While Daoism and Zen have long become glib buzzwords in the West, some such as R.H. Blyth and Alan Watts have given informed treatments, and some like Gary Snyder embody the ethos. In another post I alluded to Daoist wuwei while feeling sad that we can’t attribute the expression “Don’t just do something, stand there!” to Miles Davis.
Helen De Cruz contributes a thoughtful study from her background as performer and scholar of baroque lute and archlute. In studying a Zamboni prelude with her teacher, she elaborates on his advice “Be more Zen”:
to give shape to the extemporising, improvisatory nature of a prelude one should achieve more with less, giving an air of effortlessness to quick runs using difficult and sometimes awkward grips. The composition of a prelude embodies the aesthetic of studied effortlessness: at first, the notes sound spontaneous, searching, reaching, as if the player is merely tuning her instrument and improvising. But then, as the harmonies are given increasingly definite shape through blossoming arpeggios, the ear inclines to expect the next note with increasing confidence, and finally it all comes together: the earlier hesitant notes get their meaning, and the mind discerns the cohesive whole—it turns out not a single note was coincidental.
The term sprezzatura * (akin to “effortless grace” or “studied carelessness”) was introduced by the Italian Renaissance philosopher and diplomat Baldassare Castiglione in his etiquette manual Il Cortegiano (1528), written for the “small but chic” court at Urbino. Essential skills for the courtier included dancing, wrestling, fencing, horse riding, sports (such as tennis), and playing a musical instrument. The goal was “to steer away from affectation at all costs, […] to practice in everything a certain nonchalance [sprezzatura] that shall conceal design and show that what is done and said is done without effort and almost without thought”.
While the concealment of art can be affected, the aesthetic is still prized today—for instance, in men’s fashion,
where one aims for an appearance of effortless grace in what is in reality a carefully curated wardrobe. It is part of how athletes are judged. […] The aesthetician Tom Cochrane equates sprezzatura with the aesthetic of cool, which he describes as containing “elements of aesthetic power or sublimity, specifically an elevation above the passions and indifference to danger.” The graceful courtier is (seemingly) unconcerned with the effect he has on the audience. Ultimately, he is unconcerned with himself, he has lost all self-consciousness in the intrinsic beauty of his actions.
De Cruz notes that early discussions often focused on the practice of ritual. “To achieve true mastery, you must lose yourself in a skilled task that harmonises you with your physical and mental environment, and you will achieve mental quietude as a result.” Inevitably, I think of my great household Daoist mentors Li Qing and his son Li Manshan, both lowly peasants; this is also a question of charisma, not always a major theme of studies of Daoist ritual…
The early Daoist classic Zhuangzi evinces the art of the bell-stand maker, wheelwright—and butcher: as de Cruz explains a much-discussed passage,
Lord Wenhui watches in silent admiration as his butcher (who is also his cook) is cutting up an ox: “every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee—zip! zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Jingshou music [ancient ritual items, the former part of rain ceremonies].
“Ah, this is marvelous!” said Lord Wenhui. “Imagine skill reaching such heights!”
Cook Ding laid down his knife and replied, “What I care about is the Way [dao], which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now – now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes.”
“Perception and understanding have come to a stop, and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and follow things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.”
Zhuangzi also tells the story of a man swimming in fast-running currents, who tells Confucius:
I have no way [無道wu dao]. I began with what I was used to, grew up with my nature, and let things come to completion with fate. I go under with the swirls and come out with the eddies, following along the way the water goes and never thinking about myself. That’s how I can stay afloat.
De Cruz comments astutely:
Note the details in this story: the man has long hair that streams down, rather than being tied up in a knot, indicating he is of lower class. He sings not in a ritual context, as the Confucians would require, but out of sheer, unadulterated joy. Confucius is the main Confucian sage but (in Zhuangzian fashion) cannot fathom how someone is able to make such a dive and come out alive. Rather than a specific affectation, the swimmer has “no way.” He exhibits the essence of sprezzatura in his graceful movements and his indifference to danger.
For both folk and art music in the time of Vermeer, click here.
She cites the 17th-century English lutenist Mary Burwell:
One must then sit upright in playing to show no constraint or pains, to have a smiling countenance, that the company may not think you play unwillingly, and [to] show that you animate the lute as well as the lute does animate you. Yet you must not stir your body nor your head, nor show any extreme satisfaction in your playing. You must make no mouths, nor bite your lips, nor cast your hands in a flourishing manner that relishes of a fiddler [!]. In one word, you must not less please the eyes than the ears.
the aptitudes for which [playing the harpsichord] calls are natural to everyone—much like in walking, or, if you like, running.
She cites the flow theory of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:
Self-forgetting opens the mind to the intrinsic beauty of skills we exhibit in the flow state,
explaining
In Zhuangzi’s butcher and swimmer and in Mary Burwell’s lutenist, the practitioner refuses to be identified with their performance, thus overcoming the self-centredness that often accompanies achievement.
This may be one reason why I became so resistant to Beethoven, for whom struggle—audible struggle—was central, becoming dominant in the romantic aesthetic of the virtuoso concerto soloist, striving to overcome.
De Cruz concludes:
We achieve an overall pleasing effect when we are in harmony with our physical constraints. When we achieve wuwei in skilled performance, we deliberately submit ourselves to our environment and to the limitations of our bodies—we place our actions rather than ourselves centre stage. We can say that sprezzatura presents a philosophy of life, an approach to our environment and our surroundings that acknowledges our bodily imperfections and our situatedness, and that yet enables us to achieve through non-action and mental stillness a kind of perfection that our audience can delight in and enjoy. Sometimes the beauty and wonder we bring into the world has more to do with our non-action than with our action.
As an Early Music performer manqué, I (along with most of my colleagues) never delved deeply into theoretical issues. Akin to factory workers, we were more concerned with turning up for the gig, getting the notes right, and keeping together. Only quite recently have I begun to admire the work of scholars like Richard Taruskin and John Butt.
Andrew Parrott’s book The Pursuit of Musick (2022) is astutely reviewed for the LRB (“Hickup over the Litany“) by Peter Phillips, based on his own experience in the Early Music world as director of the Tallis Scholars over half a century. Phillips opens by observing:
One of the abiding mysteries in presenting music from the past is what the singers sounded like. There is no evidence for it, apart from written descriptions, all of which fall far short of telling us anything precise.
Citing a description of the singing in the Chapel Royal in 1515, written by the Venetian ambassador to Henry VIII’s court: “More divine than human; they were not singing but jubilating [giubilavano]”, Phillips comments: “the exact meaning of ‘giubilavano’ has been long debated, to no avail”. He goes on to ask
And what does this résumé of national styles, written in 1517, tell us? “The French sing; the Spaniards weepe; the Italians, which dwell about the Coasts of Genoa, caper with their Voyces; the others bark; but the Germanes … doe howle like wolves.”
Thus in recreating the sounds of early music, instrumentalists had more to build on than singers:
Performing on copies of old instruments produced cleaner textures. Research indicated lighter and quicker tempi, and suddenly the colours inherent in the orchestration became apparent, like the colours concealed under centuries of varnish on Old Master paintings. Singing followed suit. Romantic slush became almost morally unacceptable, when it was realised that vibrato in singing, as in playing, had gone too far by the 1960s. The only difference was that the instrumentalists were building on solid foundations, and the singers on what was sometimes no more than guesswork.
He refers to Parrott:
In 1707, Thomas Brown wrote that some of the singing men at St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey “dayly come wreeking hot out of a Bawdy-House into the Church; and others Stagger out of a Tavern to Afternoon-Prayers, and Hickup over a little of the Littany, and so back again”.
—observing that “at times one wonders whether Parrott, after all, isn’t out to persuade us that standards in the past weren’t as high as they are now”.
Whereas Parrott was always more radical, sometimes even contrary, Phillips is among those choral directors who concluded that
the cake isn’t worth the candle, and one might as well go back to basics, look at the music carefully and create a sound which seems to suit what the composer may have wanted, as seen through his scores, and which pleases a modern public.
He notes the common accusation that
the reinvention of the past was doing no more than anaesthetising and colonising it, to give modern people a comfortable sense of nostalgia and possession. And in fussing about minutiae of detail, which might have been misleadingly reported and interpreted, it could distract performers from giving themselves wholeheartedly to a convincing, living interpretation.
Indeed, the Early Music revolution gave way to box-office pragmatism (see e.g. here, and here).
Among those criticising the Early Music movement was Pierre Boulez—here he offered a more recent example:
It is not clear that one would really be pleasing the composer […] by re-establishing performance circumstances that could never have been entirely satisfactory. Stravinsky asserted the unique documentary value of his own recordings and maintained that future interpreters should study them and be obliged to refer to them. Unfortunately, though, his precarious gifts as a performer, the circumstances and time pressures under which the recordings were made and the quality of the forces at his disposal do not let us regard this evidence as any sort of absolute model. In any case, can there be such a thing? Every interpretation conveys an essentially transitory truth.
Along with notes on falsetto, and pronunciation, Phillips cites Richard Sherr on the Sistine Chapel Choir in Palestrina’s time,
when it was the premier choir in Christendom. What indeed would Palestrina say, given the standards of the choir that habitually sang his works at the time, if he could hear modern performances? His music, so perfectly formed, so gleaming, cries out for the kind of choral discipline which is rare today, but must then have been non-existent. [Sherr:] “What is surprising, perhaps, is the number of papal singers throughout the 16th century who were thought by their contemporaries not to have been competent.” […]
The adjectives used to describe them include “harsh” (aspra), “hoarse” (rauca), “dissonant” (disona: “untuned”) … and they are occasionally associated with the noun imbecillitas (“weakness”). Many of them were routinely ill, or absent, some were very old but couldn’t be sacked, and some had been admitted without taking an audition. “In short,” Sherr concludes, “we may really not want to hear the music the Sistine Choir sang in the age of Palestrina in the way that they sang it.”
Phillips too reflects,
I have no doubt that if we were really to recreate an evening with an 18th-century orchestra, or a service with a 16th-century choir, we would be horrified by the standard of performance, and disgusted by the smells.
Phillips adduces Parrott’s 1987 recording of Allegri’s Miserere, shorn of its famous high C:
He moves on to the earliest surviving recordings of (WAM) singers—Caruso, and (also eschewing vibrato) this remarkable 1904 version of Ave Maria by Alessandro Moreschi, then 45 “and reportedly past his prime”:
(Moreschi was part of the Sistine Chapel Choir when they recorded Mozart’s Ave verum corpus in 1902, but not so you’d hear..).
If trends can change that much in a century, how much more must they have changed in five hundred years?
His review ends gloomily:
You are left with the impression that old music, when presented narrowly, is for old people.
* * *
Of course, the sound of early singing is still with us, perhaps not so much in the world of Western Art Music as in folk and popular musics (cf. Peter Burke on Popular culture in early modern Europe), in “world” traditions (e.g. Peter Jeffery for liturgy) —and, one might say, in daily life (on a lighter note, click here for a London taxi-driver’s interpretation of the term “early music”). I’m also keen to learn what Phillips has to say about the way that vocal and instrumental sounds of North Africa and the Middle East have been incorporated by interpreters of medieval music, such as Jantina Noorman with Musica Reservata, or in the work of Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XX. And in European regional folk genres we might find clues in living traditions to the way “Spaniards weepe” in the cante jondo of Andalucian flamenco, or how “the Italians, which dwell about the Coasts of Genoa, caper with their Voyces” in trallalero (under Italy: folk musicking). However imprecise, such oral/aural material may supplement early textual sources, adding further pieces to the jigsaw.
I wasn’t previously aware of The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019; reviewed by Roger Ebert and Mark Kermode), but it’s just as compelling, with a star-studded cast. For me, among all the immortal dialogue, two scenes stand out with Robert De Niro, as he tries to relay the unwelcome news from Jo Pesci to Al Pacino, and as it becomes clear that his best friend is gonna have to get whacked:
and
We may be used to “It is what it is”, but here “It’s what it is” makes an even stronger line.
The female gaze is only fleeting in The Irishman, but the revulsion in the face of Frank’s daughter Peggy offers a rare glimpse of a moral core to the story. These movies are particularly topical amidst the current mafia state prosecutions in the USA.
It will come as no surprise to regular readers if I note that “It is what it is” makes a suitable bumper-sticker for the descriptive anthropologist of Daoist ritual, by contrast with the prescriptive agenda of scholars seeking clues in modern ritual to the religious doctrine of ancient times (see Debunking “living fossils”) [Oh FFS—Ed.].
On a more topical note, the astoundingCoco Gauff used the expression in her wise reflections after her semi-final in the US Open was (briefly) disrupted. She is Good People.
I’ve featured taranta in several posts, starting with the 1959 fieldwork of Ernesto De Martino (The land of remorse) and Diego Carpitella in Salento. Reading the new Italian translation of KlausVoswinckel‘s novel Tarantella oder Hölderlin tanzt (2016), set in the same region, inspires me to seek further leads.
Klaus’s story, a synthesis of his lifelong immersion in literature, music, film, and his devotion to the folk culture of Salento, is animated both by the apparition of authors past (Hölderlin, Novalis, Beckett, Celan) and by living characters in the taranta scene—such as Titina, Maristella, the musicians of Officina Zoè, and notably the singing and charisma of the great Enza Pagliara (to whom I paid homage here). I can’t attempt to convey the depths of the novel, but it’s permeated with evocative accounts of musicking in local communities around Salento, as well as reflections on the changing modern history of taranta.
* * *
It’s important to bring to life the individuality of folk performers immortalised in seemingly anonymous old photos and recordings. Biography has become a popular thread in ethnomusicology; the intersecting of social change and people’s life stories is a major theme of my work on Gaoluo and Daoist ritual.
While the black-and-white images from De Martino and Carpitella’s fieldwork are renowned, I had never sought more on the stories of the musicians shown there. Klaus’s novel led me to the great healer-violinist Luigi Stifani[1] (1914–2000).
Resident in Nardò, Mesciu [Maestro] Gigi started training to become a barber from the age of 8. At first learning guitar and mandolin, he then bought a violin for 2 1⁄2 lire—paying in instalments! By age 14 he was taking part in taranta healing sessions, shutting up shop whenever he was needed to attend a domestic exorcism. [2] Even after the 1970s, as taranta was relocating to the public stage, he was still occasionally required to play on behalf of the mildly possessed.
Over the years following his initial encounters with De Martino and Carpitella, Stifani maintained contacts with scholars and the media, his barbershop becoming a kind of centre for taranta studies (see e.g. this series of interviews from 1998). His own diaries are published in Elenco del tarantolismo: biografie delle tarantolate di Nardò e della provincia e fuori provincia and Io al Santo ci credo.
Among Stifani’s notes is this passage, cited by Klaus:
1959, Rita di Surano, bitten by a black spider, 22 years old. She danced for eight days continuously in the month of August. Her dance was rather swift, but always on the ground. We began playing from 9 in the morning and stopped at 6 in the evening. It was only that she couldn’t see any colours while she was dancing—she only wanted to see black. Indeed, her relatives and neighbours had to wear black. And if someone didn’t, she would chase them and rip off their shirt.
The violin doesn’t always feature alongside the tamburello, organetto, and chitarra, but its invigorating energy can play a crucial role in healing.
Transcription by Diego Carpitella.
Besides the startling 1959 films (in my original post), here’s the famous 1967 stage performance in Milan in the Sentite buona gente series, curated by Diego Carpitella and Roberto Leydi:
Playlists such as this show his influence on later generations, even as the social function of taranta shifted—such as Mauro Durante:
Mesciu Gigi died on 28th June 2000, the very day of the festa of San Paolo (patron saint of the tarantate), so memorably described in The land of remorse.
* * *
As media awareness of taranta grew, two feature films appeared:
What survives the transition from domestic ritual to the world-music stage is the essential somatic energy of life: voice, percussion, dance, gathering together. But as with flamenco or ahouach, while musicians can bring vigour to the spectacle of grand festivals, nothing can compare to the ambience of a smaller-scale communal event where the distance between performers and audience dissolves.
[2] Stifani later gave recollections of 29 cases from 1928 until 1972—only a partial list (he also wrote “I have cured over fifty”); and his was just one of numerous such groups in the region.
With “mistakes” (closely followed by denials—notably Brexit) having become routine under this evil Tory regime, I’m reminded that I’ve always been fond of the Italian sbaglio (verb sbagliare), with the appealingly economical negative prefix s- creating an expressive diphthong. Admittedly in this case a positive version baglio/bagliare is elusive, but it reminds me of other words equivalent to English dis-, such as
Returning to “mistakes”: in British politics, “misjudgements” that have appalling social and economic consequences can now be casually brushed aside with a patrician air of disdain. In China, however (as throughout the socialist bloc), “making a mistake” (fan cuowu 犯错误), a catch-all for political, sexual, and indeed clerical misdemeanours, is now used humorously—despite (or because of) its Maoist heritage, with the disastrous personal and familial consequences that could ensue from innocent infringements against the fluctuating political orthodoxy of the day, or entirely innocuous casual remarks—cf. Goulash deviationism, China: commemorating trauma, and movies such as Blue kite and Living. In documents from the Maoist era the term is a sparse hint of such faux pas, as under The Houshan Daoists, requiring us to read between the lines (see my review of the Anthology of the folk music of the Chinese peoples).
Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan this week for an audience with President Tsai Ing-wen was both bold and costly. As she tweeted,
America’s solidarity with the 23 million people of Taiwan is more important today than ever, as the world faces a choice between autocracy and democracy.
But at such a highly sensitive moment in world affairs, her trip has inflamed relations with the PRC, prompting much ominous sabre-rattling from them; and according to many China-watchers, and indeed the US government, it was ill-advised. So far not only has the PRC regime escalated the war of words, but it is retaliating seriously by launching live-fire military drills.
Pelosi’s visit was illustrated by this striking image that has been making the rounds on social media:
The transliteration Nanxi Peiluoxi 南西 佩洛西 is felicitous (cf. Shuaike 帥克 for Švejk). Her Italian parents migrated west (xi 西), and her mother came from the south (nan 南); more to the point, in the image above the final xi character has been elided into the popular deity Queen Mother of the West (Xiwangmu 西王母). * It illustrates the, um, nexus between sacred and secular power that one finds so often in Chinese religion, both before and since the 1949 “Liberation” (such as the ritual associations of Hebei; see e.g. my Plucking the winds). And on opulent processions in both Taiwan and Fujian across the strait, such god images are borne aloft on palanquins to re-assert territorial boundaries.
Still, by contrast with Pelosi’s excursion, pilgrimages for the seafarers’ goddess Mazu 媽祖 have been a major factor since the 1980s in the political, economic, and cultural rapprochement of people on both sides of the strait (see e.g. here).
And as to Pelosi and Catholicism, click here for a discussion of an extraordinary image from the Chinese embassy in France, depicting the Virgin Mary (Pelosi) as a baby-stealing witch.
For Pelosi’s “long history of opposing Beijing”, including her 1991 visit to Tiananmen to commemorate the victims of the 1989 demonstrations, click here.
Meanwhile, as rabid nationalist Hu Xijin of the Chinese Global Times denounced Pelosi’s visit, Chinese netizens have fabricated an unlikely fantasy love affair between them:
Just as unlikely, “back in the USA”, for once, Fox News and Mitch McConnell—normally Pelosi’s harshest critics—are full of praise for her initiative.
* * *
Around the time of Obama’s visit to China in 2009, “Obamao” T-shirts (“serve the people”) were sold in Beijing before being banned:
While the T-shirts made a popular kitsch image in Beijing, adroitly combining enthusiasm for a foreign icon with misplaced nostalgia for Mao, in the USA they were soon in demand among Obama’s opponents, who fatuously compared his health-care reform with the Holocaust.
The world is a complicated place (You Heard It Here First).
I suppose most people read it simply as “Nanxi Peiluoxi wangmu niangniang” rather than “Nanxi Peiluo Xiwangmu niangniang”, but it’s a nice ambiguity—cf. the classic story of the hilarious misconstruing of a report on Prince Sihanouk’s visit to China!
I’ve noted the exuberance of national anthems based on the style of Italian opera, notably that of Brazil. But I curiously omitted to pay homage to the Italiananthem, composed by Michele Novaro in 1847 when the concept of “Italy” was still novel. Though it soon became popular, it only became the national anthem in 1946.
With All Due Respect to the spirited renditions of players and spectators, it’s worth relishing it in a polished performance, with three of the six verses (1, 2, and 4):
For anyone not quite ready to sit through an entire Verdi opera, this makes a ready stopgap. The instrumental intro already passes through several moods in quick succession; the song, with its snappy modulation at 0.57, and the fine sequence from 1.18, is just as rousing.
Some of the lyrics may seem a tad niche, all the more so from the mouths of burly athletes—like the openings of verse 1:
Fratelli d’Italia, l’Italia s’è desta, dell’elmo di Scipio s’è cinta la testa.
and 2:
Noi fummo da secoli calpesti, derisi, perché non siam popolo, perché siam divisi.
