Street Music and NarrativeTraditions

Street Music and NarrativeTraditions
edited by Sergio Bonanzinga, Luisa Del Giudice, Thomas A. McKean
Edizioni Museo Pasqualino, Palermo 2019
Suoni&Culture n.5
ISBN 978-88-97035-54-1

 

Street Music and Narrative Traditions calls on international folksong and music scholars to consider the phenomenon of publically- performed music traditions – time-honored as well as emergent – in their widest geographic contexts. The essays span ancient to contemporary forms: from the blind urban players of Sicily to the performative contours accompanying Scandinavian cod fisheries, from the musical art of Scots minstrelsy to the Hip-Hop stylings of a young Aberdonian rapper, from the music of street festivals such as the Gigli of Nola, and Carnival, or the individual virtuosi of the genre, such as Sor Capanna of nineteenth-century Rome, to present-day Chicano music in a Salt Lake City farmer’s market. The twenty contributions on sung narrative traditions in street contexts are geographically diverse and penned by some of the leading folksong and ethnomusicological scholars writing today. The volume also considers the Italy-Italian Diaspora nexus of musical activity and advocacy, documenting the historic repatriation of the Alan Lomax multimedia recordings, led by Anna Lomax Wood of the Association of Cultural Equity in New York, to an assembly of Sicilian cultural experts at Palermo’s Museo Pasqualino in 2016.

 

Sergio Bonanzinga, holds a doctorate in Ethno-anthropology and is full Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Palermo. He has closely studied the functional and symbolic values involved in the expressive performance of oral tradition (music, dance, narratives, theatre) with reference to field research in Sicily, Greece, and Tunisia.

Luisa Del Giudice, Ph.D., is an Independent Scholar and has been a university academic (UCLA, Addis Abeba University), a public-sector educator (Founder-Director of the Italian Oral History Institute) and a community activist. She has published and lectured widely and is internationally known for her work on Italian diaspora and Italian folklife, ethnology, and oral history.

Thomas A. McKean, is a folklorist specialising in Scots and Gaelic song, custom and belief, and the role of skills and tradition in building community resilience. He is interested in creativity, place, and the relationship of traditional practices to the individual. He is Director of the Elphinstone Institute for Ethnology, Folklore, and Ethnomusicology at the University of Aberdeen, and founded the North East Folklore Archive at Mintlaw, Aberdeenshire.

 

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RECENSIONI 

La Ricerca Folklorica 75 _ Musica di strada, di Katia Ballacchino