blowing there, and where each song is heard over long distances of open land. at the sea, rhythms had the wave-beat, now smooth and seductive, now frenzied and volcanic.

That is why there can be no single folk tradition in Italy. it is a palimpsest, a text that has been written, and rewritten in a succession of invasions, migrations and lost rituals, over a millennium. Under the sunshine radiance of the tarantella or the grave litany of a monastery chant their looms something antique, buried, and perturbed. One layer is never destroyed by another, it just covers it up, which is faint enough to be heard by anyone who listens closely enough. Not only the most familiar music of Italian life but even political music is a reminder of what is elsewhere, of what has been learned by a guest or an immigrant or a neighbor across the water. Planting colonies on the southern shores, the Greeks introduced forms and scales which continue to lurk in the songs of Calabria and Campania. The Lombards and Franks, riding south out of central Europe, brought with them tonalities which were foreign to the Mediterranean ear, but which mingled with the home melodies and modified them forever. and then Arabs, who left there not only architecture, but microtones, ornaments, and rhythms still spirit-haunted in the lullabies and laments of the island.

To mention invasion only, however, is not sufficient. isolation furnished these influences with their weird power. A melody that a traveler brought could have become lost in a big city in the sounds of the mob. However, a melody might slip into a backwater village, nestling like a rock or a seed into the hills, and live their hundreds of years, learned first of all by the grandmother and then of the child who transplanted it through the years, distilled it gradually, made it native, familiar, proprietary. And so with every instrument: a flute brought over accidentally by some Greek could continue, in one vale, as it was, and, in another, become more unrecognizable. A drum of African descent might come to be a holy item in a country fest, the foreign originate being forgotten. The music of Italy is thick since it assimilated everything but never homogenized fully. It preserved its fragments alive.

When one listens to this tapestry, he does not hear a straight line of history but spirals. Northern folk songs are addressed to the stern beauty of Germanic territories but in the Italian gentleness that reveals the south. Sicilian laments have the burden of Byzantine liturgy on them, but they have the rhythms that sway to a North African heat. The independent Sardinia as some fossilized chunk of another era, retires polyphonic chants it would seem, prehistoric, still untouched by Rome itself. And even in the remotest corners of the land we hear the rumor of pre-Christian ceremonies, which under the plumes of Catholic festival still, in the primality of their rhythms, succeed in escaping effacement. The holiest of hymns, in the most far-flung village, may bear the shade of a pagan harvest-song, re-cycled, and now in the praise of saints, rather than of sun gods.

That is why Italy seems to be an acoustic memory of Europe in itself. At the time when other countries reduced their national folklore to a single symbol of national identity, Italy was divided both out of preference and necessity. Politically it was late to unify, and even when it did the people were more attached to the village, to their dialect, to their hill or island, than to the nation in general. That stubbornness is reflected in the music. It never attained pure nationality. It was purely regional, intensely local, even though bizarrely universal. What one shepherd says in Abruzzo may be unintelligible to a fisherman in Liguria, but both are beset with essence of a desire to survive, a closeness to the natural world.

This has been perhaps the reason why the outsiders have always romanticized Italian music and seldom comprehended it. All they hear is the superficiality the animated dances, the screaming singing, the noise at the festival, and they believe they have found a culture of merriment. However, there runs a dark depth of sadness under that luster. These lands were in difficult times to the people of the lands. Their songs are full of hunger, exile, burden of alien rulers. Even tarantella, the gayest, is quite of the mother of fear- Of fear of the tooth of the spider, of poison in the blood, of the death that stalks unseen. It was, not only to dance raving, but to heal, sweat out blood darkness. Polyphonic chants, in the mountains, were not simply beautiful talks, they were a means to talk over distances, to call spirits, to resound the very sound of the wind.

The folklore of Italy is therefore not ornamental. It is the survival. It is reminder. It is a form of preserving what the history attempted to take away. Even to a simple lullaby one may listen, and hear a mother gently remembering not only her own child but her own parents, her own woes, her own nearly insurmountable defeats against the passivity of eternity. The same happens with the instruments. Not at all an Italian invention was the zampogna, that rustic bagpipe, a Romanized version of the Greek aulos, as well as of still older shepherd pipes. But when it is played by a mountain musician it is as thoroughly Italian in character as writing on paper, after it gets into the rough but melancholy style of that folk.