Verse 4 is rather arcane too:
Dall’Alpi a Sicilia, dovunque è Legnano, Ogn’uom di Ferruccio ha il core, ha la mano, I bimbi d’Italia si chiaman Balilla, Il suon d’ogni squilla i Vespri suonò [noisy Vespas].
And verse 5:
Son giunchi che piegano le spade vendute Già l’Aquila d’Austria le penne ha perdute [make do with spaghetti then] Il sangue d’Italia, il sangue Polacco [checks notes] bevé col cosacco, ma il cor le bruciò.
Yet again, this exhilarating piece, bursting with energy and variety, only underlines the utter tedium of the British anthem (see also Haydn for football). For Italian folk musicking, click here; and do listen to Enza Pagliara!
Having struggled with the dense theoretical terminology of ritual studies so ably surveyed by Catherine Bell, it’s a great pleasure to read the classic 1985 ethnography
Robert Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: faith and community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950.
This study of “religion in the streets” describes the annual festa of the Madonna of Mount Carmel on East 115th Street in New York, celebrated by poor immigrants from south Italy and their American-born or –raised children. [1]
By the time that Orsi was visiting the neighbourhood the heyday of the festa was long past. Besides his own interviews, he consults copious written sources, notably Leonard Covello’s interviews from the late 1920s, as well as parish bulletins—in which women’s requests for graces were prominent—and novels.
This introductory sentence may seem simple, but it’s crucial:
It is the central assumption of this history that the celebration cannot be understood apart from an understanding of the people who took part in it.
Orsi constantly notes social and religious change. On procession, men and women were segregated until at least the 1940s. “As soon as economic capacity matched social aspiration, which allowed Italians to send their children to school, the entire grammar school of Our Lady of Mount Carmel marched in the procession by grade.” Before the community was powerful enough to make arrangements, the procession had to stop for passing trolley cars. But as the neighbourhood shrank, so did the procession.
He shows the disparaging stance of the official church towards “popular religion” (cf. De Martino on taranta in south Italy; and elsewhere, such as in China!), and the attempt to transform it into a vision of respectable American Catholicism, like its Irish or Polish adherents.
The immigrants made no distinction between “sacred” and “profane” elements of the festa: all had an integrated meaning. However, they did constantly distinguish religion and church. The festa was
the occasion on which the Italians of Harlem revealed to themselves and to others who they were, introduced their children to their most fundamental perceptions of reality, and attempted to deal with the many tensions and crises that arose because they were immigrants in a strange land and because of the particular nature of their deepest values.
The landscape of urban popular religion is also important, “a world of parks, stoops, alleyways, hallways, fire escapes, storefronts, traffic, police, courtyards, street crime, and street play”…
Chapter 1 gives a vivid description that will remind fieldworkers of popular festivals in many parts of the world; for me it recalls in some detail the “red and fiery” (see e.g. Chau, Religion in China, chapter 3) atmosphere of Chinese temple fairs. The convivial atmosphere of the festa lasted throughout the week surrounding the main day on 16th July. Pilgrims were hosted from out of town, apartments and streets cleaned, food prepared. Amidst a wealth of decorations American flags and the Italian tricolour were displayed. Orsi evokes processions, vows, graces, healing, people offering bundles of clothing; booths selling religious items, including wax replicas of afflicted human organs, statuettes of infants (for doll effigies, cf. The Houshan Daoists, under “Houshan since the 1980s”), and charms.
On procession the statue of the Madonna was carried on a float, with a guard of honour, fireworks, and incense, touring the parish (China again..). A powerful metaphor for submission was the carrying of heavy candles on procession. The boundaries of the community were defined both by the procession and by the smells and tastes of the festa, with feasting at home and on the streets.
At the rear of the procession, and into the church, came penitents—some barefoot, some crawling. The faithful sang south Italian religious chants; bands played Italian and American music; concerts were held in local parks; men gambled. At first the festa was led by merchants and businessmen; from the 1920s it was directed by the local elite of lawyers, politicians, and so on. Irish police kept the peace.
Orsi soon undermines the rosy image of this beguiling preliminary sketch. Chapter 2 describes the history of Italian immigration to Harlem. The small early communities in the 1870s kept expanding as arrivals fleeing hardship in Basilicata and Calabria added to the ethnic mix in East Harlem, experiencing a new kind of hardship. By the 1920s much of the neighbourhood was dominated by Italians. Conflict with the Irish population was particularly fierce.
Emigration was a family strategy for survival. With kinship networks strong, people’s main loyalty was to the family. They would send regular remittances back to south Italy. If early arrivals (mainly men) felt conflicted attitudes towards the homeland, the second and third generations continued to learn about the bonds with their culture, not least through Leonard Covello’s educational work from the 1920s. Household shrines were standard.
There was continuity, but within the context of disruption—“men separated from their wives and children, men and women separated from their parents and grandparents”. They felt the gulf between their aspirations and the harsh reality of life in Harlem. “Guilt that they were not doing enough, pressure to work harder and faster, and fear that they would be unsuccessful haunted the early arrivals”. They were anxious that family structures and norms would be eroded, and that they would become unrecognisable to their kin back home.
Their hunger for work made them vulnerable to exploitation. Apart from their household duties, women also worked in poorly paid jobs (giobba, job!). Boarding in substandard, densely-packed housing, the community suffered from poor health; infant mortality remained high until the 1930s. Crime and juvenile delinquency were common, with racketeers and gangs. The press seized on such problems. All this was far from the earthly paradise the migrants had imagined before setting out from Italy.
Here’s Helen Levitt’s silent film on street life in East Harlem in 1948:
Tensions within the community were partly based on regional origins, with particular rivalry between Neapolitans and Sicilians. Though Covello made a partial list of sixty-four regional societies in 1934, by then extreme regional loyalties were giving way to neighbourhood consciousness, led by the club, “part social club, part political organisation, and part athletic association”. At the same time, the residents were attached to their Harlem enclave, the sense of solidarity, its sounds, smells, and tastes—a feeling that, as often, was enhanced by nostalgia. Even during the Depression, when the community was hit hard, they cared for each other. Gradually many became Americans “by attrition”.
Chapter 3 describes the origins of the devotion to Mount Carmel in Italian Harlem. The Madonna shared the poverty of her worshippers, and her changing fortunes were closely linked to theirs. The faithful sought her aid for sickness, and during the Depression; for soldiers going off to fight in World War Two, and for children to do well in school.
In 1881 immigrants from Polla in Salerno formed a mutual aid society in the name of the Madonna, amongst whose major functions was to provide support for proper funeral ritual—partly a reflection of their sense of insecurity in the new environment. The first festa the society organised was held in 1882. At first these festas were intimate assemblies held in courtyards or small dwellings; they were lay-organised, with no priestly supervision. The immigrants knelt before a small printed picture of the Madonna, said the rosary, chanted the Magnificat, and enjoyed a communal meal. A priest appeared at the festa in 1883, leading Mass and joining in the procession; but he soon disappeared from the story.
Already by 1884 the festa was described as a great popular celebration. The community now had a statue of the Madonna, sent from her home at Polla. That year too, the Pallotine fathers arrived in the community, with a priest presiding over a little chapel in 111th Street; and the community built a church on 115th Street, which now became the official sponsor of the festa. As Orsi notes,
For the entire history of the devotion, this celebration of a woman, in which women were the central participants, was presided over by a public male authority.
In the early years the devotees of the Madonna had to worship in the basement of the church. But as the festa became more visible on the streets, more well-heeled visitors from other neighbourhoods came to gawp (cf. Mahler’s 1909 visit to the Lower East Side). Irish and other American Catholics took a dim view of the “pagan” popular devotion on display, which they found devoid of any understanding of “the great truths of religion”.
After a series of complex debates with the Vatican, the statue of the Madonna was crowned in 1904, her golden decoration provided by donations of gold from immigrant families—rings, brooches, family heirlooms. In 1922 the interior of the church was renovated, and the following year the Madonna statue was enthroned on the main altar. The bell tower, completed in 1927, was rich in meaning for the community, who again gave generously for its construction. By now the church and the devotion belonged to the entire community of Italian Harlem, not to any particular neighbourhood or region of Italy.
The twenty-fifth anniversary of the coronation of the Madonna on 16th July 1929 was celebrated in great style, with the statue carried out onto the streets. By now the church was a major emblem of the community. If the Masses conducted by its priests were still not the focus of worship, families were now commonly holding their rites of passage there.
During World War Two women turned to the Madonna to protect their menfolk on distant battlefields, making vows that were still being kept until the 1960s. The troops also went into battle wearing scapulars bearing the image of the Madonna around their necks (again under The Houshan Daoists, cf. stories of Houtu rescuing soldiers in the Korean and Vietnam wars).
After Italy’s surrender to the allies in 1944, in a remarkable gesture of reconciliation towards former enemies of the USA, a service was held for five hundred Italian “ex-prisoners of war” who were held at an army base just outside New York. The church bell announced the end of the war; Madonna processions celebrated the peace.
By the 1950s the church took precedence over the popular cult. The community spirit of parish clubs and schools now fostered patriotism and anti-Communism. As former residents moved out to the boroughs, Italian Harlem was changing rapidly too, it was becoming Spanish Harlem. The power of the Madonna waned, and a new sense of loss emerged. By 1953,
the meaning of the festa was interior, controlled, a matter of the heart and not the street. The people have come out not to march and eat and cry in the hot streets, but to go to church.
Italian and English reports of the festa after 1947 seem to describe different events, the former stressing orderliness, the latter noting passion and fervour.
In Chapter 4 Orsi studies the domus-centred society of Italian Harlem, where the family was the “source of meaning and morals”. Even in recalling their homeland, they hardly knew an Italian nation (if they were aware of it at all, it was as an oppressor)—only the domus of their paese, with its discipline, loyalty, and mutual support. They contrasted this with American family values. Parents were anxious when their children married outside the community. The deep religiosity of the people was largely untrammelled by priests; as the priesthood seemed to compete with the domus, anticlericalism was a major theme. Individuals were seen in relation to the domus.
In the apartment building, doors were always open to neighbouring families. Christmas and baptisms were celebrations shared by the whole building. Rispetto was expected, both within and between families.
So far, this seems to play to the usual romantic clichés; but the chapter goes on to muddy the picture considerably. Rispetto was a “dark and complex” theme, implying “both love and fear, intimacy and distance”; the culture demanded obedience. The public nature of life and the policing of values could also be intimidating. When rispetto was violated, vergogna (shame) ensued.
Funerals came to acquire changing meanings. In the early period, they prompted painful reflections on whether emigration had been a wise decision; later, the community sought to reassure itself about the lasting strength of its values. As to the sacred shrines that adorned family apartments, “the home was not sacred because these figures were there, but, rather, these figures were there because the home was sacred”. But “loyalty to the domus could at times take on a real ferocity”. This was shown not only in hostility with Puerto Rican and black communities, but internally too: their rage was often turned inward.
Orsi warns against drawing a simple conclusion that the domus limited the ambitions of the Italian community: once they acquired skills in the labour market, they moved up the ladder. Later in the book he observes that dreams of “making America” were not incompatible with traditional modesty.
Chapter 5 continues to explore the way in which the family cracked under the very nature of Italian American life. Immigration was a traumatic experience; throughout its history, the domus was perceived as being in danger in American society.
Efforts to maintain the domus in all its authoritarian purity at the centre of the culture were driven by this dread of its imminent collapse. But the domus did not collapse, nor did it ever seem close to doing so in Italian Harlem; so we must consider whether the persistent sense of its fragility was not the expression of deep conflict within and ambivalence toward the domus itself. […]
The domus in Italian Harlem was the scene of bitter conflict and profound struggle.
Though not for public display, this was evident in the generational conflict between the Italian-born generations and their Italian American children, who mostly “seemed to exist in subtle and quiet alienation from each other”. Within the hierarchy of the domus, rivalries obtained, with father and oldest brother exercising particular power and competing. Other members of the family subtly undermined such authority. For younger men, taking part in sports was a significant outlet that also gave rise to conflict in the family.
The sexual life of young people was a minefield, with dating and courting closely policed by the “detective agency” of the extended family. Dates were a source of dread for both men and women; young women were expected to marry the first man they dated.
Orsi unpacks the Mafia myth. For many Italians, gangsters were romantic figures, helping to keep the community safe, protecting the virtue of its women: “willing to put their considerable cruelty at the service of the domus”, they enforced its values.
Everyone in the community knew that local mobsters spent most of their time in Italian Harlem extorting Italian merchants and running numbers games that took money away from the community. The mobsters were never presented as banditti who took from the rich and gave to Italian Harlem. […] Why did the domus need to be surrounded and the Madonna rescued by violent and cruel men? Why did the community make heroes out of these mobsters, if only in the tales they told, when they knew full well the reality of their crimes? Why did anger and violence assume such central places in the fantasies of Italian Harlem? And what was the threat to the domus that could be repelled only by such extreme measures? […] Symbols of aggression and repression, the mythical mafiosi embodied the complexity of feeling and anxiety which the people of Italian Harlem bore toward the domus.
He devotes several fine sections to the lives of women and the subtle ways in which they resisted the submission demanded of them. His unobtrusive feminism is one of the great strengths of the book.
Until the clergy at the church put a stop to it in the 1920s, it was a common occurrence at the annual festa for members of a family to drag one of the central women of their household down the aisle of the church. As they went along, the woman stuck her tongue out so that it touched the stones of the church floor, licking them as she was borne toward the Madonna. This disturbing ritual, which was deplored by visitors to the church in the early years of this century, clearly poses certain explicit questions about the role of women in the culture and in the family. Why was a woman dragged in this way by her family up to the figure of a divine and powerful woman? What was being expressed here of the inner life of the community? What were the community—and the women—learning as they observed this scene? To answer these questions, we must study the lives of women in the community, the nature of family life, relations between men and women, and attitudes toward the sacred woman on the altar on 115th Street.
Publicly the family was a theatrical display of patriarchy, but in private it was a matriarchy, albeit one exercised in subterranean ways. Married women were the guardians of traditional mores. Some older women were respected healers (cf. Chinese mediums), having brought from south Italy their skills in the rituals of protection from the evil eye. This also revealed the tension between the old world and the new. Where the mechanical techniques of American doctors could offer no hope of a cure, Italian female healers were summoned, whose stress was on the whole communal environment. Women also played a major role at funerals, bearing the public burden of mourning.
Modest behaviour was expected of young unmarried women. They were both “volcanoes ready to erupt and lambs wandering in a world of wolves”. Their upbringing was “fraught with anxiety and dread”.
Young women were summoned to a dangerous dance by their men. The latter made their advances—and then watched to see if they would be resisted as they wanted and expected to be. […] One false move would bring disaster down on them. […] Who had the real power here—the women who had to uphold the standards of the domus or the men who put them to the test?
Many men insisted that their wives should not learn English. In this stifling environment, rebellion was rare, and young women had to find more subtle ways of asserting their independence. Gradually, as women became better educated than men, one way in which they could loosen their bonds was through employment. They began finding clerical work—progress that was also resisted by the seniors of the family.
Women did appear in public, but street life was male-dominated. The religious experience of women was complex. Taking part in the devotion, besides confirming their roles in the community, they could also articulate their anxieties to the Madonna. Tensions between the women of the family was defused by the devotion.
In Chapter 6 Orsi gives sketches towards an inner history of immigration. Despite the importance of memory in shaping identity,
The distance of the immigrants from their lives in Italy, their complex feelings toward their homeland, and their hopes for a new beginning for themselves and especially for their children made them unwilling or unable to share their memories with their American-born or –raised children.
This was compounded by the generational tensions within the family.
Having sought to escape from the poverty of the homeland, immigrants found themselves ensnared in a different kind of poverty. Apart from their own sense of alienation, they also had to reckon with American xenophobia. As Covello recalled, “We were becoming Americans by learning how to be ashamed of our parents”.
This sets the scene for a return to the festa in Chapter 7. In the early period, when immigrants were mostly single men, “participation in the cult assuaged their complicated guilt”, their devotion to the Madonna (“mamma’s house”) representing their fidelity to “a moral and cultural system signified and dominated by women”. As they were joined by women from the homeland, they sought peace, protection, and pardon in the cult. The presence of the Madonna in East Harlem gave divine and maternal sanction to the immigrants’ decision to leave south Italy.
The procession itself was a kind of enactment of their journey. The 1928 souvenir journal described “the long and fatiguing journeys [viaggi]” to the shrine, trips that involved “enormous expense” for the devout. People stressed that the faithful came from “all over” for the annual celebration, stressing long trips that involved crossing water. As Italian Harlem dispersed after World War Two, “a new emphasis was placed on the journeys back to the shrine undertaken by those who had moved out of the community”. The festa was a return not only to their paese but to their mother.
Slowly the community developed a kind of pan-Italian patriotism. Mussolini was popular in East Harlem, “not as a Fascist but as a symbol of the forceful presence they were still groping for”. While the festa remained mainly a demonstration of continuity with the community’s south Italian roots, regional distinctions were already breaking down by 1928.
Orsi stresses the centrality of eating at the festa, again recalling the domus. “Food was symbol and sanction and sacrament, integrating the home, the streets, and the sacred”. The cult celebrated the whole texture of Italian humanity, so very different from the closed world of Protestant America.
People also beseeched the Madonna to heal domestic conflicts, minor maladies, nervous breakdowns, and other crises. Some stories reflect “a concern for the manifold threats of an urban environment, and all implicitly depict mothers and fathers distracted by a multitude of worries and anxieties”. After World War Two, upwardly-mobile Italians who had recently moved out might pray for the husband’s business or a daughter’s success in school. Often such prayers were answered. Healing stories
were the sacred, cathartic theatre of Italian Harlem: the community could derive a deep redemptive satisfaction from the threatened demise of the domus while looking forward to to the satisfaction’s of the domus’ final triumph.
The street was “a theatre of extremes, […] a carnival alternately beckoning and frightening. The devotion to Mount Carmel responded to this tension: it was the annual blessing and reclamation of the streets”.
The devotion, the church, and the monthly parish bulletins also helped to define and legitimate the local power structure.
At a time when Italian doctors, lawyers, and merchants were not welcomed into the American elite, they claimed an authority for themselves by advertising in the bulletin—as did politicians. American laws were judged by the values of the domus. With popular political campaigns, Fiorello LaGuardia, and then his protégé Vito Marcantonio (a former student of Covello), enacted progressive social legislation for better housing, as well as for full employment and safer working conditions.
Orsi looks in more detail at the world of work, “hard wage labour at gruelling jobs under the supervision of other ethnic groups”. Men worked as rag-pickers, junk and bottle collectors, bootblacks, newsboys, beer sellers, candy makers, sign makers, barbers, pushcart vendors, dock workers, construction workers; women worked making artificial flowers at home and dressmakers in factories. They suffered worse than other groups from periods of unemployment. Their bosses sought to control any signs of socialist leanings. The festa, with its stress on reciprocal relations, energy and enthusiasm, offered a different vision from wage alienation. It was also a time when the faithful sought cures for workplace accidents and related traumas.
Religious sacrifice allows men and women to believe that they have some control over their destinies even when they fear that they are otherwise bound by severe economic and social constraints. […] In this way, religious experience becomes a realm of relative freedom in the midst of lives ruled by necessity.
The question arises, however, whether this religious behaviour is not, or does not become, masochistic, a desperate infliction of punishment on the self in a frustrated rage against the perception of powerlessness.
Again Orsi suggests that the devotion encouraged people to repress their rage against the domus by turning it inward. The two possibilities of sacrifice, entrapment and resolution, can hardly be separated.
And again Orsi interrogates the role of women. While men were in nominal control of the devotion, women were the central figures in its life. Yet at the same time that it offered them consolation, it reaffirmed those aspects of the culture which oppressed them: the source of their comfort was also the source of their entrapment. As one women commented succinctly,
I had a hard life. I got married and it got worse.
Among a wealth of case studies in the book is that of a young woman who in 1946 prayed fervently to the Madonna that her suitor would propose to her. She was grateful when he did so, but she soon found out that he behaved in ways that she could not approve of. Since there was no socially sanctioned way of breaking off the engagement, she again sought the help of the Madonna, strengthening her resolve to end the relationship and making a promise to attend weekly novenas. This ratified her decision, which would have found approval nowhere else in the community; and her attendance at the novenas demonstrated her constancy both to the community and to other suitors.
Orsi cites a 1930 obituary notice which exploited the chance to instruct women in their duties, its “suffocatingly lyrical prose” concealing an “aesthetic of entrapment”. He ends the chapter with further reflections on the immigrants’ fear of secular power (inherited, indeed, from their ancestral oppression in south Italy):
Distant and self-serving authority, in their eyes, took sons away and sent them to distant wars that would profit only the wealthy, denied or granted them assistance, built housing projects in the neighbourhood from which they were then excluded on the basis of apparently unreasonable regulations designed to defeat them.