Suppose a man should go walking down the Alps to Sicily and show a proper ear everywhere, he would not feel that he was transversing a nation, but that he was walking over a continent reduced one-third, transported, in a word, into a peninsula. In the north there would be yodel calls, and harmonies to remind you of Austria and Switzerland. and you would course amongst the hills of the middle land, whose voices are prolonged and liturgical as they echo the voice of the monks of Rome. More south, the beats start swinging, unbalanced, portending to Arab and Greek dances. And at last, on the islands time takes the most complete U-turn, and you are among those whose ears know things that are older than the Latin Language. And here, in spite of all the differences, there is something, always a something in the links, that goes through, a sort of whisper that says, this is yet Italy still one voice many-and-many.

The sheer quantity of influences that made this folk tapestry denser than any other in Europe is not the only thing about them as they also exist together instead of eliminating each other. Italy did not forget the past forever. The villages continued to prevail with their ancient ways even after the Renaissance transformed its cities into symbol of art and good taste. Even the humblest peasant in the nineteenth century sung melody which a Greek colonist might have known two millennium before. A shepherd may perform a rhythm part of an African drum and never realize where it has come from. Thus, the Italian folk music is history and memory loss. It is mindful yet mindless. It retains pieces without an explanation being required.

Thus, to begin by making the land of Italy an acoustic palimpsest is to be ready to set out on a journey that can be no straight line. It must move circuitously, as the sound of a bell coming down a valley, and winding through every stratum of time. Knowing it is not having a list, but experiencing the paradoxes that one cannot help to fall in love, or the exotic and domestic are one and the same, or that the divine and the profane can never be separated. Italy is not a museum of music, but a musical organism, and the soul of Italy cannot be found in the celebrated arias, the epic operas, but in the neglected backwaters where a voice is still harkening to the land.

When one listens more emphatically, it becomes more evident that Italian folk music is not a matter of performance, but of utility. It was never made to be observed at a distance but to connect people together in actual life occasions. Work songs also came up with the tune of the work, this was not to entertain but to synchronize hands and tools in the fields. Laments were not wrote to an audience but they were written to the dead themselves in that they could hopefully hear the sound speak them beyond the veil. The marriage songs were not a simple ovation of marriage but a calling of blessings to guarantee fertility, safety, and peace. Music became the air through which the breather of the life lives and this is why today it has so much intensity within it. it is not decorative but necessary.

Not merely were instruments and melodies left by every stratum of the past; manners of feeling were left. The Roman Empire dispersed its disciplined chants, formal and processional, it enforced order on ritual. But in the fall of the empire the chants transformed into regional dialects of sound, re-created in the land. The south was an imprint of mysticism as the Byzantines left their drones matchless and their modal scales never die in mysticism, and sacred and secular came together. They came with their oud and their intricate rhythms, the Arabs, and they brought out in Sicily and Naples an undertone of a sensuality that never went away. Even the Norman whose origin were Northern European left some shadow of ballad-storytelling in the newer ways of the South. Nor did any of these things destroy its predecessor: they coexisted, overlapped, and paled and endured, until a good singer, a good season, came to bring it back to life.

The special thing about Italy is that these layers were local. Melodies formed by Greek settlers in Taranto may never travel to a village lying fifty kilometers away. Geography established acoustic boundaries that were more powerful than political boundaries. mountain ranges like walls locked off whole communities, and actual islands became little worlds of their own. Sardinia uttered a polyphony so particular that it is like a cue to pre-historic Europe, its eerie throat-sung harmonies rewriting rituals even older than Christianity. These chants were not kept by the islanders in acts of nostalgia, but necessity city they were an element in religious festivals, in seasonal changes, of a world that believed in power in sound. By contrast, on mainland near to the trade routes of Venice or Genoa, recycled foreign scales relatively quickly, leaning away on cosmopolitan tastes. The difference between those places is huge, yet they are equally Italian.

The result of this uneven preservation was a strange effect: some parts of this are the echo of the ancient Greece, some the echo of the medieval Europe, some the parts of the Arab world. To travel through Italy is to go through time itself. You would get the sound of a shepherd that plays a reed-pipe, just as described by Virgil, and in the south, you would have sounds resembling the drumming of Tunisia. And in one village people may go through some ritual dance which even to this day salutes a Roman goddess in the name of a Christian saint. In a third the villagers may assemble to chant a lament so primitive that it seems prehistoric. This mosaic does not accept being flattened down into one discourse.

The Italian folk music has emotional wholeness, however, despite its complexity. It has something like an element of passion in it that goes beyond the details of style or language. Happy or tragic, the music appears to be an expression of an internal or rather visceral relationship to the land and even to community. Even the sunniest songs are tinged with depression as if they know that life is so fragile. Even the sorrowful cries are beautiful as though even sorrow can be bought off through music. This contradiction is the Italian history: a place of so much beauty marked by so much conflict, a population made by strength as well as by conquest.

And these folk arts fed the greatest of those performances like a mole under a pergola root: for centuries, the outside world admired Italian music, its operas, its madrigals, its Renaissance masters, but it was what went on, down below. The operatic extravagance of Naples, the mellow polyphony of Venice, did not spring out of nothing. They ate of one cup of agricultural song, street song and rate. Writing to great stages, perhaps Verdi or Puccini were tortured by the music of his childhood, the chorus of peasants singing dialect, the beating of a tambourine in a dusty village square. The paganism that found its way into holidays and routes could not be hushed even by the church in its leader it could dominate the practice of music.

The most outstanding aspect of the acoustic history of Italy is probably this resilience of popular memory. There were other countries that experienced the time when industrial, urbanization or centralized culture destroyed some local traditions. Italy fought back due to the fact that it did not entirely leave its villages. Cities were becoming more modern day by day but even so, the countryside played an important role in identity. Thus, ethnomusicologists came to realize in the 20th century, medieval ballads were still to be heard in the countryside of Tuscany, there was still polyphonic shepherd singing in Calabria, there was still tarantella rites, not performed as spectacles to the tourists, but as actual healing ceremonies. It was like time rolled up in time, preserving the pieces of each time.

It would be true to say that Italian folk music is not only talking about the past but what it represents is more of a time view where time is not a straight line; rather it is a circle. Harvest, saint-praising, solstices, equinoxes festivals are reminders of that people are a part of the universal rhythm of nature. Frankly, these cycles cannot be possible without the songs. Just as they are songs that are not sung because somebody determines to sing but because the season requires it, because the land insists on them. To this date, the perceptions associated with music are still somewhat ritual-focused in some obscure locations. A chant is also not just a song, it is a process of providing good harvests, honoring the dead, healing the sick.

The result of this thorough entangling of geography, history and feeling is what has made Italy such a unique palimpsest. European countries, of course, possess quite rich folk traditions, but the Italian one gains its density due to the location of the country at the crossroads of so many worlds. It never became so secluded that it could evolve a single common tradition, and it never became adequately blanketed by external forces that it lost itself. It walked a border line between blankness offenses; sapping and preserving as much as heed, snatching what outside and making its own, until it seemed naturally wasteful, like a memory of a walked time, spent abuse less.

The conception of purity must, however, be forgotten to really hear Italy. There is nothing like pure Italian folk music or one origin. What there is a progression of conversations of land and visitor, old gods and new saints, voices of the living and echoes of the dead. It is a music that exists as a result of crash and make up, of repeated layering of one sound over the other. And it is as a palimpsest, so that when you run out one of the layers you discover another already fading, yet present waits to be sung once more.

This then is how the journey starts with the awareness of one note in Italy having more than one history. A mere lullaby may combine for breathless moments the ghost of a Greek colony, a Roman hymn, a Byzantine prayer, and an Arab improvise all together, condensed into a melody which a mother sings, who is herself unconscious of all these things, but who, nevertheless, feels them in her blood. An event in rural dance may appear to be festive and even a dance in a distant village has traces of the antique exorcism movement and rises of the harvests. And silence, here also, is multi-faceted; a break in a song can seem like thousands of years of silence.