In conclusion, Chapter 8 discusses “the theology of the streets”.
Southern Italian popular religion gave voice to the despair of men and women long oppressed—oppressed with peculiar, sadistic ingenuity—and reinforced attitudes of resignation and fear, as well as a sense of the perversity of reality.
This was present in the Harlem devotion, but it was not the whole story.
Orsi notes the problems of reading the theology of such a people within its full social context. It’s not that the immigrants were silent about these issues: they wondered about the meaning of their lives, and pondered their place in the scheme of things. Nor was their theology merely a corruption or a poor assimilation of Catholic doctrine. They resented the American Catholic church’s belittling of their “pagan” faith. In the New World the devotion represented their determination to triumph over adversity.
They had brought their Madonna with them and every year they took her out into the streets where they lived. They would not allow religious officials, in this country or in Italy, to alienate them from the sacred. […]
The Italians of East Harlem revealed a sense of the insufficiency of a male God. Women seemed to doubt that a male God could understand their needs and hopes and so they turned to another, complementary divine figure whose life was full of suffering for her child, a story that resonated deeply with the economy of Italian American family life.
Of course, Orsi’s accounts of generational strife are variations of morality tales around the world. If all this looks like an instance of the crumbling of the strict “family values” such as one can find to various degrees in many, if not all, cultures, it’s a particularly well-documented one. And it shows a painful, confused transitional period, from which communities can apparently emerge.
While the Madonna cult often reminds me of Chinese temple fairs, accounts of the latter tend to be more celebratory, steering clear of the negative aspects of the cultures they represent, or merely indicting the bête-noire of state socialist repression as an alien force repressing an apparently timeless, ideal communal cohesion. This applies to studies of religious life not only in the PRC, but also, I think, in Taiwan, where the strength of traditional observances and values is stressed in implied contrast with those on the mainland. Many such accounts are more centred on liturgical texts and ritual sequences than on the lives of ordinary people.
Another major blessing of Orsi’s deeply humane book is that it bypasses the arcane apparatus of scholarly vocabulary that was already de rigueur in anthropology and ritual studies (see Catherine Bell’s fine surveys—in Ritual: perspectives and dimensions she praises the book for its exposition of orthopraxy—useful as the term may be, Orsi doesn’t even feel a need for it. This economy of jargon makes the text all the more instructive, besides being immensely readable.
* * *
Orsi provides substantial introductions to all three editions. The first is straightforward yet instructive. The second (2002) he calls “Fieldwork between the present and the past” (a crucial issue for China and elsewhere). As he set off on his project in the late 1970s, he aspired to becoming a “real” historian:
I have heard historians proudly say that they study only dead people, and in those early days I, too, was looking for dead people.
(cf. WAM, with Esa-Pekka Salonen’s interview for the LA Phil!). With his discipline of religious studies still “wedded to textuality”, at first Orsi considered that it was the badge of the serious historian to trawl through dusty archives. His epiphany came with finding the papers of Leonard Covello, and by listening to women as he sat with them in their kitchens.
While by Orsi’s time the festa was a pale shadow of its former vibrancy, he found that there was no firm barrier between the present and the past. While one might say he had been unlucky to train as a historian rather than as an ethnographer, he soon broke the chains of that training.
I came to realise that I was learning as much from how people were talking to me as from what they were telling me, as much from what was going on around the stories as from the stories themselves.
Of course, his anxieties on undertaking the project were part of a wider critical re-assessment of the discipline of religious history under the stimulus of ethnography. He interrogates the “unnecessary and confusing boundaries” that sealed off “religion” from “popular religion”. Had his training then extended to anthropology (and indeed ritual studies), he would have found his natural domus—one that many scholars of religion in China still resist, immune to epiphany. Rather than regretting that Orsi didn’t discover the discipline of anthropology sooner, I rejoice in the way he discovered its lessons for himself in the field, rather as I did in China.
Even then Orsi was acutely conscious of gender issues. In the old “body–spirit” antinomy,
Associated with the corporal end of this dichotomy were women and the various concerns of everyday life, while spirit represented the public, the political, and the masculine. […] I found myself right in the vice of the antinomy that structured not only modern historiography but modern professionalism generally.
He also stresses power—not just the power of some over others, but “the power that circulates through cultural forms”, and the power of religion to “shape, orient, and limit the imagination”.
As he becomes aware, “fieldwork proceeds through relationships”. Such study is done not only among real people, but by real people too. “My interlocutors did not let me be invisible, drawing me out with questions about my life and experience”—just as I learned in Gaoluo.
This represents the refusal of otherness by the people we study; it is their determination not to be rendered alien.
He goes on:
On one level, it is useful to remember that the inert documents stored away in archives were once the living media of real people’s engagement with the unfolding events of their times. […] My method in telling the story of the Madonna and Italian Harlem was to bring the voices from the archives and the voices from the streets into relation, allowing them to challenge, amend, deepen, and correct each other.
On his later annual visits to the festa, a woman called Antoinette would always seek him out. “So you think the festa is dying out? Looks pretty good to me.” Orsi concedes that by observing that the festa was waning, he seemed to have fallen into the old trap of early anthropologists who believe they have arrived just in time to preserve a last glimpse of a primitive and disappearing world (see e.g. Musics lost and found). Such “romantic twilight elegies” came to be seen as serving colonial interests, legitimating the work of the ethnographer as a kind of preservationist.
I did have good reason in the early 1980s to think that the festa was not going to be around much longer. The crowds were dwindling. The old Italians in the neighbourhood were dying. Their children, who had moved away to the suburbs, seemed less and less interested in coming back, always more apprehensive about the safety of the neighbourhood…
So in a coda Orsi takes the opportunity of revising his story: “I had not foreseen the arrival of the Haitians. How could I?” By 2010 more Haitians were attending the festa than Italians, transforming it yet again. Orsi notes that whereas Italians held the Puerto Rican community responsible for the demise of Italian Harlem (even though it had been their own choice to move out), the Haitians came into “a special place of cherished memory to which Italian Americans of the second and third generations were themselves “returning”. The Haitians were not seen as taking anything away.
In the third introduction (2010), “History, real presence, and the refusal to be purified”, Orsi reflects further on changes in religious studies since the 1985 edition—while still refraining (wisely) from detailing changes in anthropology and ritual studies.
He illustrates the continuing story with letters that he regularly received from Italian Americans after the publication of the book, telling their own stories, blurring the line between the past and the present, and transforming themselves from the objects of history into its subjects and narrators.
While Orsi’s approach was in line with studies of working-class cultures at the time, he contrasts the growth of theoretical discourse:
History was being recast as a literary and ideological enterprise with only the most attenuated relationship to anything like a past that had really happened. […] The notion that scholars who studied other cultures or other times were representing in their writing the actual lived experience of the people in these other times and places had become risible and self-delusional, if not a corrupt alignment with power.
Still, he appreciates the increasing popularity of studies of “lived religion”.
The West has been reframed from the perspective of the rest of the world, where what goes on at the Madonna’s shrine is more common and familiar than the sanctioned practices of “modern” Western religion.
He came to explore the potential for accepting folk belief in “real presences”. Part of the modern “eradication of memory” is the forgetting
that not long ago, the gods, spirits, saints, ancestors, and demons were familiar and recognisable members of the social world, in miracles, apparitions, and devotions, amid the relationships of everyday life.
This dangerous amnesia he calls “purification”.
* * *
See also Pomodoro!, a perceptive social history of the tomato on both sides of the Atlantic. Cf. the Boas circle at Columbia; and note the Lomaxes’ remarkable recordings of piffero and ciaramella played by south Italian immigrants to New York and New Jersey in the early 1960s. All this amidst the more familiar ferment of New York life, not least the jazz scene…
For a fine study of street gangs in modern Chicago, click here. For female deities in China and women’s participation in ritual there, see e.g. here and here. And among a wealth of discussions of fieldwork, note Bruce Jackson.
[1] Online sites like these have more recollections and images:
There must be early film footage of the procession, but I haven’t yet found any. Meanwhile in London, this silent clip shows the 1927 procession for Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Clerkenwell’s Little Italy:
As I observed in my roundup for 2020, since part of my mission (whatever that is) is to vary the distribution of the diverse posts on this blog, keeping you guessing, this latest annual mélange is an occasion to group together some major themes from this past year. This is only a selection; for reasons of economy, I’ve tended to skip over some of the lighter items. You can also consult the tags and categories in the sidebar.
Some essential posts:
A selection of nine anagram tales from Nicolas Robertson’s fantastical series
Even just for this last year, I realise there’s a lot to read there, but do click away on all the links! And I can’t resist reminding you of some of my earlier favourites, notably
In 1982 I was fortunate to hear the great Franca Rame(1929–2013) in London performing her Female parts: one-woman plays (1977, co-written with Dario Fo).
Waking up A woman alone The same old story Medea
The stories, satirising the chains of Church, State, and machismo, are based on her Tutto casa, letto e chiesa; here’s the first part of her virtuosic 1977 live performance in Milan—using the clichéd image of femininity to further confuse her Italian audience:
And here she performs Waking up (Il risveglio) for TV that year:
The same old story, with its foul-mouthed dolly (translated by Ed Emery here; and in Stuart Hood’s booklet for the 1982 London performances), is particularly fine. She may be a tough act to follow, but here’s Jennifer Long performing the concluding doll story in English:
So anyway, once upon a time there was a lovely little girl who had a lovely little dolly. Well, actually, the dolly wasn’t lovely at all… she was all dirty and tatty and made of rags, and she used to say terrible swear words, which the little girl learned and went round repeating.
One day her mummy asked her: “But who on earth taught you those horrible swear words?” “My dolly,” said the little girl. “Ooh, you liar! You’ve been hanging round with those horrible boys.”
“No, mummy, really, it’s my dolly. Come on, dolly, say a few swear words for mummy!”
And the dolly, who always did everything the little girl asked her to do, because she loved her so much, came out with a whole string of terrible words: “Porca puttana! Stronzo! Mi piaci un casino! Culo!” [She chants, like a slogan] “Cu-lo, cu-lo, cu-lo!” […]
“Excuse me, gnomey,” she said, “have you seen a big ginger cat with a rag dolly in his mouth, who swears all the time?”
“Er, there he is, there,” says the gnome, waving with his willy, and splosh, he squirts out a big stream of widdle, which lands right on the ginger cat, which promptly falls down dead. Because, as we know, gnomes’ widdle is terribly poisonous for cats! […]
The dénouement makes the message clear:
And the grown-up little girl takes her dolly and hugs her closely closely to her, and gradually, gradually, the little dolly disappears, right into her heart.
And now the grown-up little girl is out there all on her own, on a long, long road… She walks and walks, and she comes to a big tree. And underneath that tree there are lots of other grown-up little girls just like herself, and they make her ever so welcome, and they say: “Sit down here… with us… We’re all telling our own stories. Why don’t you start…” they say to a fair-haired girl sitting there. And the girl begins: “When I was a little girl I had a rag doll who used to say terrible swear-words…”
“Me too!”
“Me too!”
“Me too!”
And all the girls burst out laughing. And one of them says: “Well, who would ever have imagined it: Your story… my story… We’ve all got the same story…!”
You can admire more of Franca Rame’s own performances on her YouTube channel, such as her version of Mistero buffo, debunking Catholicism (Dario Fo’s full version is here, with English translation here; cf. Patricia Lockwood).
Philippe Sands, The Ratline: love, lies, and justice on the trail of a Nazi fugitive (2020)
is an extraordinary sequel to his book East West street and film A Nazi legacy. In those works we learned of the shameful careers of Hans Frank and Otto Wächter, Nazi governors in Poland/Ukraine who oversaw the murder of countless Jewish families, including that of Sands himself. A major theme in both book and film is Sands’s relationship with their sons; whereas Frank’s son Niklas vehemently denounces his father’s crimes, Wächter’s son Horst somehow clings onto an image of his father as a humane leader who was caught up in the evil. Horst
did not deny the horrors, of a holocaust, of millions of people murdered. It happened and it was wrong, period. “I know the system was criminal, that my father was part of it, but I don’t think of him as a criminal.”
The Ratline focuses on Otto Wächter and the story of his attempted flight from justice after the war. It supplements Sands’s ten-part series on BBC Radio 4; both make a most captivating detective story, with plot twists at every chapter.
The book is in four parts: Love, Power, Flight, and Death. It sets forth from the papers of Otto Wächter’s wife Charlotte, handed down to their son Horst.
Otto took part in anti-Jewish activism as early as 1921, before his 20th birthday. As he moved up the Nazi ranks, he met Charlotte in 1929. She gave him a copy of Mein Kampf in 1931, just before she too joined the party; they married in 1932, going on to have six children.
In 1934 the family was separated for two years when Otto went into hiding after Engelbert Dolfuss was killed in a Nazi attempt to overthrow his government in Vienna. By 1936 he was working in Berlin alongside Heydrich, Himmler, and Eichmann. Following the 1938 Anschluss, he was promoted yet higher.
In Vienna, as Jews were persecuted ruthlessly, Charlotte held lavish dinner parties and took her growing family on idyllic holidays in the mountains. To read of her cultural tastes is unsettling (cf. Alex Ross, The rest is noise, Chapter 9): she attended the Ring cycle, Der Freischütz, and The marriage of Figaro at the Salzburg festival, as well as Bruckner 7 (“her favourite piece of music”); Falstaff, Don Carlos, and Rosenkavalier at the Vienna State Opera; and she heard Furtwängler conducting Mozart and Beethoven.
Upon the Nazi occupation of Poland, Otto was made governor of the District of Kraków, overseeing ever more extreme measures against the Jewish population. In 1941 he created the Kraków ghetto; plans for the Final Solution were coming into action. Charlotte was proud of his “humane” work. The Vienna Phil came to Kraków; the city’s own orchestra performed Brahms’s 2nd piano concerto and Beethoven 7.
The following year Otto was made governor of the District of Galicia, based at Lemberg (Lviv), already ravaged by Soviet occupation. His house there had a big garden, a swimming pool and tennis court, and a large staff. On a visit, Hans Frank announced the implementation of the final Solution in Galicia, his odious speech received with “lively applause”:
Party comrade Wächter! I have to say, you did well. Lemberg is once again a true, proud, German city. I do not speak about the Jews who are still here, we will deal with them, of course. […]
Incidentally, I don’t seem to have any of that trash hanging around here today. What’s going on? They tell me that there were thousands and thousands of those flat-footed primitives in this city once upon a time—but there hasn’t been a single one to be seen since I arrived. Don’t tell me that you’ve been treating them badly?
Otto found time to attend Die Entführung aus dem Serail.
By 1943 Galicia was proclaimed Judenfrei. Otto took advantage of this “success” to create the Waffen-SS Galicia Division by drafting Ukrainians in the territory, as the war with the Soviet Union became increasingly ominous. Typically, Charlotte commented, “He knew how to govern, with Austrian charm and warmth”; she hoped the move would make him popular with Ukrainians.
Horst too consistently claims that others were responsible for the atrocities, maintaining this position even when Sands confronts him with irrefutable evidence; but at the same time their relationship remains cordial, and Horst keenly continues to supply him with more information. Sands eventually finds that Horst’s defence of his father is more about his devotion to the memory of his mother.
In 2014, following the Purcell Room event (shown in A Nazi legacy) at which Horst claimed his father was still venerated in Ukraine, Sands, Niklas Frank, and Horst travelled there to film some of the most disturbing scenes in the documentary, visiting an event west of Lviv in commemoration of the Waffen-SS Galicia Division. While relations among the trio have somehow remained civilised, this event prompted Niklas to regard Horst conclusively as a Nazi.
By summer 1944, as Russian troops advanced, Otto retreated to Berlin, from where he was soon transferred to a post in Italy, liaising between Hitler and Mussolini’s Republic of Salò. In a speech he disingenuously claimed that Germany
“wanted clean factories, decent housing for workers, mothers and children, improved living conditions created for the masses”, not conflict. It had been forced to draw its sword, “to defend against envious, rapacious neighbours”, in a war started by the “powers of the eternal subversion of capital and Judaism”.
But privately Otto and Charlotte recognised that defeat was imminent. He returned to Berlin in February 1945, still working in support of Ukrainian forces against Stalin. After Hitler’s suicide on 29th April, Charlotte took steps to have the children taken to safety, and faced the US occupation at home on Lake Zell in Austria; fearing the worst, she found the American troops remarkably friendly, and was able to summon the children back.
Meanwhile, hunted by the Americans, British, Poles, Jews, and Soviets, Otto went into hiding, heading south across the mountains towards Italy.
* * *
So far, the story overlaps with that of East West street. In Part Three Sands traces Otto’s years on the run. The publicity surrounding the release of A Nazi legacy prompted Horst to renew his efforts to defend the memory of his father. It was now that he began to show Sands the voluminous papers of his mother, which he agreed to house at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
This archive offered new leads on the mysterious post-war years leading up to Otto’s death in Rome in 1949, apparently the result of bathing in the polluted Tiber.
By late 1945 news was reaching Otto and Charlotte of the fate of other senior Nazis, “a litany of indictments, arrests, suicides, and disappearances”. Among many of Otto’s colleagues captured was Hans Frank, leading to his sentencing at the Nuremburg Trials and execution.
It turned out that after Otto disappeared, Charlotte was in constant contact with him as he evaded detection by moving around in the mountains of Austria. Throughout the period she was exchanging letters with Otto, and they furtively met up every few weeks in hill farms, or in a tiny mountain hut, Charlotte bringing along supplies for the fugitive, as well as providing him with fake identity papers. By 1947, with the spacious family homes confiscated, Charlotte managed to buy a house in Salzburg.
In the mountains Otto had a companion known as Buko, a junior SS man also on the run, who took care of him; remarkably, he was still alive in 2017, and he provided details on the period for Sands and Horst when they went to visit him at home in Germany.
In summer 1948 Otto at last resolved to head south alone towards the Vatican, staging point on the Ratline, an escape route for Nazis to flee to safety in South America. First, Charlotte took the risk of secretly bringing him home to Salzburg for Christmas with the children (see photo above). She had just had another abortion, her third since 1934. But as neighbours found out that Otto was there, he made his way south, reaching Bolzano by Easter 1949. Sands learned that the Polish authorities were already on his trail.
Among the works of art that the Wächters had stolen from the Kraków museum was a version of Bruegel’s The fight between Carnival and Lent. Short of funds, Otto subsidised his journey by selling such works. With a new identity card, he now took the train to Rome. The support network with which he eventually met up arranged for him to lodge at Vigna Pia, a monastic establishment south of the city whose murky clientele included many such fugitives. The previous occupant of Otto’s cell was an SS man who “designed gas vans used to murder Jews and persons with disabilities”, and who went on to serve as senior adviser to Pinochet.
Taking great care, Otto and Charlotte remained in frequent contact by letter. As she continued attending concerts in Salzburg, Otto explored escape routes. With Otto short of money again, Charlotte continued selling off looted art works. But he needed to find employment; incongruously, he now found work as an extra for a filmed version of La forza del destino. Tito Gobbi, who starred in the leading role, “could not have been aware that one of the extras was a man indicted for mass murder, for shootings and executions”. Another film followed.
But Otto and Charlotte were ever more anxious that he would be exposed. In July 1949 he visited a “kind old comrade” outside Rome, going for a swim and eating heartily. But he soon began to feel unwell, and after returning to Rome he consulted a German doctor. As his fever became more serious, he was admitted to the Ospedale di Santo Spirito, a Vatican-supported institution. By the time that Charlotte arrived on 15th July, she learned that he had died two days earlier.
* * *
But there’s still much more to unravel: in Part Four, the most remarkable part of the book, the plot thickens yet again, with staggering twists in every chapter.
On the 16th July Charlotte met Bishop Hudal, in whose arms her husband had died. Doubts were soon aired as to whether Otto was really dead, but records show that Charlotte had viewed his corpse in the mortuary, “black as wood, all burnt inside, like a Negro”. That day his body was taken to the cemetery for interment, the first of five burials over the following decades: at the family home in Salzburg, at another of Charlotte’s properties and then a cemetery nearby, and finally in a different plot at the same site along with Charlotte after her own death in 1985.
This story only emerged in 2016, after the documentary and the first book. From Charlotte’s papers and Otto’s diary, a web of shady contacts in Rome began to emerge. Sands begins his quest with Bishop Hudal, who gave refuge to Nazis during and after the war—including Erich Priebke, responsible for the Fosse Ardeatine massacre outside Rome; Josef Mengele; and the mass-murderer Franz Stangl, whose interviews with Gitta Sereny shortly before his death in 1971 provided further clues about the Bishop.
After Hudal’s death in 1963, his posthumous memoir revealed that Otto had told him that he had been poisoned “by a former German major working in Rome”, at the behest of the American secret service—a suggestion that hardly appears in Charlotte’s papers.
With Horst, Sands now began to delve into the clue, scrutinising Otto’s address book. By now the fear of Communism was replacing the old enemy of Nazism. An expert on the history of Italy at the time doubted that Otto could have been poisoned: most violence was aimed at settling scores with Italian fascists. Otto’s pursuers might at first have been keen to have him arrested, jailed, tried; but by 1949, as the Communist threat loomed, the Americans were more concerned to turn such Nazi criminals into agents against their own new opponents—as indeed were the Russians.
Sands makes use of the archives of the American Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), whose concerns moved from denazification to the recruiting of former Nazis in the face of the Communist threat. They were well aware of the Ratline (indeed, they may even have created it) and the Vatican connection.
Sands now consults his neighbour David Cornwall (John Le Carré!), with his own rich experience of espionage—he was even in Austria in 1949, hunting Nazis. He could see that Otto would have been attractive to the Americans as a “talent-spotter”; “the incidental fact that he was a monster would play no part. If they looked him over and liked the cut of his jib, I’d be surprised if they didn’t recruit him.” The Americans would follow this up with Persilschein, washing whiter than white, disguising the recruit’s background.
The ever more labyrinthine trail eventually leads to Karl Hass, a former SS major then working in Rome as a spy for the Americans. A former colleague of Otto, he had been caught by the CIC in November 1945, but escaped several times. By 1947 he had come to an arrangement with the CIC, approved by Thomas Lucid, commanding officer of the 430th detachment. Hass agreed to run a new network of agents, codenamed Project Los Angeles. Many names on the list were contacts of Otto’s in Rome, including Bishop Hudal: Otto had walked into a nest of secret agents.
So it transpires from the CIC Archives that the “kind old comrade” whom Otto went to meet in July 1949 was none other than Hass. Already concerned that Hass might be a double agent, the CIC later dropped him. Remaining in Italy, he even followed in Otto’s footsteps, landing parts in The house of intrigue and Visconti’s The damned; cast as an SS officer, he hardly had to act.
One of those whom the Ratline had helped escape to Argentina was Erich Priebke. In 1994 a US documentary team tracked him down there; while curtly admitting his involvement in the Ardeatine massacre, he adopted the “just following orders” gambit, just like Otto. But he was now extradited and put on trial in Rome—which led to Hass also being charged with crimes against humanity. They were both sentenced in 1998; Hass died in 2004.
By 2017 it was clear that Bishop Hudal helped Nazis escape to South America; that he helped Otto; and that he was a paid agent of the Americans.
By this time Horst was convinced that Otto had been poisoned—which allowed him to portray his father as a victim rather than a perpetrator. He went to Rome with Sands to seek further clues. They visited Vigna Pia, the hospital where Otto died, and the Ardeatine Caves. Next the group visited Lake Albano, scene of the fateful weekend when Otto visited Karl Hoss and fell ill. There they met an old priest who confided yet another revelation: Thomas Lucid, Hass’s CIC controller, had a son Viktor (b.1946) as a result of an affair with his secretary; and Viktor married Hass’s daughter Enrica in 1974. Sands travelled to Geneva to meet him, learning more (but never enough) about Hass. Brought up by a stepfather, only in 1960 did Viktor learn that Lucid was his biological father.
To fill in more details about Lucid, Sands then went to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to talk with his other son Tom Junior, to whom his wife gave birth in 1947. He too received Sands genially (on the topic of fieldwork rapport, I may add that in the midst of such deeply traumatic material, the people whom Sands seeks out are won over by his sensitivity and integrity). Eventually Sands revealed to Tom Junior that he had a brother in Geneva—not quite news to him, but a secret that he had discreetly buried.
Meanwhile Horst was hoping to have his father’s remains exhumed, with a view to getting DNA tests done to show any traces of poison. Consulting various scientists, Sands learned that this would be a tall order; and from his detailed notes they tended towards the view that Otto was more likely infected after swimming in polluted waters.
Horst’s latest suspect for the murder of his father was the famous Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Documents in Wiesenthal’s archive provided more details on Otto’s time in Kraków and Lemberg, but nothing to hint that he might have been involved in his murder.
In 2018 Sands reported back to Horst, who gave his blessing to the forthcoming Ratline podcast—while still defending his father, even when Sands asked him about incriminating documents that Horst himself had worried over in 2007.
The podcast produced further memories from listeners. Sands returned once again to Horst’s home, showing him some more photos, including the Bochnia executions (above), without changing Horst’s mind. And he shared a new document showing that immediately after meeting Otto in May 1949, Bishop Hudal had divulged the news to his American minders, yet they had taken no steps to apprehend him; Otto’s fear of the Americans was misplaced. The document further claimed that Otto had offered his service to the Italians.
* * *
Even if the mystery of Otto Wächter’s death still remains unsolved despite all these intrepid investigations, Sands has showed the most extraordinary persistence in tracking down sources—to which Horst kept on leading him, even while insisting on his father’s innocence. The Ratline is an object lesson in how to unearth buried truths. It makes an utterly compelling story—further essential material on this hideous, complex period of the mid-20th century.
Petits pays, grandes musiques: le parcours d’un ethnomusicologue en Méditerranée (2020; 512 pages).
Among BLJ’s main fieldsites, the focus here is on the Mediterranean, notably Sardinia—his early work on Morocco only features en passant. His remit also extends to India, Java, Iran, the Hebrides, Brazil, jazz, and Western Art Music. Most valuably, the text is cued to 63 wonderful audio and video tracks on this onlineplaylist, so that we can instructively listen and watch as we read (or even before Rushing Out to buy the book). Meanwhile BLJ also considers changing ways of musicking (the French musiquer is good), and changing trends over his long career in ethnomusicology. One feels his rapport as participant observer; while applying thick description (cf. Geertz) to both social and musical aspects, his style is deeply engaged, full of character.
BLJ entertains villagers, Irgoli 1995. Photo: Maria Manca.
* * *
The Introduction by Giovanni Giuriati gives background on early influences on BLJ’s studies and the significance of his ouevre; while sharing many approaches with Anglo-American ethnomusicology, he has also been at the centre of a distinctively European tradition (cf. posts under Society and soundscape).
The main text is a parcours in three parts, each with nine chapters—an anthology of mostly previously-published articles, illuminatingly arranged by themes.
Part One, “Improvisation: permanence et transformations”, unpacks the creative process (cf. Nettl).
After an introductory chapter, BLJ offers three vignettes on Sardinia, featuring the launeddas (in memory of Aurelio Porcu); dances with organetto; and songs with guitar. Alongside detailed musical analyses, he always pays attention to social context (festas, bars, and so on).
“Bartók’s kaleidoscope” is a thoughtful tribute, dating from 1994. Focusing on Béla Bartók’s early recordings and transcriptions of the folk music of Romania (cf. my Musical cultures of east Europe), it’s further informed by BLJ’s own fieldwork there from 1991 to 1996 with Jacques Bouët and Speranţa Rădulescu (see A tue-tête: chant et violon au pays de l’Oach, Roumanie, 2002, with DVD, including amazing clips like #23).
Chapter 6 is a more general discussion of models and typology, in which BLJ spreads his net to Iran, India, and Scotland—as well as Morocco, illustrated by the Aissawa cult of Meknes (#15), and Turkey, with a fine taksim on the zurna (#18b).
He then continues exploring Romanian village traditions with chapters on the oral traditions of the Ouach (Oaș) and Baia Mare regions. He discusses the misleading dichotomy between fieldwork and the laboratory.
In an intriguing experiment, the team asked local musicians to play their own transformations on short extracts played to them from a Brahms Hungarian dance, The four seasons, and West Side story (##24–27). While I appreciate the idea, here I’m rather less excited by the insights it yields.
A numinous image, also used for the cover of Paul Berliner’s Thinking in jazz—
just the kind of fusion of ethnographic and musical detail that BLJ practises.
Part One ends with a virtuosic entr’acte, “The jazz ear”, suggesting grander themes through two suggestive analytical vignettes. Seeking to assess contrasting evaluations of Chet Baker’s vocal intonation, BLJ gives a micro-analysis of his “deviant” pitches at the opening of I fall in love too easily (cf. Deep in a dream, and Chet in Italy). And the “cultural ear” is apparent too in his discussion of the harmonic implications in Charlie Parker’s different melodic renditions of Billy’s bounce. While this kind of analysis stops short of explaining why audiences are so moved by both jazzmen, it suggests fruitful paths.
This jazz vignette leads BLJ to suggest three approaches:
the imperial (“not to say imperialist”) position, whereby ethnomusicologists, with their universal science, declare themselves the omniscient authority, taking credit for the aptitude of others (Others) without asking too many questions;
the discouraging opposite view, as expressed famously by Bruno Nettl‘s teacher in Iran: “You will never understand this music”;
a middle way, which BLJ favours: that it is precisely the problematic accessibility of the music of others that is at the heart of our task.
Part Two, “Chanter ensemble, être ensemble” (and the word ensemble is more evocative in French!) returns to Sardinia, considering vocal polyphony there (“Les mystères des voix sardes”). Five chapters explore aspects of the Castelsardo confraternities, with their annual cycle of rituals culminating in the Passion rituals of Holy Week, illustrated with magnificent video clips like #35 and #39 (more under Sardinian chronicles). Exquisite as is BLJ’s Chants de Passion (1998), he reflects that
les mots du livre sont beaucoup moins riche que les paroles qui leur ont donné naissance. […] L’écriture est toujours maladroite lorsqu’il s’agit de rendre compte des intonations et de la richesse de l’oral…
Musical notation too is an imperfect tool.
BLJ in deep harmony with tenore quartet at wedding, 1998. Photo: SJ.
In the fourth chapter of this section BLJ expands his consideration of vocal polyphony in Sardinia to the more widely-known secular genre of the tenore quartet, including the distinctive group from Fonni, who open his 1991 CD Polyphonies de Sardaigne (#36b).
Chapters 5 and 6 offer more perspectives on the Castelsardo liturgy, reflecting on the aesthetic judgements of the participants, and on memory, individual style, conditions and constraints (the ritual cycle, sense of place), grammatical rules, preparation. With such factors in mind, BLJ analyses a 1993 Stabat mater (#41).
Chapter 7 considers such orally-transmitted group singing in the less formal (male) social interaction of the cantina. Describing the singer as “creator of empathy”, he notes that while such societies commonly refer to nos anciens, the word “tradition” doesn’t belong to such societies, but is an invention of the “professors”—an issue to bear in mind in China.
This discussion makes a bridge to the last two chapters of Part Two. Chapter 8 is a version of BLJ’s 2013 article “Multipart drinking (and singing): a case study in southern Albania”. After apéritifs in Ancient Greece and the Andes, he describes the Tosk ensemble seated around a table (also a focus of Chinese musicking), singing in free tempo as they make toasts with raki (e.g. #45), revealing the correlation between social and musical rules and their spatial and temporal dimensions.
La performance a pour but de render contigus, de façon construite et progressive, le proche et le lointain, le present et l’absent et—pourrait-on dire plus largement—les mondes physique et métaphysique.
He notes the presence of virtual as well as real participants:
Il s’agit d’etres mythiques: héros convoqués par les textes des chants dont on célèbre l’importance, faits d’armes divers (en general contre les Turcs), fiancées perdues ou inaccessibles dont on ne sait pas meme si elles existèrent un jour. Mais aussi présences-absences: le chant est la trace d’un souvenir, d’une situation précédente, de l’objet de ses pensées, et qui se voit adoubé d’attentions expressifs particulières. De sorte qu’être ensemble revient à s’inscrire dans un présent, mais consiste tout autant dans l’évocation et le rappel des absents.
As to the polyphony of the Lab people further southwest in Albania, Chapter 9 discusses the mournful song Ianina, led by Nazif Çelaj (#48; full version on BLJ’s 1988 CD Albanie: polyphonies vocales et instrumentales). It was premiered at a 1983 folk festival in Gjirokastër, and despite being promptly elevated by the regime to national status, audiences agreed that it was both original and moving. This seems to have been a rather rare occasion in folk tradition to witness a song regarded as a “new creation”; while BLJ describes the innovative aspects of the vocal arrangement (always embedded in tradition), I’d like to know more about just how the song came into being.
One particularity of the song is its evocation of the funeral laments of women:
Il est comme un esquisse ou un rappel des lamentations funèbres dont les femmes ont en principal l’exclusivité. Il emprunte ainsi, sans le dire, au vaj (cri, plainte ou lamentation féminine). Il y a là un travestissement qui ne peut passer inaperçu. En fait, un double travestissement, car ce chant d’hommes emprunte aux femmes et il ne raconte pas seulement une histoire: il la met en scène en y insérant—en live—le chagrin occasionné par le mort du héros.
He concludes:
Chant de douleur de l’ancien régime, il renvoie au temps de la domination des Turcs. Mais aussi et sourtout au régime qui l’avait vu naître, comme si, à son tour, il ne pouvait plus s’extirper de ce passé encore brûlant. Cependant, il n’est pas nécessaire que son référent soit precis, car en tant que plainte masquée Ianina chante la douleur. Or, celle-ci ne manque pas des scénarios anciens ou nouveaux pour fair irruption: elle renvoie à ce qui fut autrefois, mais aussi à ce qui est aujourd’hui (l’instabilité morale, l’injustice social et l’émigration notamment). Et sans doute a-t-elle même l’étrange pouvoir d’inclure les douleurs à venir. Elle et à la fois précise et indécise. En cela réside sa fonction paradoxale autant que son charactère opératoire.
In Part Three, “La musique en effet”, we return again to Sardinia. Chapter 1 reflects on BLJ’s “home base” of Irgoli, opening with villagers’ apparent indifference to the intrusion of American rock music blasting from the TV in the bar. He contrasts the whole social soundscape with the silence surrounding vendetta. The tenore style of Irgoli has hardly been affected by the fashionable adoption of other such groups onto the “world music” bandwagon. And meanwhile the canto a chitarra, the improvised “jousts” of the gara poetica, and dancing in the piazza continued to thrive there.
Further pondering how music reflects the social structures in which it is inscribed (an idée fixe of ethnomusicologists), in Chapter 2 BLJ revisits the launeddas and the liturgy of Castelsardo.
In Chapter 3, “Le cheval, le chant, la poésie”, he reflects on the limitations of comparison, even between the various festive cultures of Sardinia. Chapter 4 explores the connection between flowers and liturgical song. The following three chapters discuss Lévi-Strauss, the “science” of music, and affect—ending with an astute commentary on the speaking voices of women in Castelsardo.
In Chapter 8, BLJ’s return to Orgosolo in 2011 after thirty years prompts reflections on memory and the individual “proprietors” of repertoire among his various fieldsites. This in turn leads to a discussion of female mourners in Albania (#61), and the return of a celebrated Albanian singer to his desolate natal home, shown in BLJ’s film with Hélène Delaporte, Chant d’un pays perdu (2006) (extracts e.g. #62b and 62d).
For both performers and audiences, a complex, imprecise nostalgia may be involved in a synchronic event (as well as in later reception history, I might add). He ends with a note on music, memory, and possession—the latter here denoting the power of absent or lost beings in the performative expressions of the living.
This leads suitably to the final chapter of Part Three, on Georgia on my mind as sung by the “alchemist” Ray Charles. Applying the same methods he has developed for folk traditions, BLJ analyses the musical features that create the multivalent portrait of an elusive protagonist, with its “tempo-malaise”.
“Georgia”—l’être évoqué—existe a travers son énonciation chantée, des qualités d’intonation spécifiques, un timbre ô combien particulier, des transitoires d’attaque et de fin, etc., constituant non pas l’accessoire du chant mais son essence.
Noting the human voice as marker of social discrimination, he explores the “black voice”, anchored in the memory of douleur, and “le nègre blanc”; the pentatonic basis of the song, both gospel and rural (another pays perdu); and the arrangement by Ralph Burns. Nor does he neglect to pay homage to the 1941 recording of Georgia by Billie Holiday (and one might cite her Don’t explain as a succinct assessment both to support and criticise his method?!).
In his thoughtful Postface/Volte-face, BLJ reflects on the major themes that have emerged, describing the ethnomusicologist as both droguiste and acrobate-gymnaste. While noting the reduced local diversity of rural traditions since his first fieldtrips in the 1960s (a theme, indeed, that one might trace back to the origins of anthropology), he has remained alert to change, constantly refining his “models”.
All this makes one keen to explore the final bibliography, discography, and filmography—and do also consult the ear-opening CD set Les voix du monde, in which BLJ played a significant role. What—no index?!
This stimulating tour de force is both a survey of Bernard Lortat-Jacob’s lifetime immersion in musicking and another reminder of the wealth of Mediterranean traditions on our doorsteps, along with their relevance to a global understanding of local cultures.
You may be disappointed to learn that the plot concerns not a tomato but the Judgment of Paris, with the prize of the Golden Apple. Still, I can’t help wondering if early performances prompted giggling (I’m like, “Hey guys, Cesti’s gone and written an opera about a tomato!”).
The opera is mentioned in the fascinating, mouth-watering
David Gentilcore, Pomodoro!: a history of the tomato in Italy (2010),
whose basic culinary ingredients are liberally seasoned with wise observations on social and economic change.
The tomato’s uses were continually subject to change, from production to exchange, distribution, and production. […] The tomato is an ideal basis for examining the prevailing values, beliefs, conditions, and structures in the society of which it was a part and how they changed over several centuries.
In Chapter 1, “Strange and horrible things”, Gentilcore dates the recorded history of the tomato in Italy from 31st October 1548, when Cosimo de’ Medici presented a basketful to the excellencies of Pisa—who seem to have been bemused:
And the basket was opened and they looked at one another with much thoughtfulness.
Remarkably, it would be well over 300 years before the tomato gained widespread favour among the Italian population in the pasta sauces we now know and love, belatedly becoming a national symbol—for Italian emigrants abroad, during the Fascist period, and later. Other New World imports (such as maize, potatoes, tobacco, American beans, chillies, cocoa, vanilla) gained acceptance more quickly.
Cesti’s opera was premiered in Vienna; the composer died the following year, and I haven’t yet seen evidence of further performances—staging it would have been a massive undertaking. So audiences in Italy may even have been denied the opportunity of a good giggle, although word must have spread. Still, in Italy, over a century after the tomato was first recorded there, one might suppose that the word pomodoro (the pomo referring generally to fruit, not to the apple) at least had become part of the vocabulary of the elite who were the audience for such spectacles. But then, they would also be familiar with the ancient story—although from the simple synopsis one might not imagine that it called for elaborate stage machinery to depict tableaus like shipwrecks and collapsing towers:
The gods ask the Trojan prince Paris to decide which of the goddesses Venus, Juno, and Pallas (Minerva) is the most beautiful and thus deserving of the Golden Apple. Paris gives the prize to Venus. The spurned goddesses try to get their revenge until Jupiter decides to end the confusion, turns to the audience and awards the golden apple to the Empress Margaret Theresa [“Typical!”].
An early Miss World contest, then, with Paris in the role of Bob Hope.
The tomato had been introduced to Europe by Cortés, reaching Italy by way of Spain, as a botanical specimen. The physician-botanist Mattioli described it in 1544, using the name pomo d’oro in his 1554 revision. But confusingly, the term also continued to denote the fruit in the ancient myth of the Hesperides.
Gentilcore notes the early association of tomato and eggplant (or aubergine, splendidly advertised by British greengrocers as OBOS). The latter, incidentally, reached Europe from Persia by way of Andalucia.
In 1628 the Paduan physician Sala regarded tomatoes as “strange and horrible things”, following
a description of locust-eating in Ethiopia, spider- and cricket-eating in Padua, and ant- and worm-eating in India.
Indeed, to eat them was still commonly regarded as harmful, even poisonous.
Yet, as both Durante and Sala inadvertently suggest, someone was eating tomatoes, regardless of the dietary advice. Costante Felice, a physician near Urbino, tells us who: “gluttons and those eager for new things”.
Left, Arcimboldo, Vertumnus, c1590; right, door frieze, Cathedral of Pisa, 1600/1601. Artistic depictions of tomatoes were very rare before the mid-18th century; the emperor’s mouth is more likely to contain cherries than cherry tomatoes.
In Chapter 2 Gentilcore broadens the theme to consider Renaissance Europe’s apparent aversion to fruit and vegetables—based on the advice of physicians of the time (cf. Sleeper!). Consumption of vegetables increased through the 17th and 18th centuries, but an Italian culinary manual from 1590 contains not a single reference to them.
Still, health warnings were not necessarily heeded by either princes and courtiers or the common folk—as we’ve been noticing recently… Other treatises attest to a great variety of common vegetables and plants being consumed. In 1596 the English courtier Robert Dallington wrote:
Herbage is the most generall food of the Tuscan, at whose table a sallet is as ordinary as salt at ours; for being eaten of all sorts of persons, and at all times of the yeare: of the rich because they love to spare; of the poore because they cannot choose; of many Religious because of their vow, of most others because of their want. It remaineth to believe that which themselves confesse; namely, that for every horse-load of flesh eaten, there is ten cart-loads of hearbes and rootes; which also their open markets and private tables doe witnesse.