In saying that Italy is an acoustic palimpsest we do not mean to romanticize Italy but to acknowledge how it retains intricacy without obliteration. It serves as a reminder that music, just like the memory, does not fade away, it changes, it conceals, it waits. And in Italy, more than in any other part of Europe, the past never ceases to sing, not as a phantasm, but as a living presence, which is to be traced into every theme.

This is just a point of arrival. Farther is to remove one layer after another and go exploring in the mountains and the islands, and hear the songs that made people well and the cries that sang their prayers, and the screams that wept. It is to learn how a seaside land could grow into a land of sound unto itself where one hill, one valley, speaks in one voice but is part of the same chorus. And it is with that chorus that the genuine spirit of the Italian folklore lies, not on Broadway nor in the concerts, but in the rude echoes of the very soil.

The Foundations

Sound was there before there were nations; before the word Italy or Rome had any meaning the land was already sounding. Even further back than writing recorded acts of kings, or verses sculptured on poets, there was music, the mother-tongue of recollection. It was created of bones, of breath, out of grooves of reeds, stretched on animal hides. It is archaeology which shows us that those first Italians--if, indeed, they were Italians at all--heard with us, the ways of the wind in the mountain passes, the murmur of the sea against the rocks, the rustle of woods. They did not just sit down and listen. The attempt was made to reply.

We have found in the caverns of Liguria, and of the middle Apennines, the debris of bone flutes resting with the skeletons of the players. Appreciably small, demure, when applied to the lips of a modern musician they utter a sound of which we cannot know. It is both perfect and flawed equally, a tottering trill that is at once older than language. These were not the instruments in the later sense of delicacy: they were rather voices, an extension of the breath tending to obscure the distinction between animal and human. Others were inlaid with the bones of birds which they preferred, because of their lightness and spontaneity. These were fashioned of the long bones of deer, deeper toned and thicker. It was possible that to play one was to call up the ghost of the animal which it had once been, and to release its life-spirits into the air.

Good archaeology does not only display the objects, good archaeology also shows how to hear. These Neolithic were the people who lived in an un-urbanized Italy where nature was too much in all aspects. Their flutes possibly were an instrument of a ritual practiced in the caves the echo of which made a single tone become a chorus of the dead. Picture a shaman in a dark place blowing through a hollowed bone, and the echo bouncing around in the cave such that it appears that more people are talking when there was but one. These encounters must have been like stepping into the world of divinity in that music was not something you danced to but through communicating with the unseen.

No one can deny that as the millenniums went by, the peninsula changed the owners but the urge to create sound of raw materials did not diminish. During Bronze Age, it achieved an organization. Small bells of bronze and rattles have been found by archaeologists; these objects were modest enough but were endowed with a mighty symbolic value. They had acute, metallic, piercing tones, useful to procession, or to keeping time in group labor, or to sending away evil spirits. These bells can be found in certain death sites next to the dead and they seem to travel with them after death. Bronze was the new voice of the earth, solid, and more welded than a bone and its echo promised the permanence.

But though metallurgy was advancing, the ancient materials also continued to be used. Bone and bronze the Etruscans, the unknown race whose towns studded central Italy till they were swept away by Rome, perfected; and fused bone with bronze, to create the instruments of unusual beauty and power. Their most notable inventions were the lituus, a long, curved horn that would give a haunting tone that would echo miles. It was simply no musical instrument, but an instrument of power, in ceremonies which united the fabric of the living to that of the gods. In issuing the lituus a call to attention was not made, but a claim to space was carved in air, a declaration was made that some sacred thing was transpiring. To have heard it, in an Etruscan necropolis, among tombs covered with paintings of dancing figures, would have been to have experienced the transition between life and death erased, and transposed into sound.

The lituus bore a company of sober electric sound, that reaches the heart as well as to the ear, the sort of resonance all stuck in the middle of the chest. Now, when they play replicas, it produces a creepy feeling of familiarity. The tones bear some resemblance even to later Roman ceremony horns, and to Alpine horns such as the Swiss alphorn, indicating a consistency of acoustic imagination over cultures. But at Etruria the lituus took up the living of its own. It was associated with augury, with the interpretation of the skies, and thus its tone was an indication that music was not outside the realm of divination. It was a warning to men as perceptibly as to gods.