Indeed, the religious institutions made a virtue of a diet rich in vegetables. And Gentilcore notes the importance of markets; the ortolani market gardeners of Turin had their own religious confraternity. He offers an aside on what was described as the “incomprehensible predilection” in Rome for broccoli, later to become “le vainquer de macaroni“. To the consternation of English observers, salad (“the mixing of diverse and various things”) came into vogue. Olive oil was still used more for lighting lamps than for cooking.
As he comments, historians always have difficulty finding information regarding the diet of the poor. From an early-18th-century French report on the dietary habits of Naples, it’s clear that much of the population not only ate vegetables but subsisted on them—along with bread rather than pasta; and tomatoes were part of this regime.
Methods of preparation remained basic because the kitchen utensils remained basic. The peasant kitchen thus was basic, with only a few clay or wooden implements.
Recipe, 1705.
Chapter 3, “They are to be enjoyed”, explores the acculturation of the tomato in 18th-century Italy. By 1759 a survey of farming in Tuscany included it among the “fruits prized by men [sic: see below] as foodstuffs or as condiments for them”. Gentilcore surveys the different varieties of tomato.
Sardinia was a Spanish possession until 1720, and the Sardinians, at all social levels, may have been “the first [in ‘Italy’] to take the tomato seriously”. Disappointingly for those of us who supposed that sun-dried tomatoes were invented in 1970s’ Hampstead, they appear in a Sardinian recipe from the mid-18th century.
By the 1830s, but probably earlier too, enterprising peasant women in the Cagliari area were selling sun-dried tomatoes. This is an important reminder of the role of gender in agrarian change. Indeed, women frequently were responsible for the cultivation, preparation, and sale of foodstuffs, and tomatoes were becoming an important element of domestic production, if not consumption.
Recipes, 1773.
We now find tomatoes not only eaten cooked and raw, but preserved in a thick paste, and in sauces. Still, their appreciation was regional: for southern peasants they were a major ingredient of their ordinary food, but they played only an occasional role in northern cuisine—and this remains true today. **
Tomatoes were now becoming so common that people were throwing them away—or at least were throwing them. In Italy, tomatoes were the missile of choice to show disapproval of public performers, and the activity came to be known as a pomodorata.
An 1863 report refers to the poor of Naples eating something called pizza, “seasoned on the top with an abundance or oil or pork fat, with cheese, oregano, garlic, parsley, mint leaves, with tomato especially in summer, and finally sometimes even with small fresh fish”. As Gentilcore observes, tomato was not yet a basic element of pizza, but only one possibility among several.
Moreover, that report may also contain the earliest reference to pasta as a staple food accompanied by tomato sauce—the subject of Chapter 4. It coincided with the movement to unify the different states and islands into a single nation.
Indeed, the triumph of pasta was also remarkably late. Types such as lasagne, vermicelli, and maccheroni were already established by the 16th century (spaghetti was a latecomer), but pasta was eaten soft, cooked for long periods, and thus accompanied by dry condiments; it was still a side dish. The two best-known regions for production were the Ligurian coast and the Bay of Naples.
By the mid-19th century the Neapolitans commonly ate pasta in taverns and as street food. It was now served slightly hard (vierd vierd: the expression al dente only became common after World War One)—a novelty that soon spread.
Making the preserve for the sauce (conserva, passata, salsa) was still largely a small-scale, local activity. Towards the end of the 19th century a French traveller in Calabria commented:
We are, in effect, in the season in which, in every Calabrian house, tomato preserve is made for use during the rest of the year. It is a solemn occasion in the popular life of these lands, a kind of festive celebration, an excuse for get-togethers and gatherings… Neighbours, and especially the neighbourhood women, get together in different houses one after the other for the making of conserva di pomi d’or, a procedure that culminates with a large meal; and they gossip as much as they can while crushing and cooking the tomatoes. It is here that for several months the locale’s chronicle of scandal is identified and commented on; it is here that those old rustic songs, which are today so avidly collected by scholars keen on folklore, are repeated from generation to generation.
By the 1880s tomato paste began to be exported to the USA. Its industrialisation was concentrated (sic, as Gentilore notes!) in Liguria, Emilia Romagna, and Campania. Tomatoes were first canned in the USA and Britain; in Italy, Parma took a leading role in both cultivation and preservation. Tomato ketchup was already becoming the national condiment of the USA.
The marriage between pasta and the tomato is usually said to have taken place in Naples around the 1830s. Pasta al pomodoro only gradually became a national stereotype from the late 19th century—just as millions of Italians started crossing the ocean to the New World, where the tomato had originated. It was to make repeated crossings.
So while I find it a challenge to imagine Botticelli and Michelangelo not tucking into a plate of penne arrabiata, such dishes would have been hardly more familiar to Verdi as they were to Monteverdi. Even as late as the 1930s when Umberto Saba met Gabriele D’Annunzio, he was more impressed by the novelty of the plate of pasta with tomato sauce (“a crimson marvel”) than by the Fascist celebrity himself.
The first acclaimed pizza was cooked for Queen Margherita in Naples in 1889; of three pizzas prepared for her, one was seasoned with tomato, mozzarella, and basil—the red, white, and green of the new national flag. In fact, its history goes back considerably earlier.
Above we saw a folk version of pizza in 1863 (for much earlier antecedents, see wiki). Pizzas were publicly made and sold in Naples by late in the 17th century. During his stay there in 1835, Alexandre Dumas described it as the staple diet of the city’s poor—with pasta eaten only on Sundays. By the middle of the century the city had over eighty pizzerie. In the 1880s Carlo Collodi, writing for a young audience, was underwhelmed:
Do you want to know what pizza is? It is a flat bread of leavened dough, toasted in the oven, with a sauce of a little bit of everything on it. The black of the toasted bread, the off-white of the garlic and anchovies, the greeny yellow of the oil and the lightly fried greens, and the red bits of the tomatoes scattered here and there give the pizza an air of messy grime very much in keeping with that of the man selling it.
The juxtaposition of hunger and gluttony is one theme of Collodi’s Pinocchio, first published in book form in 1883.
Pinocchio jumps into the sea, only to find himself in a fisherman’s net. Pinocchio explains to the fisherman that he is not a fish to be eaten, but a puppet. The fisherman replies that he has never caught a “puppet fish”, and asks how he would prefer to be cooked: “Would you like to be fried in the frying pan, or would you prefer to be stewed with tomato sauce?”
Meanwhile bread, often eaten stale, remained a basic foodstuff. In Puglia there was a popular proverb Ce mange paene e pomedaore nan ve me’ o dattaore (“He who eats bread and tomato, to the doctor will never go”).
In Chapter 5, “Authentic Italian gravy”, the scene shifts to the USA, along with successive waves of migrants. From 1876 to 1945 over nine million Italians crossed the Atlantic in search of a new life, most of them arriving between the 1890s and 1920s (cf. Accordion crimes).
Left, making tomato paste the Sicilian way, Madison WI, mid-1920s; right, supper on the Lower East Side, NYC, 1915.
Ventura’s 1886 short story “Peppino”, set in New York, describes pasta with tomato sauce, then still a novelty. Gentilcore goes on:
Making homemade tomato paste (conserva) was, for many immigrant families, partly a symbolic link to the town left behind, partly a matter of taste preference, and partly good economic sense.
Many immigrants also resorted to canned tomato paste. At first, such preserves were imported from Italy, but local production soon competed. The discussion subsumes the varieties of tomato, and the history of additives—including coal tar and formaldehyde.
In the early 20th century, the UK was the second main importer of Italian tomato preserves; meanwhile the British took to growing their own, with the growth of the suburbs and the increasing availability of greenhouses.
Ironically, American immigrants were often unaware of how much change was taking place as they strove to maintain continuity.
As emigrants, they had left Italy because of “hunger”, but as immigrants nostalgia and longing quickly set in. This was not nostalgia for the “land of poverty”, of course, but for the festive foods and the community to which they belonged. Consequently, they reproduced the food production and consumption patterns that were more dreamed of than actual in the world left behind. The “old country” became a mythologised place, which immigrant parents described to their children as a place where poverty and hunger coexisted with food that was good and natural and where they all ate together as a family.
The ritual of the Sunday dinner signified that the family was living the American dream, and
the focus for the transmission (or, if you prefer, the inculcation) of cultural mores and aspirations from parents to children. The place of origin that parents described to their children on these occasions was not so much a real place as a place remembered, a place imagined. The immigrants gradually filled it with idealised constructions, which had a very real function [for them]: to interpret, explain, criticise, and even deny the New World present, to both themselves and their children.
An account from 1940s’ America remains true today (note the typical use of the male pronoun!):
The Italian forced to live far away from his homeland, wherever in the world he sets his table, rejects every kind of cooking in order to establish his own, the simple but tasty cooking of his native land. And more than anything else he does not give up his traditional dish of macaroni with tomato sauce.
The new hybrid of the Italian-American restaurant too became stereotypical to the point of caricature—the “red-sauce joint, with its dishes smothered in tomato sauce, its red-checked tablecloths, and its candles stuck in Chianti bottles”.
By the 1930s the clientele of such restaurants had shifted from poor single immigrant bordanti to “bohemians” in search of an “Italian experience”.
Somewhat gleefully, Gentilcore also documents the invention of canned spaghetti in tomato sauce, dating from the early 20th century.
The sight of GIs opening cans of tomato spaghetti must have been a strange one to southern Italian peasants as the allied forces made their way up the peninsula in the latter stages of World War II. […]
It is easy to look down on such products, but it was a new way of eating food. After all, both spaghetti with tomato sauce and the invention of canning began about the same time, in the mid-19th century, so why shouldn’t they be united? It is just that we attribute different meanings, different values, and a different social status to pasta al pomodoro and canned spaghetti.
Returning to Italy, Chapter 6, “The autarchical tomato”, takes the story on to the Fascist era.
The mass migration of millions of Italians across the Atlantic had a positive effect on dietary practices in Italy in the form of remittances and return migration. […] For the first time, these remittances gave many Italians a chance to put aside money or goods.
Thus food preservation flourished as never before. But as economic prosperity grew, expectations and aspirations continued to change.
Gentilcore continues the story of the industrialisation of tomato processing—noting a company in Felino near Parma that rejoiced in the name Società anonima di coltivatori per la produzione delle conserve di pomodoro.
Changing patterns of organised labour had been giving rise to social unrest since early in the 20th century. Despite labour laws, even in the 1940s much of the burden for cultivation was borne by women and children. After World War One strikes and riots erupted. Mussolini’s Fascist Party sought to restore order—and to make Italy self-sufficient in food.
While the campaign of the Fascist Futurist Marinetti to abolish pasta was fruitless (indeed, Neapolitans came out onto the streets in protest), he didn’t extend his proscription to the “light and adaptable” tomato. Even ketchup survived the regime, though with their aversion to foreign words, it was renamed Rubra. Much Fascist food advertising was aimed at the resourceful housewife.
After 1924, when the USA restricted immigration, the Italian regime sought to replace it with Libya as a destination; as they proclaimed autarchia, or self-sufficiency, tomato cultivation was propounded there too. None of these projects bore much fruit.
On the eve of Italy’s fateful entry into World War Two in 1940, it was exporting virtually all of its fresh tomato crop to Germany; Gentilcore observes that Italy’s “Pact of Steel” with Nazi Germany that year might as well have been called the “tomato pact”.
Chapter 7, “The tomato conquest”, opens with a reminder of the poverty of Italy (particularly the chronically afflicted rural south) in the 1950s, as depicted in the neo-realist films of the day. But industrialisation, urbanisation, refrigerators, and the rise of supermarkets further transformed people’s eating habits. In the two decades from 1950, Italians grew in height but not in weight, despite the ever greater popularity of pasta. As stereotype and reality began to fuse, Italians could now eat spaghetti al pomodoro to their heart’s content. It was increasingly popular in Britain and the USA too, although pundits like Elizabeth David resisted the cliché, stressing the regional variety of la cucina Italiana.
Gentilcore’s material is now supplemented by feature films, such as two scenes, both from 1954—Totò’s spaghetti scene in Miseria e nobiltà (1954):
and Alberto Sordi’s scene from Un Americano a Roma (also 1954):
The recipe for spaghetti with tomato sauce included in Sophia Loren’s In cucina con amore (1971) is a tribute to the earthy recipes of her grandmother.
The disparity between north and south persisted. In his song Siamo meridionali! (1980) Mimmo Cavallo referred back to the family bathtub of southern migrants, classic receptacle for the growing of tomatoes (coltiviamo pomodori ddint’e vasche ‘e bagno):
Such migration from the south influenced the eating habits of both the migrants and the hosts.
In the Hollywood “pasta paradigm” (see e.g. this 1978 article by Daniel Golden), “the tomato sauces prepared and consumed by gangsters echo the bloody acts they commit”. One thinks of two scenes from Goodfellas (1990)—at home:
and in prison:
Pomodoro! can’t quite find a place for one of the great spaghetti-eating scenes: in Tampopo, Japanese debutantes are strictly schooled in the etiquette of eating them properly (another failed project, like Mussolini’s Fascism):
Nor does Gentilcore mention the “pizza effect” of anthropology, whereby elements of a nation or people’s culture are transformed or at least more fully embraced elsewhere, then re-imported to their culture of origin (cf. Tibetan “singing bowls”). The tomato played a role in the dubious “Mediterranean diet”.
By the 1980s, EU subsidies were further transforming the food economy, with Puglia benefitting notably. The Epilogue surveys the current tomato scene in Italy and beyond. As multinationals service our demand for year-round supply of “fresh” foodstuffs by sending them on vast, irrational journeys, Gentilcore addresses the global problem of labour slavery, organised crime, and trafficking. As immigrants began performing the tasks that Italians now shunned, the organisation and exploitation of labour by gang bosses was already featured in Pummaro’ (Michele Placido, 1989). Heavily staffed by African immigrants, and more recently eastern Europeans, the labour force is more vulnerable than the giornatori of yesteryear. Polish gang bosses exploit the Poles who work for them.
In a justly nostalgic passage which will strike a chord in Britain and elsewhere,
Nowadays, tomatoes look the same everywhere in Italy. Whereas “the real tomato has different, complicated shapes, with splits and streaks, and often pronounced baroque features, which so pleased the Neapolitan painters of the 17th century” [actually not yet, as Gentilcore points out], tomatoes today taste of nothing; they are full of water.
EU subsidies were not only unwelcome to producers in California, but hit West African countries hard. In turn, Italian growers have been hostile to Chinese imports, with the term “yellow peril” rearing its ugly head again (cf. Fu Manchu).
Gentilcore notes the Chinese term fanqie 番茄, “foreign eggplant”—the tomato was introduced there quite early by European missionaries, but still remains quite niche. BTW, it’s also known as xihongshi 西红柿 (“Western red persimmmon”), which reminds me of yet another story that I heard from Tian Qing (e.g. here, and here): during a phase of reviving Maoist “red songs” in Xi’an, some wag suggested the city might be renamed Tomato (Xihongshi 西红市 “Western red city”). I must also put in a word for the succulent tomatoes grown by Li Manshan.
This book will make you hungry—not just for knowledge.
* * *
All this is yet another instance of how things we assume to be eternal and immutable, like harmony and democracy, turn out not to be so. Another reason why I’ve cited Pomodoro! at some length is because its integrative approach, while perhaps a hallmark of most research worth its (um) salt, bears an affinity with that of ethnomusicology, including reception history—as for musicking, so for tomato-ing.
* Not to be confused with his long-lost Russian cousin Cestikoff, whose opera Il trasporto del pompino, regrettably not about fire-engines, was banned in St Petersburg. Allegedly.
** Cf. The Monty Python cheeseshop sketch: Cleese: “How about Cheddar?” Palin: “Well, we don’t get much call for it around here, Sir.” Cleese: “Not much call—it’s the single most popular cheese in the world!” Palin (smugly): “Not round here, Sir.“
I wonder how many of us pause to notice that today, the 25th March, is the Feast of the Annunciation. At least in north Europe, popular awareness of the cycle of feast days in the Christian calendar has been much diluted (that’s an observation rather than a lament). So here are some representations of the event in art and music.
The Annunciation is one of the most popular themes in Christian art, notably frescos and paintings. Wiki introduces variations over time and region:
The composition of depictions is very consistent, with Gabriel, normally standing on the left, facing the Virgin, who is generally seated or kneeling, at least in later depictions. Typically, Gabriel is shown in near-profile, while the Virgin faces more to the front. She is usually shown indoors, or in a porch of some kind, in which case Gabriel may be outside the building entirely, in the Renaissance often in a garden, which refers to the hortus conclusus, sometimes an explicit setting for Annunciations. The building is sometimes clearly the Virgin’s home, but is also often intended to represent the Jerusalem Temple, as some legendary accounts placed the scene there.
The Virgin may be shown reading, as medieval legend represented her as a considerable scholar, or engaged in a domestic task, often reflecting another legend that she was one of a number of virgins asked to weave a new Veil of the Temple.
Late medieval commentators distinguished several phases of the Virgin’s reaction to the appearance of Gabriel and the news, from initial alarm at the sudden vision, followed by reluctance to fulfill the role, to a final acceptance. These are reflected in art by the Virgin’s posture and expression.
In Late Medieval and Early Renaissance, the impregnation of the Virgin by God may be indicated by rays falling on her, typically through a window, as light passing through a window was a frequent metaphor in devotional writing for her virginal conception of Jesus. Sometimes a small figure of God the Father or the Holy Spirit as a dove is seen in the air, as the source of the rays.
Less common examples feature other biblical figures in the scene. Gabriel, especially in northern Europe, is often shown wearing the vestments of a deacon on a grand feast day, with a cope fastened at the centre with a large morse (brooch).
Especially in Early Netherlandish painting, images may contain very complex programmes of visual references, with a number of domestic objects having significance in reinforcing the theology of the event.
Among Byzantine representations:
Armenia: Toros Taronetsi, 1323.
Russia, 14th century.
Annunciation to Zechariah, from an Ethiopian Bible, c1700.
Much later in England, the theme was revived by the Pre-Raphaelites:
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1850.
John William Waterhouse, 1914.
* * *
In A question of attribution Alan Bennett introduced his drôle and perceptive views on the lost symbolism of art, fancifully attributing his comments on Annunciation paintings to the Queen (see On visual culture).
And recalling her Catholic upbringing in Priestdaddy, Patricia Lockwood reflects on her youthful quest for enlightenment:
While we were growing up there was another painting in our house: Fra Angelico’s Annunciation. It was one of those paintings that seem to continue outside their own borders and reach into real life; this, I thought, must be what “good art” must mean. Two hands stretched out of the sun and shot a streaming gilt tassel into Mary, who bent over the place where she was struck. The angel, with feathers like a fractal quail, delivered his message directly into her eyes. Mary’s face was an unripe peach, not ready, not ready; a little book slid off her right thigh like a pat of butter. Stars in the ceiling pierced down. Far to the left, those two green grinches of sin, Adam and Eve, began their grumbling nude walk offstage.
When I left home, I hardly ever saw pictures of the Annunciation anymore. I was not expecting this somehow—I thought I would still encounter the messenger angel everywhere. It was the messenger angel who captured my attention, and not the angel with the flaming sword and not the dark-headed angel of death and certainly not the angel with the regrettable name of Phanuel. By instinct I understood that the most interesting one is the information angel, who carries the newspaper that is meant for you over the doorstep and into your life.
And how does the good news arrive? It does not arrive in your ears, exactly; it arrives in your face as a great gush of light. It is carried to you, not like a rose but like the symbol of a rose, straight into your understanding. There is no sound. It happens in your bedroom, or in your cave in the middle of the desert, with a lion’s head spreading on your lap, or on top of the pillar where you’ve sat for a hot century. It happens in your study, wherever that happens to be.
By the baroque era, German composers commonly provided cantatas to celebrate the Feast of the Annunciation—notably Bach (much detail here, with links to discussions of individual works).
Talheim altarpiece, 1518.
His two surviving cantatas for the Annunciation on 25th March coincided with Palm Sunday. He composed Himmelskönig, sei willkommen (BWV 182) for Weimar in 1714, depicting the entry into Jerusalem:
Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern: left, the hymn, Nikolai 1599; right, violin part.
In German, rather than Verkündigung, the Annunciation is commonly known as Englischgruss—which one realises means “Angelic greeting” (cf. the finale of Mahler 4), rather than a stiff handshake and lugubrious “How do you do”.
So here’s Brahms‘s a cappella setting Der englische gruß, simple and affecting:
I’m grateful to Sophia Loren, well, for everything—but right now, for introducing me to Lucio Dalla’s song Caruso(1986), her own favourite among her excellentDesert island discs recently.
Over a slow pulse, the text is delivered in an urgent parlando-rubato style, the intensity of the melody highlighted by a vertiginously high register, suggesting flamenco deep song:
Lucio Dalla (who actually came from Bologna) was staying at the Excelsior Vittoria Hotel in Sorrento, coincidentally in the very same room where many years earlier Enrico Caruso had stayed shortly before his death. As the owners told him about Caruso’s last days and his turbulent love life, Dalla was inspired to compose the song—the melody and lyrics of whose refrain are based on the 1930 Neapolitan song Dicitencello Vuie. (As a foil to the male gaze, the background of Naples is a fine pretext to remind ourselves of the brilliant novels of Elena Ferrante.)
While in both its theme and its style Caruso clearly invites versions by tenors like Pavarotti and Bocelli, it makes a good instance of how such music is better heard without polished artifice (here Dalla sings it with Pavarotti).
Qui dove il mare luccica, E tira forte il vento Su una vecchia terrazza Davanti al golfo di Surriento Un uomo abbraccia una ragazza, Dopo che aveva pianto Poi si schiarisce la voce, E ricomincia il canto.
Te voglio bene assaje, Ma tanto tanto bene sai è una catena ormai, Che scioglie il sangue dint’ ‘e ‘vvene sai.
Vide le luci in mezzo al mare, Pensò alle notti là in America Ma erano solo le lampare Nella bianca scia di un’elica Sentì il dolore nella musica, Si alzò dal pianoforte Ma quando vide la luna uscire da una nuvola Gli sembrò più dolce anche la morte Guardò negli occhi la ragazza, Quelli occhi verdi come il mare Poi all’improvviso uscì una lacrima, E lui credette di affogare.
Te voglio bene assaje, Ma tanto tanto bene sai è una catena ormai, Che scioglie il sangue dint’ ‘e ‘vvene sai
Potenza della lirica, Dove ogni dramma è un falso Che con un po’ di trucco e con la mimica Puoi diventare un altro Ma due occhi che ti guardano Così vicini e veri Ti fan scordare le parole, Confondono i pensieri Così diventa tutto piccolo, Anche le notti là in America Ti volti e vedi la tua vita Come la scia di un’elica Ma sì, è la vita che finisce, Ma lui non ci pensò poi tanto Anzi si sentiva già felice, E ricominciò il suo canto.
Te voglio bene assaje, Ma tanto tanto bene sai è una catena ormai, Che scioglie il sangue dint’ ‘e ‘vvene sai
Here Dalla sings it live, for an audience who are clearly just as enraptured as Sophia Loren:
So returning to Sophia Loren, in her Desert Island discs she discusses her most recent project working with her son Edoardo Ponti on The life ahead. And she recalls her illustrious early career, such as the filming of Two women(La Ciociara, Vittorio de Sica, 1960)—a story about the horrors of war, based on the book by Alberto Moravia (cf. The conformist). Here’s a trailer:
The film ends with Loren and Brando dancing a tango—in the words of this review:
Chaplin was a sexual revolutionary long before the sexual revolution, and here, at the age of 77, he foresaw—even unto the film’s concluding tango, half a decade before Bertolucci’s—a world in which sex would break down the doors and come out of the closets.
Though the film wasn’t a great critical success, at least it was admired by John Betjeman and Jack Nicholson—more unlikely bedfellows…
Back with Desert island discs, how delightful is Sophia Loren’s final greeting—making us staid Radio 4 listeners feel even more grey and reserved:
With our unwelcome new sensitivity to the resurgence of unaccountable authoritarianism, and to complement my post on the resistance to Mussolini, I’ve been reading
Richard Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy: life under the dictatorship (2005),
a thorough, nuanced study of the period (see e.g. this review).
Bosworth notes how our understanding is impeded by the popular image of Italians as “nice people” (brava gente), with their alluring cuisine, fashion, art and architecture (cf. the “three Fs” in Portugal). With revealing stories about provincial life, he explores why ordinary Italians were vulnerable to fascism, and how complicit they were.
Italian society, with its massive regional and class divides, was far from monolithic. Values can and do change, but in such a fragmented, unstable country, most people were “impervious to the cheap nationalist rhetoric about a homogeneous and united people”. Bosworth’s cast includes peasants, landowners, factory workers, industrialists, shopkeepers, doctors, teachers.
Within the “civilised” north and the “barbarous” south there were significant regional divides. Besides modern industrial Turin, disease-prone Venice, the south, Sicily, and Sardinia, Rome was a particular case. Even in the 1950s, peasants in Salento regarded “national roads” as foreign and alien. Poverty, starvation, and sickness were common.
Bosworth describes assaults on press freedom, the liquidation of non-Fascist trade unions, squadrism, and the secret police; the glorification of warfare, and ill-fated foreign colonial aggression (Libya, Ethiopia, Somalia, Albania, Greece, involvement in the Spanish Civil War), accompanied by camps, genocide, and chemical weapons.
During the Ethiopian campaign the authorities soon frowned upon the popular ditty Faccetta nera, with its suggestion of racial mingling. It’s disturbingly easy to find online:
Despite propaganda, such costly foreign ventures were not widely supported. Meanwhile at home the regime was constantly beset by economic troubles and corruption.
Amidst tensions between the state and the Catholic church, one area on which they agreed was the status of women, whose mission was to “breed, cook, and worship”.
In both rural and urban Italy, women could rarely detect anything that was modern in their lives.
Progress was painfully slow and patchy. Italy’s low birth rate in recent decades goes back to this period; despite exhortations from state and Church, and strict abortion laws, the birth rate fell through the 1930s. Even in some isolated rural paesi in the north, some women had never heard of Mussolini.
Fascist rhetoric found it hard to penetrate family values.
Italian homes may have contained images of the Duce but portraits of the Popes, Mary, Christ, and the holy saints, the King, the other royals and a slew of other not reliably Fascist lay saints, of whom Garibaldi was the most loved and widespread, could also be found on apartment walls.
The period from 1880 was marked by major waves of emigration, in particular to the USA. Although from the late 1920s it became much more difficult to leave, fascist and anti-fascist groups competed in the diverse foreign communities.
Bosworth qualifies the notion that the First World War led directly to Fascism. By 1917 “liberal and dynastic” motives gave way to a “popular and national” agenda. As in the Austro-Hungarian army, officers and ordinary troops literally spoke different languages. And as elsewhere, far from bringing peace, the end of the war brought renewed social conflicts and continuing violence. Among the “great powers”, Italy was most fragile.
One important prelude to the Mussolini regime was Gabriele D’Annunzio’s regime at Fiume. Meanwhile violence became ever more common—as a means of asserting local power and advancing wealth, status, and authority, and to counter the spectre of Bolshevism. Bosworth looks at the uneven distribution of fascism in the provinces. The murder of Matteotti in 1924 was a turning point leading to dictatorship and the elimination of dissent. Opponents of the regime were sentenced to confino exile. During his exile on the island of Lipari, erstwhile fascist Leandro Arpinetti took up cooking, while lamenting that the locals were “somnolent poltroons”—a term that I must incorporate into my lexicon of invective (cf. Slonimsky).
The Balilla scout movement, along with “Fascistised” sport and leisure activities, made potent tools for the indoctrination of youth. Radio (and later, film) was recruited to the Fascist cause, but technology still lagged behind; even by 1940 there were still only half a million telephones (indeed, they were still rare in post-war Britain).
Among those flocking to the cause were the apiarists of Trentino. Their bees were “a superior breed (razza)”, “the best in the world”,
the natural model for Italians when they worked in perfect peace, harmony and fraternal love under the Duce.
The “purification” of language was another arena of contention. A campaign to replace the polite third-person usage Lei with the more “manly” second-person voi had mixed results. Zuppa inglese was renamed zuppa impero; hotel was replaced by albergo.
Qualifying the idea that Italian dictatorship may seem rather benign compared to those of Germany and the USSR, Bosworth reminds us of its brutality. Racial policy too was less extreme than under Nazism, but its ramifications were ugly.
Besides xenophobic assumptions about blacks, Arabs, and “Slavs”, and “border fascism” in the northeast, anti-semitism only became a major stain under the alliance with Nazi Germany. Indeed, Jews had played a role in the rise of Italian Fascism; yet racist laws accumulated after 1938. Under German rule, Jews were rounded up and deported from late 1943: among 7,495 deportees, 610 survived.
Schoolteacher partisan, Val d’Aosta 1944.
Active partisan resistance grew, though numbers were was not so large as one may imagine.
Bosworth opens his account of the legacy with the 2004 visit of George W. Bush to the site of the 1944 massacre at the Ardeatine caves just outside Rome, where SS troops murdered 335 Italian men—one of a series of such reprisals (see also under The Ratline). He deflates the spin that the memorial represents a “virtuous nation as victim”.
Again, the end of the war didn’t bring peace (cf. Keith Lowe, Savage continent). After the partisan murders of 1945 (notably in the “triangle of death” in Emilia-Romagna), political fascism began to assume new forms. As elsewhere, commitment to an institutional purge of fascism soon faded. Revisionist accounts were widely read. Right- and left-wing terrorist violence grew alarmingly through the 1970s. Burlesque-only was keen to belittle the fascist heritage.
In architecture, a sadly fitting memorial to Fascism in Rome is the grandiose model suburb of EUR. Initiated in 1942 but only completed after Liberation, it became a soulless place, “a lesson in how not to foster urban vitality”.
The whole psyche of the era is effectively evoked in Alberto Moravia’s novel The conformist and Bernardo Bertolucci’s film.
Renewed alarm over the widespread resurgence of fascism has led to much analysis of the diverse forms in which it surfaces. Now I’m all for experts; in an era of groundless rants, I’m grateful for balanced presentations. I’m underwhelmed by erudite arguments that the current crisis in the USA does not make a totally identical parallel with past societies elsewhere. [1] With Trumpism sharing many themes with regimes like those of Hitler or Mussolini (themselves quite different)—xenophobia, hate speech, assaults on the media and the rule of law, manipulation of the electorate, support for violent militias, putting people in cages—there are clearly ample causes for anxiety.
Sous aucun prétexte je ne veux Avoir de réflexes malheureux Il faut que tu m’ex——pliques un peu mieux Comment te dire adieu
Mon coeur de silex vite prend feu Ton coeur de Pyrex résiste au feu Je suis bien perplexe, je ne veux Me résoudre aux adieux
(Je sais bien qu’un ex——amour n’a pas de chance, ou si peu Mais pour moi un ex——plication voudrait mieux)
Sous aucun prétexte je ne veux Devant toi surex——poser mes yeux Derrière un Kleenex je saurais mieux Comment te dire adieu Comment te dire adieu
(Tu as mis à l’index nos nuits blanches, nos matins gris-bleu Mais pour moi une ex——plication vaudrait mieux)
Sous aucun prétexte je ne veux Devant toi surex—poser mes yeux Derrière un Kleenex je saurais mieux Comment te dire adieu Comment te dire adieu Comment te dire adieu
She sounds soooo cool, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of hurting going on here. Instead, she finds inner strength through a flurry of insouciant wordplay on “ex“—not least Pyrex (a niche hommage to kitchenware in French chanson) and Kleenex. Sex is just a sibilant away….
Nor does she let up in her gorgeous sprechstimme interludes (above a change to triple metre on strings), stressing ex——amour and ex——plication (as in the sung ex——pliques and surex——poser) with an ecc——entric hiatus, negating the natural rhythm of speech—not so much a speech impediment as the kind of deliberate pause advocated by therapists to prepare the stammerer to approach the following syllable (especially plosives) with easy onset!
True, she would make the Paris phone directory sound irresistibly seductive (cf. the HP sauce label), but here her spoken sections further the dramatic effect, ex——punging, ex——orcising her ex——perience. They’re punctuated by a funky syncopated trumpet motif, courtesy of Caravelli, worthy of Hardy’s fellow-Parisian Messiaen—who three years previously had completed the Sept haïkaï…
Then there’s the extra visual frisson of veux, malheureux, auxadieux, mieux. One even hopes to hear her pronouncing the x there (I wonder how this works: do native French speakers somehow hear it in their heads?).
À propos, like many men, Monsieur Pyrex, the passionless, fire-resistant subject of this nonchalent lament, clearly needs his head ex——amining.
Françoise Hardy subtly subverts both the melodrama and the “gamine elfin waif” trope (see also Feminine endings). Put this song on the British school syllabus and there’ll soon be a legion of fluent young Francophiles…
Her German version of the song works well too; while the lyrics are less detached, they make a bit of an effort to keep the “ex” theme going:
Nach zwei Cognacsex bekamst du Mut Deine Abschiedstexte waren gut [Das Lied von der Erde for generation X?] Ratlos und perplex nur dachte ich Was mach ich ohne dich
Stets war mein Komplex du bist zu schön Charm hast du für sechs, ach was, für zehn ** Liebt denn so was exklusiv nur mich Was mach ich ohne dich
(Ob du daran denkst Wie einsam und verloren ich bin Nein, du hast schon längst Eine Andere im Sinn)
Gib mir keinen Extrakuss jetzt mehr Der nur noch Reflexbewegung wäre Ratlos und perplex nur frag ich mich Was mach ich ohne dich Was mach ich ohne dich
(All die Nächte mit dir Voll von Glück bis zum Morgengrauen Die und dich stahl mir Eine andere Frau)
Diese Dame X, die dich mir nimmt Fliegt auf deine Tricks wie ich, bestimmt Dann als Dame ex sagt sie wie ich Was mach ich ohne dich Was mach ich ohne dich
And she sings it in Italian, with yet another angle on the story:
Non voglio un pretesto per pietà Sai che io detesto falsità Sii un po’ più onesto quando vuoi Finirla fra di noi
Non restar perplesso ad inventar Scuse che del resto non van mai Oltre ad un modesto rendez-vous A cui non vieni più
(Io so bene che i castelli di carta Con un soffio van giù Non ne hai colpa tu)
Non voglio un pretesto per pietà Sai che io detesto falsità Dammi il fazzoletto quando vuoi Finirla fra di noi Finirla fra di noi
That first verse is good:
I don’t want an excuse for piety Know that I detest falsity Be a bit more honest when you want To finish it between us.
One might think Spanish regional languages would offer potential for the exes too. Anyway, the nuances of mood in these various versions are intriguing. Possibly a multilingual EU directive to Brexit Britain?
Françoise Hardy did a more melancholic version with her soul sister (twin?) Jane Birkin in 1976 (Comment lui dire adieu!):
Later Birkin gave an intense live arabesque rendition (1996/2002), with ex——emplary decorations on solo fiddle:
The 60s, eh?! Ex——traordinare! I am officially applying to be reincarnated as Serge Gainsbourg.
* English pronunciation shontooz, as in A French letter, n.2.
Alongside the soundscape of popular celebration in Italy, we might think ourselves into the mood of late-19th century Italian Catholicism among the elite with the Quattro pezzi sacriof Jo Green—sorry, I mean Giuseppe Verdi, composed between 1886 and 1898.
The whole piece, highly chromatic, demands close listening. Of the two a cappella movements Ave Maria and Laudi alla Vergine Maria, the first is inspired by the “enigmatic scale”
(with five semitones and four whole tones!!! Cf. Unpromising chromaticisms)—though I haven’t yet found it in Indian raga, I’d love to hear a dhrupad version.
Recently a friend living in Istanbul, who regularly visits her grown-up children in London, remarked on her shortest ever flight home.
This put me in mind of [cf. Alan Bennett’s Sermon] a story that I just can’t track down—I want to quote the original, but I’ve scoured my groaning bookshelves in vain. * Anyway, until I do find it, I’ll offer you a rough version, which I’m sure is more elaborate, as is the way with oral retellings:
An elderly Italian-American (I’ll call him Luigi) who hasn’t been back to Italy since emigrating to Chicago in his 20s, decides to take a short trip to see Rome again. Dozing off on his flight, he wakes up when the plane touches down on a stopover in New York; so in a daze, delighted that the time has passed so quickly, he gets off. Impressed by the smooth efficiency of Italian passport control, he makes his way to the cab rank, asking the driver, in Italian, to take him to a reasonably-priced hotel downtown. The cab driver is Italian, of course, so they chat away as he takes Luigi to his hotel.
Naturally the receptionist is also Italian, so after checking in he asks her to recommend a nice little family-run trattoria nearby. And so it goes on… In blissful ignorance Luigi spends a happy few days in New York like this, marvelling at how much Rome has changed. He pauses to admire a zampogna and piffero duo on the street. Somewhat surprised to see so much “I ♥ NY” merchandise in the souvenir shops, he puts it down to the relentless march of globalisation; but eventually he finds an “I ♥ Rome” T-shirt, and a cute little plastic model of the Colosseum (which he just hasn’t managed to find time to visit), buying them from the (Italian) assistant to take back proudly to Chicago with him.
So near and yet so far… I really must find the original. Sounds rather like David Sedaris, Beppe Severgnini, or perhaps George Mikes, but no luck yet. Please help, someone!
For more Italian jaunts, click here; and for a touring game, here.
And there shall be a great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will really know where lieth those little things wi- with the sort of … raffia-work base that has an attachment.
Stravinsky’s opera The rake’s progress(1951, with libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallmann, is loosely inspired by a series of paintings by William Hogarth.
I got to know the opera in 1979 through playing it in the pit with Riccardo Chailly and the London Sinfonietta in Milan for La Scala, with sets by David Hockney. With performances only every couple of days, it made a wonderful three-week holiday, giving me my first opportunity to explore Milan and the nearby towns of north Italy (Cremona, Brescia, Bergamo, Verona, and so on), long before our 1990s’ tours of Mozart operas in Parma and Ferrara (for more Italian inspirations, see here). “But that’s not important right now“.
As ever, Richard Taruskin‘s perspectives on Stravinsky’s opera are stimulating (The danger of music, pp.109–17). It also gives me another pretext to admire the wonderful Barbara Hannigan—here she is in concert, singing, and conducting, Anne’s aria from Act 1:
To follow Susan MccLary’s incisive comments on the astounding use of the harpsichord in Brandenburg 5, I admire its sinister use in the Act 3 graveyard scene.
Caroline Moorehead, A bold and dangerous family: the Rossellis and the fight against Mussolini (2017).
The book is framed by crucial murders: of Giacomo Matteotti in 1924, and of the brothers Carlo and Nello Rosselli in 1937.
The rise of fascism in Italy is amply studied by scholars such as Richard Bosworth. Yet the focused, personal angle of biography makes an engaging perspective on the political upheavals of the 20th century—as we find for China (e.g. here; see also under Cultural Revolutions, including my work on the Li family Daoists).
The present physical and mental landscape of Europe is shaped by the events of the past century (for fascism—Italy 1922–45, Portugal 1933–74, Germany 1933–45, Spain 1939–75—see this wiki article). I’ve outlined the rise of fascism in Spain and Portugal in the context of their singing cultures. And as in China, it can be tempting to retreat into nostalgia for early cultural grandeur.
Amelia: the early years While the fate of the brothers is the main story of the book, their lives shouldn’t overshadow that of their mother, Amelia Pincherle Rosselli (1870–1954), Jewish feminist, playwright, and translator.
Reminding us that Italy was only unified in 1870, Moorehead evokes Amelia’s early life in Venice; alongside its splendour, she notes its decaying, sinister feel (D.H. Lawrence: “abhorrent, green, slippery”). She was excited by the launch of the first vaporetto in 1881. Her father died when she was 14, whereupon she moved to Rome. She came to share the ideals of Giuseppe Mazzini, a family friend who spent much of his exile in London. His
patriotism, his hatred of xenophobia and imperialism, his honesty and moral clarity, were all crucial to the Rossellis’ view of themselves and the world they lived in.
Amelia at the time of her marriage.
After her wedding in 1892, the couple took a honeymoon of nearly three months, visiting Naples, Nice, Monte Carlo, Spain, Portugal, North Africa, France, and England. In Vienna Amelia became more politicised, absorbing feminist ideas; becoming multi-lingual, she soon gained a reputation for her challenging plays. After returning to Rome, she gave birth to three sons. But as the couple grew apart, Amelia took them off to live in Florence in 1903, a rather benign separation. There, as Moorehead notes with perspective on modern architectural vandalism, in the last fifteen years alone,
one of the most famous city centres in the world had been stripped down—26 old streets destroyed, along with 40 piazzas—in the name of modernity and hygiene.
Florence (also with a lively expat English community) now made a lively venue for Amelia’s creative talents. Her plays in Venetian dialect were well received. She took part in the evolving feminist movement. Politics played a growing role; as anarchists fostered strikes among the many poor city-dwellers, later battle lines were drawn between reformers and reactionaries. Gaetano Salvemini (1873–1957), an inspiration for the Rossellis, was among the most long-lived anti-fascist historians.
While thinkers were keen to free Italy from the passatismo cult of the past, some futurists also extolled war, like Filippo Tommaso Marinetti; it was important, he wrote, to liberate Italy from
its smelly gangrene of professors, archeologists, Ciceroni and antiquarians. We mean to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards. […] We will glorify war, the world’s only hygiene […] and scorn women.
Hmm—just when it was going so well…
Amidst the cataclysm of World War One (Moorhead notes that as many as half of the Italian soldiers were illiterate), the death of Amelia’s oldest son Aldo in the Dolomites was devastating.*
The rise of Mussolini, and the resistance The unhealed scars of hatred from the war led to the rise of Mussolini. Major strikes of workers from 1920 to 1922 were countered by “punitive expeditions” against “subversives” by fascist squadristi, egged on by the police, army, and judiciary.
Carlo became part of a committed anti-fascist circle that included Filipo Turati, Giacomo Matteotti, and the young Piero Gobetti. Through Salvemini he met the Englishwoman Marion Cave, who would become his wife. In 1923, after a trip to Paris, he got to know the Italian community in London, busy with its own political tensions.
The first Italians, pedlars, organ-grinders, and jugglers had arrived in London early in the 18th century, and settled in Clerkenwell, turning its narrow, modest streets into a little Italy, where few of the women spoke English. England had been welcoming to these exiles, as it was to the artisans, barbers, asphalters, carpenters, tool-makers, cooks, and ice-cream makers who travelled up through France and across the Channel all through the 19th century. Arriving in Clerkenwell, they felt at home among the flowering window boxes and the sheets hanging from the windows. Some sold ice from the back of a cart. Others opened boarding houses. Pasta was made at home, then hung from the washing line to dry.**
Among the more affluent Italian community in London many were sympathetic to the fascist cause, including groups like the splendidly-named Ice Cream and Temperance Refreshment Federation. But others lampooned the fascists.
After taking part in a Fabian gathering in genteel Hindhead, Carlo visited Birmingham and the Midlands, “the real England, smoky, dirty, industrial, ugly, productive”—though he found no redeeming features in English food of whatever social level.
After a brief period of ambivalence towards women’s rights, by 1923 Mussolini went on the attack against feminism. Soon
magazine articles showed pictures of comely peasant women in national dress. And sturdy peasant men “mirthful”, yet “sober in their habits”, enjoying “health” and “praiseworthy” pastimes. Private dance halls were closed “for reasons of morality”. People were urged to become lean, willowy, sinewy. “I have no pity,” declared Mussolini, “for the fat”. The new Italian was to be “Herculean”, potent, granite-like, made of steel.
Italian youth were indoctrinated in the Balilla movement (not to be confused with the Barilla pasta company, latterly unlikely sponsors of the wonderful Coco Gauff). Mussolini sent a mission to England to sudy Baden Powell’s Boy Scouts.
The last photo of Matteotti (centre), shortly before his murder.
The murder of Matteotti in 1924 was a decisive moment, shocking the younger dissidents into political action. It was now clear that Mussolini could not be defeated by legal means.
As repression intensified in Italy, Carlo visited London again to observe guild socialism and the new Labour government. Back in Florence, fascist squadri were ever more active. In Monteleone a sculpture was erected of a Madonna and child brandishing a club, La Madonna del manganello. Salvemini was forced into exile.
Confino After managing to help Turati flee to Paris, Carlo was thrown into prison. Though the sentencing of the defendants to a mere ten months at the “trial of the professors” in 1927 seemed like some kind of victory against fascism, Mussolini still sent them off for five years’ confino on a succession of remote island penal colonies. Meanwhile Nello married Maria Todesco; but he too was soon sentenced to confino.
Banishment to penal colonies was a common method of dealing with opponents of the fascist regimes in Europe (for Portugal, see here; cf. The first gulag), and had a long history as far back as ancient Rome. As elsewhere, in recent years these islands—Ustica, Favignana, Lipari, Ponza, Pantelleria, Lampedusa, Le Tremiti—have become tourist destinations, their painful histories often ignored. In recent years they have also become staging posts for desperate migrants on the route to Europe.
Though conditions were spartan, the islands had a certain rustic charm, and compared to many other such camps conditions were relatively benign. Those with sufficient funds were able to find their own dwellings; they received basic supplies from relatives, and educated themselves—and the locals. The Rossellis’ wives and children, and Amelia, were permitted to join them. Early in 1928, Nello was released from Ustica, though he remained under surveillance.
Meanwhile Carlo was on Lipari. Again the confinati kept busy, selling doughnuts, organizing deliveries of Parmesan, giving talks on Dante.
Left: Nello’s house on Ustica, with a crowd of confinati. Right: Carlo, with Nitti and Lussu, escaping from Lipari on their way to freedom.
Fleeing from such islands was considered impossible; yet in 1929, after several attempts, Carlo managed to escape with two other confinati by boat to Tunisia, eventually reaching Paris, where he joined a lively community of anti-facist exiles; soon Marion and their young children arrived. Nello was soon returned to Ustica before being moved on to Ponza, but he was released again by November.
The struggle continues Though Mussolini’s network of spies was active in Paris, Carlo and his comrades still managed to stage demonstrations in Italy against fascist power, dropping leaflets by plane over Milan. Such resistance may seem largely ineffectual, but it was significant.
In 1930 Nello spent time in England, meeting up with Salvemini and English supporters of the cause. Amelia joined him. Her nephew Alberto Moravia also arrived; though he was now fêted for his novel Gli indifferenti, Amelia and Nello were disturbed by his cool cynicism. Stopping off in Paris on his way back to Italy, Moravia met up with Carlo, who asked him to post a letter in Rome for an anarchist friend, which he did reluctantly.
This passage may sound familiar:
The Italians were fed inconsistencies, falsehoods, contradictions, differing interpretations, all designed to mystify and confuse, many of it [sic] couched in stentorian, martial tones over the radio. It was forbidden to mention failures.
As the indoctrination of youth continued, we can imagine Amelia’s reaction:
As for girls, who had to be protected from the “unnatural desires of English suffragettes” and the frivolity and worldliness of “French coquettes”, they were made to dance, garden, iron, and knit, and given “doll drills”, in which they were taught how to hold babies the correct way. When, in the early summer of 1928, thousands of girls between the ages of 16 and 18 were brought to Rome for the first gymnastic-athletic competition, they were told to discipline their muscles and take part in rifle practice, while at the same time to study “good mothering”, in order to become “neither feeble… nor gloomy”. (Pope Pius XI protested about the rifles: if girls raised their arms, it should “be always and only in prayer and charitable actions”.)
Marinetti continued to propound his wild vision: he
wanted to “fascistise” all culture, do away with classical architecture and fill Italy’s squares with electric trams and overhead wires. He wanted to industrialise Venice and ban everything foreign—films, food, orchestras, and even languages—within “our virile, proud, dynamic pensinula”.
Being antipassatista involved being anti-pasta:
And since the new man had to be futuristic inside as well as out, he launched a campaign against pasta, saying that it had made Italians gross, lazy, complacent, and stupid, and led to pessimism and prostitution. “Until now men have fed themselves like ants, rats, cats, and oxen,” he declared in an article on Futuristic cooking. The new man would do better to eat black olives, fennel hearts, and kumquats, and as he ate, stroke sandpaper and velvet, enjoying the contrast in taste and texture, while a waiter sprayed carnation-scented water on to the back of his neck and from the kitchen were relayed the roars of aeroplane motors. At the Holy Palate, his proposed Futuristic restaurant in Turin, diners would be given a boiled chicken accompanied by ball bearings in whipped cream, served by a “woman of the future”, bald and wearing spectacles. Compared to the remorseless severity and humourlessness of most fascist dictators, Marinetti’s crazy fantasies had a certain innocent charm.
Though Marinetti’s vision may have had little long-term impact, Mussolini did indeed wage war on pasta. His remark to Bocchini, head of his secret police, has a more contemporary ring:
We want to create a kind of magical eye which keeps Italians under control and can at any moment provide me with a complete, up-to-date picture of everything being said and done in the whole of Italy. Men … with the craftiness of a fox and the speed of a serpent, they need to learn the difficult art of provocation, how to insinuate themselves into a crowd, how to fit into every situation and every social circle.
In Florence
a “moral cleansing” was launched, with campaigns against swearing, pornography, immoral plays, and indecent fashions. “Eroticism” was done away with, wherever it occurred. Girls were enjoined not to dance the Charleston, and to wear thick stockings and blouses with long sleeves. Dance halls were closed down. There were calls to ostracise “Northern habits”, such as Christmas trees.
Amelia resigned from the Lyceum, once a lively forum for ideas.
The anti-fascists continued their work. In October 1931 leaflets were dropped over Rome. But the secret police were ever-vigilant.
Turati, whom Carlo described as the moral leader of Italy, died in Paris in 1932. With the aid of Sylvia Pankhurst (but not the British government), Carlo attempted to help Matteotti’s widow leave Italy for Paris.
After Hitler came to power in Germany, he came to Venice in 1934 to meet Mussolini for the first time—neither was enamoured.
In 1935 the remaining members of the anti-fascist network in Turin were arrested—including Carlo Levi, whose months of exile in a southern village prompted him to write Christ stopped at Eboli.
Full of bellicose imperial ambitions, Mussolini launched a brutal campaign in Abyssinia. The reproaches of the British government prompted another tirade from the ever-reliable Martinetti, decrying British snobismo, alcoholism, degeneracy, lack of genius, and above all their “sexual abnormalities”.
Carlo was now recognized as leader of the Paris exiles, and, for the spies watching him, the main threat. In Italy, Moravia had just published Le ambizioni sbagliate, but he rebuffed Carlo’s attempt to recruit him to the cause.
Spain, and the assassination In 1936 the Spanish civil war broke out, with Franco supported by Mussolini. As the anti-fascists sought to redeem their past failures, Carlo set off for the front with a band of volunteers. But with the resistance soon riven by dissent, Carlo returned to Paris in January 1937. That year too, Antonio Gramsci, leader of the Italian Communist Party, died after eleven years in prison.
In Florence anti-semitism was ever more flagrant. Just as a cell of French Cagoulards, with the blessing of Mussolini, was plotting to have Carlo eliminated, Nello, fatefully, resolved to meet his brother in Normandy. In June 1937, after a happy reunion, they were ambushed and murdered as they drove through the woods—Carlo was the target, Nello an unfortunate collateral victim.
The truth emerged only gradually; Pablo Picasso and André Breton were among a group of intellectuals who wrote that if the death of Matteotti had signalled the death of liberty in Italy, that of the Rosselli brothers has signed its death warrant in the whole of Europe.
From Alberto Moravia, Amelia’s much loved nephew, there was total silence. No telephone calls, no letters, no flowers. She did not take it well.
Amelia, broken, left Italy with Maria to Switzerland; soon Marion joined them. Seeking wider horizons, in 1939 they moved to an English village. In 1940 the Germans invaded France; the family now felt it wise to emigrate again to the USA. In New York too, politics were divisive. They met up with like-minded exiles, including the senior Salvemini, who had taken up a teaching post at Harvard in 1934 after going into exile in Paris in 1925.
In a household of women, the matriarch Amelia was now in her seventies; more than either of her daughters-in-law, she approached the New World with curiosity and openness.
Mussolini was ousted from power in the summer of 1943 before he was executed in April 1945. From afar, the Rossellis learned of the liberation of Florence and Rome. Trials were now held for the murders of Carlo and Nello. The family returned to Italy in June 1946, learning how their friends and acquaintances had collaborated with the fascists. In 1951 the bodies of Carlo and Nello were moved from Père Lachaise cemetery to Florence.
Moravia In 1945 Alberto Moravia had at last written to his aunt Amelia trying to explain his inability at the time, under surveillance, to express his condolences for the murder of Carlo and Nello; but she considered him to have acted “out of opportunism, or, at its most charitable, out of weakness”.
Moravia (1907–90) comes poorly out of this whole story. His novel The conformist (1951), which Bertolucci made into a wonderful film (see this post), reads as a telling denunciation of fascism, and is based on the lives and deaths of the Rossellis. The story of Marcello, the damaged protagonist falling prey to the fascist cause in his vain search for “normality”, contrasts with the principled, life-affirming exiles in Paris; his betrayal of Professor Quadri leads to the horrifying assassination of him and his wife in the woods. Yet Moravia remained distant from the Rosselli family. Was his novel a plea for absolution? Of course, not everyone could be as brave as the Rossellis: at the time, and for many years to come, people had to make uncomfortable moral choices throughout Europe (e.g. the GDR), Russia, and China.
Carlo’s widow Marion died in 1949, and “the Rosselli heroes left sad legacies of depression and troubled minds”. Amelia, ever strong, died at the age of 84 on Boxing Day 1954. Melina, daughter of Carlo and Marion, became a successful poet, but committed suicide in 1996 on the anniversary of the death of Sylvia Plath, whose work she had translated.
* * *
As this review notes, Moorehead makes use of contrasting sources: not only the family archive of letters, shot through with love and shared political passions, but also the huge stash of documents, inspired by suspicion and hostility, from the network of spies who documented their every move.
Now I look forward to reading her account of the resistance around Turin, A house in the mountains: the women who liberated Italy from fascism (2019). And then onto all the murky politics of later Italian politics, and the continuing threat of fascism.
Why didn’t I know, or care, about all this through my youth? Alas, my interests were so abstruse. It’s also a world away from the concerns of the Burlesque-only generation; yet the scars remain, and as fascism turns out not to have been erased, it seems ever more relevant. Like Neil MacGregor, I also wonder,
What would we have done?
* In England such trauma was to be movingly evoked by Vera Brittain, who lost her brother Edward in the same region.
** For a fascinating account of Italian folk musicians in England playing zampogna bagpipes and other folk instruments, click here. The zampogna was still heard in 1960s’ New York. Moorehead might also have mentioned more reputable early Italian migrants to England like performers of WAM.
From 1979, in that youthful idyll that one somehow took for granted, I delighted in taking part in the summer music festivals of Montepulciano (Mahler 10!!!),* Batignano (Mozart’s Zaide!!!), Pesaro (Rossini’s Mi manca la voce!!!), and the Arena di Verona. Meanwhile I avidly began exploring the whole region—Florence, Siena, Perugia, Urbino, Pisa, Orvieto, Arezzo, and so on (see also The rake’s progress).
Here’s St Fina (1238–53, sic), patron saint of the town, clasping a model of it (or possibly a birthday cake), as depicted in a series of scenes from her legend on a reliquary tabernacle (1401–2) by Lorenzo di Niccolò Gerini.
Some of these guidebooks are impressively erudite. In English, estimable research like that of Enzo Raffa in San Gimignano by the beautiful towers has been pleasantly garbled, supplementing education with giggles—always a winning combo. It opens with evocative images:
Seen in the distance, it seems an inaccessible town. Going up from the Poggibonsi way, which is the most common, the towers lose their prospective and get down** till disappearing among olive trees. The brown silver color of leaves increases the silence around red bricks of walls. From the Certaldo way, the town is more braggart. Towers are as straight as halberds be they wet by the rain or burnt by the sun, they always keep the very same color and maintain the same soleliness of the black and closed cypresses of these places.
He then goes all Zen on us:
And here, in the space enlarging at a bell’s touch, a strange sensation of surety embraces our soul.
As he takes us through the usual catalogue of medieval strife, some elements in the social picture are timeless:
A few families, the richest ones, try to impose their sovereignty through the joke of reincharges.
With Italy currently a major centre for Coronavirus, some recent articles have made parallels with historical disasters such as the 1629 outbreak in Florence. Still earlier, as Raffa relates, San Gimignano was stricken by the Black Death pandemic:
Where the interior struggles could not get, the pest arrived. The great pest of 1348, the one killing the sweet Laura of Petrarca poet, along with a great number of persons.
And he’s aware of other modern parallels:
For a town like San Gimignano, the destruction of walls would have been equal to the taking off of a suit at the open air in a rigid winter day. […] San Gimignano is refusing.
Once upon a time it was said that San Gimignano had 72 beautiful towers. Only 25 were standing up in 1580. Today there are 14, others may be numbered but they are either included in buildings or docked to a great extent. Their architecture is a speaking sign of the mentality made of surety, of offense and of pride.
As the author explains:
The holes we can still see on the facades were used for the quick building of bridges which could be used either for reaching friend families’ towers or to attach enemy families’ towers.
I’m sure he’s right, but I wonder if anyone spotted a design flaw there.
Piazza della Cisterna.
Elsewhere I read that a common, if one-off, pastime in San Gimignano was to commit suicide by throwing oneself off a high tower. But another popular way of ending it all, in Italy as in China, was by throwing oneself down a deep well. The most elegant method, I surmise, would be to throw oneself off a high tower into a deep well, as Freud and Jung might have suggested—one possible target for the ambitious acrobatic depressive might be the well in Piazza della Cisterna.
Well (sic) might one exclaim, like a duty roster for the Wigan emergency services as read in the voice of Alan Bennett:
From Assisi, home of Saint Francis, I moved on to Gubbio, enjoying the miracle of the saint taming a wolf that terrorized the town until it meekly offered its paw to him. Actually, it was a peace deal:
“As thou art willing to make this peace, I promise thee that thou shalt be fed every day by the inhabitants of this land so long as thou shalt live among them; thou shalt no longer suffer hunger, as it is hunger which has made thee do so much evil; but if I obtain all this for thee, thou must promise, on thy side, never again to attack any animal or any human being; dost thou make this promise?”
“Giving in to terrorism”, as it might now be called.
The wolf of Gubbio is one of many panels that Sassetta painted from 1437 to 1444 for an altarpiece in San Francesco at Borgo San Sepolcro near Arezzo. And now I can go and admire it, alongside some gorgeous Duccio panels, at Room 52 of the National Gallery in London!
Describing the wolf, my Italian guidebook to Gubbio contained the delightful phrase quadrupede feroce—an expression that later my Italian partner and I always tried, on the flimsiest of pretexts, to shoehorn into our conversations revolving around cuddly domestic pets.
The troubled background of such picturesque old towns can now be neatly packed away under cultural history; and they are not mere cultural playgrounds for tourists—real people have to make a living there through changing times (cf. Venice daily life in a theme park). Still, basking in these guidebooks now, with their lavish illustrations of exquisite medieval archecture and painting, I find it intriguing that only a few years later I graduated to traipsing around grimy dilapidated towns in north China, where little trace has survived of any material culture predating the 1950s (see also Molvania).
And the villages are hardly more idyillic: among decrepit single-storey dwellings from the Maoist era, the alleys are strewn with litter. The great compensation, of course, is the expressive culture of rural China.
Lenny began to rely more and more on what he could do with his voice, hands and facial expressions. […] That discovery was the first step in the direction of abstraction.
The next step was to junk speech in favor of double-talk. Here he was following the lead of Sid Caesar, the greatest double-talk artist in the history of comedy. Sid was a genius with sounds and accents. He couldn’t speak two words of any foreign language, but he would converse for hours in double-talk versions of German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Japanese—and even more exotic tongues—with such passions and such a flair for the characteristic sounds of these languages that people would swear he was actually speaking the language.
Now, as Lenny realized eventually from his prolonged study of Sid’s stage act, when you make a character speak in double-talk, you actually abstracted the essence of his vocal mannerisms. Once the words were reduced to gibberish, the whole characterization resided in the inflections and tonal peculiarities of the character’s delivery.
Indeed, beyond mere verbal fluency, hand gestures and facial expressions are important aspects of language learning (for the vocabulary of Italian hand gestures, see e.g. here).
Language Log has erudite coverage of doubletalk, with further links. Here’s the famous Sid Caesar routine, with French, German, Italian, and Japanese:
As the end of this year’s Proms approaches, I went along to the “late-night” gig of Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino (CGS), hot on the heels of the Vienna Phil. Much as I love the Proms (and I recall some wonderful gagaku and raga in the Good Old Days), world music has never played much of a role there. This was another kind of Passion at the Proms.
Complementing Italy: folk musicking, this is the latest in a series of posts on taranta-inspired musicking in south Italy:
Based in Salento, the original CGS group dates back to 1975, led by Rina and Daniele Durante. The current leader is their son Mauro, on violin—which drew me back to the less polished fiddling on the extraordinary early footage of Ernesto De Martino.
Don’t get me wrong, I love loud music; but in the hall the volume seemed excessively loud and the sound rather fuzzy—it may work better on the radio broadcast (here, for the next month). With gutsy vocals, tamburello frame-drumming, organetto, wind playing, plucking, and dancing, the combo seemed more successful when they grouped more closely on the large stage.
Of course, it’s not just about sound. Pizzica—like Bach, The Rite of Spring, and Turangalîla, indeed—demands a physical reaction; with such pieces it’s hardly possible in concert, but in this case it’s an essential part of the experience. As large concert halls go, the Albert Hall makes a suitable venue; the prommers in the Arena, whether mobile or static, always enhance the occasion.
In LCD World Music fusion fashion (cf. my final rant here), guitarist Justin Adams and Malian kora master Ballaké Sissoko joined the band—though I’d still rather hear the latter playing his own music…
On this eclectic playlist, featuring scenic tracks from CGS in full MTV mode, as well as other groups, the intoxication of their live gigs features only rarely:
For the other CGS videos on that list, you may prefer the audio tracks over the glossy visuals. Elsewhere, here’s a 2013 gig in New York:
I’m really not being an old purist fogey here, but maybe what I want is the original line-up—though of course they were always seeking to be relevant to the changing times. Among several tracks on YouTube (search for “vecchio Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino”), try this:
Between the heavyweights of Saturday-night noir viewing on BBC4 (The bridge, The Killing, Spiral), InspectorMontalbano (set in Sicily, based on the novels of Andrea Camilleri) makes an alluring interlude.
Music enriches some of the great Italian films, including La strada and Cinema Paradiso. The instrumental soundtrack for Montalbano, by Franco Piersanti, grows on one. But it’s well worth staying tuned in for the final credits, featuring the haunting songs of Olivia Sellerio (playlists here and here), moving on from the more traditional styles that feature so strongly in collections of Italian folk music.
And here’s the opening of the prequel series Young Montalbano:
She also sings Fabrizio De André’s Bocca di rosa, with a cameo on marranzanu jews harp:
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From an earlier generation a great Sicilian singer was RosaBalistreri (1927–90), who escaped a life of poverty, violence, and intolerance to work as a maid in Florence in the 1950s (thoughtful article here). Championed by Dario Fo and Leonardo Sciascia, she returned to Sicily in 1971. Unconcerned with “fidelity” to a notional tradition, her songs, issued on the Teatro del sole label (playlist here), often suggest parallels with fado (click here and here) or rebetika.
Over on the mainland, for great singing from Puglia see here and here. And please allow my usual paean to the riches of Mediterranean popular culture (see under Iberia tag), not least flamenco!
Like fiction, feature films can often suggest perspectives that more forensic academic treatments fail to evoke (cf. the GDR and China). In the post-war period, as Europe—including the east—struggled to recover, in Italy a vast migration took place from the poor south to the industrial north. Meanwhile China was in the grip of collectivization and famine.
A dominant theme of early neo-realist films was deprivation. The moving Ladri di biciclette (Vittorio De Sica, 1948) is a reminder how effective it can be to cast amateur actors:
Gelsomina I recalled La strada (Federico Fellini, 1954) when the Li family Daoists performed at a circus in Paris during their 2017 French tour. While Nino Rota’s score is effective, Petrushka, with its trumpet solo and drum interludes, might have made a suitable soundtrack too.
A tribute to Giulietta Masina is in order. Her persona has been likened to Charlie Chaplin, and her role in La strada as an innocent itinerant street performer is most beguiling—despite the stereotype of the “gamine” “elfin waif” (quite different from that of Audrey Hepburn). And her role as Fellini’s “muse” is another trope unpacked by feminists:
The image of the Muse as loved object who inspires the male artist, whilst she herself remains silent, is deeply engrained in contemporary culture, despite the best efforts of feminist critics to expose the implications of such imagery: man creates, woman inspires; man is the maker, woman the vehicle of male fantasy, an object created by the male imagination, incapable of any kind of agency herself. In short, this image of the Muse denies woman’s active participation in artistic creation and silences female creativity. [1]
Masina is also wonderful in Notti di Cabiria (1957)—despite again being exploited by callous men. Here’s the moving final scene:
The making of Fellini’s La dolce vita(1960) is the subject of a 2017 book. The stellar cast includes not only Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg, but early roles for Nico and the divine Anouk Aimée, always captivating (cf. here). As England progressed from adversity to the drabness of the 1950s, the image of Rome rapidly became fashionable. Whereas Fellini doubtless meant La dolce vita as a critique of the vacuity of the glamorous lifestyle, “over the years, the inverted commas and irony have dropped away”, leaving only “Vespas! Bikinis! Grappa!”.
Anouk Aimée with Federico Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni.
Long before I began to experience Italy at first hand, films like these made a deep impression, which keeps growing.
[1] Penny Murray, “Reclaiming the Muse”, in Vanda Zajko and Miriam Leonard, Laughing with Medusa: classical myth and feminist thought (2008).
We often study Chinese culture (both expressive and material) rather in isolation, but many parallels are suggested in
Peter Burke, Popular culture in early modern Europe (1978, thoughtfully updated in 2009 edition),
a lucidly-written single-volume work on the period 1500 to 1800. Of course it’s a vast field, but Burke’s broad coverage is enriched by illuminating detail.
Think away television, radio, and cinema, which have standardized the vernaculars of Europe within living memory, not to mention changes which are less obvious but may be more profound. Think away the railways, which probably did even more than conscription and government propaganda to erode the culture peculiar to each province and to turn regions into nations. Think away universal education and literacy, class consciousness and nationalism. Think away the modern confidence (however shaken) in progress, science, and technology, and the secular modes in which hopes and fears are expressed.
Indeed, many in Europe had little access to these features well into the 20th century—and many Chinese still later. So the historical coverage not only makes a useful perspective on popular traditions enduring today (e.g. Italy or east Europe), but is also full of lessons for our studies of popular culture in modern China.
Many (not least in China) tend to visualize Europe as a monolithic, reified, “developed” (and largely secular) modern bourgeois society, whose music (for instance) is represented by the “classical” canon. In the wake of the industrial revolution, change in the popular cultures of Europe was already a complex issue by the early 1900s, when study began to take off in earnest; but in China, for all its own revolution, many of Burke’s perspectives still seem relevant in the late 20th century. So it may be easier to see the parallels here than it would be with a study of modern Europe.
In Chapter 1 he discusses “The discovery of the people” by early-19th-century intellectuals, just as traditional culture seemed threatened—of which he gives some fine examples, long predating 20th-century concerns. Already before the industrial revolution, with the growth of towns, the improvement of roads, and the spread of literacy, the centre was invading the periphery.
Burke adduces early collections of folk-songs from Germany, Russia, Sweden, Serbia, Hungary, and Finland. The intellectuals also discovered popular religion and festivals (cf. Zhao Shiyu‘s work on Chinese temple fairs), along with folk music. Burke discusses aesthetic, intellectual, and political reasons for this interest. Along with the reaction against the Enlightenment, and the growth of nationalism,
the discovery of the people was part of a movement of cultural primitivism in which the ancient, the distant, and the popular were all equated.
In Chinese discourse on folk culture, terms like “simple” and “primitive” were still common in the late 20th century.
At the same time, Burke unpacks problems with studying the subject through the work of early European folklorists: distortion, creative bias, and the notion of “improvement”. Just like the CCP in China,
it is all to easy to continue to see popular culture through the romantic, nationalist spectacles of the intellectuals of the early 19th century.
To read the text of a ballad, a folktale, or even a tune in a collection of this period is much like looking at a Gothic church which was “restored” at much the same time. One cannot be sure whether one is looking at what was originally there, at what the restorer thought was originally there, at what he thought ought to have been there, or at what he thought should be there now. Not only texts and buildings were subject to “restoration”, but even festivals.
Burke criticizes the notions of primitivism, communalism, and purism, stressing that “popular culture does have a history”.
In Chapter 2, “Unity and variety in popular culture”, Burke notes pockets where there was still a shared culture on the lines of the (dodgy) model of tribal societies, but observes that the broad picture was not monolithic or homogeneous: social stratification was widespread. He refines the model of interdependent great and little traditions, both urban and rural, that Robert Redfield suggested in the 1930s:
There were two cultural traditions in early modern Europe, but they did not correspond symmetrically to the two main social groups, the elite and the common people. The elite participated in the little traditions, but the common people did not participate in the great tradition. The great tradition was transmitted formally at grammar schools and at universities. It was a closed tradition in the sense that people who had not attended such institutions, which were not open to all, were excluded. […] The little tradition, on the other hand, was transmitted informally. It was open to all, like the church and the market-place, where so many of the performances occurred.
So in the early period the elite, the nobility, local literati, and the clergy had access to and participated in both cultures.
In the Cracow area about 1565, more than 80% of the poor nobles were illiterate. The style of life of some rural nobles and parish priests was not so different from that of the peasants around them.
[…]
But this situation did not remain static throughout the period. The upper classes gradually withdrew from participation in the little tradition in the course of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Following Kodály and Gramsci, Burke also notes that “the people” were not a homogeneous group. As in 20th-century China, the peasants formed 80–90% of the population. But apart from peasants and craftsmen, women, children, shepherds, sailors, beggars, and so on, all had important sub-cultures. The diversity of occupations makes a useful reminder for China, both in imperial and modern times; the peasantry was itself stratified, as the CCP would observe. Burke cites Kodaly again:
Many traditional folksongs are appropriate only for one social group, like the Scandinavian drängvisor, or farm-hands’ song, and the pigvisor, the “complaints” of ill–treated maidservants.
He notes ecological differences:
Leaping dances seem to be associated with mountainous regions, in the Basque country, in Norway, in the highlands of Bavaria, Poland, and Scotland, because this was an old form of dance which did not survive in the plains.
In the countryside farmers, herdsmen, and shepherds also had different cultures, as did blacksmiths, carpenters, woodsmen, miners, and bandits. Similar stratification was notable in the towns: guilds, craftsmen (weavers, tailors, shoemakers, journeymen, apprentices, and so on), and shopkeepers.
Burke notes religion and ethnic minorities as markers of cultural difference—not only Catholics and Protestants, but Jews and Muslims. And he discusses the male category of “wanderers”—soldiers, sailors, beggars, and thieves. He notes variation by gender and region, coexisting with other types of variation. Excluded from most of the categories, “women’s culture is to popular culture what popular culture is to culture as a whole.” Other potential elements in a cultural geography of Europe would include architecture, literacy, and topography. He observes interaction between great and little traditions, finding traffic in both directions, with creative transformations.
In Chapter 3, “An elusive quarry”, Burke interrogates the sources, their literati bias and unreliability:
We want to know about performances, but what have survived are texts; we want to see these performances through the eyes of the craftsmen and peasants themselves, but we are forced to see them through the eyes of literate outsiders.
The attitudes and values of craftsmen and peasants
were expressed in activities and performances, but these activities and performances were only documented when the literate upper classes took an interest in them.
And when, as often, festivities were described by foreign visitors, they
are likely to miss all sorts of local or topical allusions and may misunderstand what the festivities mean to the participants.
Or (as in China) popular activities may be recorded simply because the authorities were trying to suppress them. And of course
A text cannot record a performance adequately, whether it is a clown’s or a preacher’s. The tone of voice is missing, so are the facial expressions, the gestures, the acrobatics.
Further, Burke notes that printed texts (including sermons) are likely to vary from the texts performed. Print not only recorded popular culture but undermined it. He lists six kinds of mediator, and explores oblique approaches to popular culture, adducing witch trials and “iconology”. And he notes the useful perspective of rebellion, also fruitful for China.
Discussing folk-songs and epics “collected” in the 20th century, he comments:
Historians whose sources consist of fragmentary texts have a lot to learn from folklorists whose sources are living people, who can be observed at work and even questioned. What I am advocating is a rather more indirect use of the modern material, to criticize or interpret the documentary sources.
To avoid misunderstanding, let me say at once what the regressive method is not. It does not consist of relatively recent situations and cheerfully assuming that they apply equally well to earlier periods.
He notes the potential for historians to learn from anthropologists.
Part Two, “Structures of popular culture”, opens with Chapter 4, “The transmission of popular culture”, focusing on the “active bearers of culture”. While observing that
Shepherds made their own bagpipes as well as playing them. The men of the household made the furniture, and the women made the clothes. […] Anyone who fell ill or had an accident would be treated at home,
he stresses that
Neither the household nor the village was culturally autonomous.
Semi-professional healers, traveling pedlars, and wandering minstrels [a term, I note, encrusted with romantic flapdoodle] were also part of the picture. He unpacks the notion of “popular artist” (one who works mainly for a public of craftsmen and peasants), and the spectrum of professionals and amateurs. I like his list of occupational performers for England:
But again there were gradations, as with shawm bands in China today. Like tinkers and pedlars, many performing groups were itinerant. The Russian skomorokhi (interestingly seen as antecedents of Pussy Riot here) travelled in bands of up to one hundred men. Burke’s description of “strolling players” in 18th-century England reminds me of Chinese opera troupes today:
Two actors would be sent ahead of the rest to get permission to play in the towns and villages on their route. Their properties and costumes would be secondhand, even dilapidated, and they would perform in inns or barns.
Georges La Tour, The hurdy-gurdy man. Cf. the lirnikyof modern Ukraine.
Several more features suggest China. Solo bards were also common—as in Spain, France, Serbia, and Russia. Whether solo or in a group, they were often equated with beggars; and many “vagabond-entertainers” were blind. Itinerant preachers were also widespread. Besides human opera, ritual puppet plays may remind us of groups still performing in regions like Fujian and Gansu.
Less well documented were the amateur performers, and semi-professionals (as in China), “part-time specialists who had another occupation but might derive a supplementary income from their singing, playing, or healing.” Performers of plays and other festivities were often organized into guilds. Funeral wailers were hired, as in Britain, Italy, and Russia. Popular healers and diviners are listed for England, Sweden, Poland, Spain.
Burke explores the physical setting, noting that it is easier to document public performances (church, tavern, market-place) than domestic occasions. He outlines the balance of folk tradition and individual innovation, refuting the “collective creation” myth.
Chapter 5, “Traditional forms”, explores genres, discussing the variety of dance and song forms; themes and variations; and the process of composition—all recurring issues in ethnomusicology. He includes preaching and material culture, seeking not only formulas and motifs but structures.
Chapter 6, “Heroes, villains, and fools” goes on to look at stock characters, probing the attitudes and values of craftsmen and peasants. In popular culture the images of rulers, the clergy and saints, the nobility and knights, the middle class and officials, are sometimes ambivalent, but the lower classes seem “conservative”, accepting them and structuring their world through the models provided by the dominant group. Conversely, craftsmen and peasants also saw society in terms not of harmony but of conflict, complaining of poverty and injustice. Here Burke lists five points along a spectrum of responses: fatalist, moralist, traditionalist, radical, and millenarian.
The Chinese peasantry since the 1940s have also clung to such heroic figures from the imperial past, remaining quite resistant to the cultural values of the CCP while absorbing new elements (like the PLA soldier in the medium’s pantheon here).
Under “ordinary people”, Burke notes that craftsmens’ image of the peasant was unflattering. Nor, in the male-dominated sources, do women emerge well:
Most popular heroines were objects, admired not so much for what they did but what they suffered. For women, martyrdom was virtually the only route to sanctity.
More common are images of deceitful and malicious women.
Under “outsiders”, outlaws (another popular theme in China) are usually, though not always, portrayed as heroic, “enabling ordinary people to take imaginative revenge on the authorities to whom they were usually obedient in real life”. Negative instances are those of the Turk and the Jew (both “scarcely human”), as well as the witch; and the stereotypes of Catholics and Protestants about each other.
Hatred of outsiders was so common as to make one wonder whether most ordinary people of the period were not what psychologists sometimes call “authoritarian personalities”, combining submissiveness to authority with aggressiveness towards people outside their group.
Breughel, The combat between Carnival and Lent.
in Chapter 7, “The world of Carnival”, Burke pursues the theme of relieving tensions, putting myths and rituals in the physical context of festivals, both Carnival itself and “carnivalesque” activities. Here he explores ritual—always a prominent theme—in greater detail, and ritual reversal, “the world upside down”. Carnival was both a holiday, a game, and a time of ecstasy and liberation, with food, sex, and violence. He subsumes public executions and mocking ceremonies like the charivari, and explores the tensions between social control and social protest. He cites Victor Turner:
By making the low high and the high low, they reaffirm the hierarchical principle.
But the “safety-valve” of ritual was not always able to contain popular dissent. Riots and rebellions made more direct forms of action. Popular rebellions, of course, are a major theme in Chinese history—studied selectively in the PRC.
The concern of the upper classes that popular festivals might pose a threat to the status quo leads to Chapter 8, “The triumph of Lent: the reform of popular culture”. Always alert to change, Burke describes the attempts of the educated (“the reformers, or the godly”), notably the clergy, to “improve” popular mores, on both theological and moral grounds. Again (as in imperial and modern China) folk religion was a principle target—miracle and mystery plays, popular sermons, and religious festivals such as saints’ days and pilgrimages.
He suggest two main periods, the first until around 1650 led by the clergy, the second in which the laity took the initiative, adding secular arguments. He outlines the “culture of the godly” that they hoped would replace the old pagan ways (more echoes of modern China). Battles were waged not only over rituals but over images and texts. One important weapon was the dissemination of vernacular Bibles. Burke is sensitive to changes in the meaning of words, such as the ever-thorny “superstition”.
One major result of this reformist zeal, unevenly achieved, was the widening of the gulf between great and little traditions, discussed in the final Chapter 9, “Popular culture and social change”. Over the whole period popular culture changed in ways that no-one could have foreseen. Burke lists population growth and urbanization, the rise of “commercial capitalism” with increasing division of labour, and the communications revolution. Though he warns against exaggerating the impact of such changes, by the 18th century the peasantry were coming to own more material objects, and better ones—although east Europe remained relatively poor. A gradual shift was under way “from the more spontaneous and participatory forms of entertainment towards more formally-organised and commercialized spectator sports.” Although he also shows that it was often in the outlying regions that traditional culture was best maintained,
In the larger towns, the process of social change seems to have enriched popular culture. In the countryside, particularly in outlying regions, the same process led to cultural impoverishment.
This topical comment from the Highlands of Scotland comes from the late 18th century:
The noblest virtues have been ruined, or driven into exile, since the love of money has crept in among us; and since deceit and hypocrisy have carried mercenary policy and slavish, sordid avarice into our land.
Under “the uses of literacy” Burke stresses the influence of the printed book, and then the press. He explains methods for assessing literacy rates around Europe, with partial evidence suggesting that “more people could read in 1800 than in 1500, that craftsmen were generally much more literate than peasants, men than women, Protestants than Catholics, and Western European than Eastern Europeans”.
Whereas some secular reformers feared that popular literacy would make the poor discontented with their lot, the godly saw it as a step to salvation. Again Burke unpacks the idea of “access” to books, with some fine examples under physical, economic, and linguistic access. He takes a nuanced approach to how all this affected popular performances, although “the book was both a dangerous competitor and a treacherous ally”.
The spread of literacy and the decline of the epic occurred together in Western Europe, while illiteracy and the epic survived together in Sicily, in Bosnia, in Russia.
I note that even the lowest literacy rates around Europe surpassed those of China in the mid-20th century; and even in the early 1990s I found few books in peasant homes there.
Burke cites the work of a sociologist working on the modern Middle East, where print is among factors said to engender “a high capacity for empathy, a willingness to accept change, to move from one place to another, or to express their own opinions about society; in a word, modernity.” However, in early modern Europe such changes were less spectacular. Old themes did not go out, but new themes did come in: as in modern China, cultural changes were not so much “substitutive” as “additive”.
He moves on to unpack the concepts of secularisation and politicisation:
Hopes and fears which had traditionally been expressed in religious terms now needed another mode of expression and increasingly found it in the political.
Despite the problems in assessing piecemeal material, and always sensitive to differing social strata, he finds an increasing sense of involvement with politics, at least in Western Europe.
Craftsmen and peasants had good reason to be more aware of the state by the end of the 18th century than they had been three hundred years before.
Burke notes the gradual withdrawal of the upper classes from the popular culture that they had previously shared—as in China. But as ever he asks probing questions:
Who withdrew? From what did they withdraw? In what parts of Europe? And why? The clergy, the nobility, and the bourgeoisie had their own reasons for abandoning popular culture.
In many regions the upper classes literally spoke a different language from ordinary people. But—at different times in different parts of Europe—they came to reject their whole culture.
And it was this gap that led to “discovery”: only when folk traditions became “alien” to the elite did they provoke curiosity, leading to the rise of folklore studies.
Looking back over the whole period,
The change in the attitudes of educated men seems truly remarkable. In 1500, they despised the common people, but shared their culture. By 1800 their descendants had ceased to participate spontaneously in popular culture, but they were in the process of rediscovering it as something exotic and therefore interesting. They were even beginning to admire “the people” from whom this alien culture had sprung.
After 1800 factors like urbanization, education, printing, and railway transport were to transform culture still more radically.
While Burke’s study is based on the period before 1800, and has been amply supplemented since, it offers thoughtful perspectives on the diverse little traditions that still persist today, and were even more widespread alongside the great traditions of Renaissance and baroque. Relevant to our studies of imperial and modern China are not only the many commonalities they share—recurring themes like ritual, reform, and so on—but ways of studying and unpacking the sources. I do recommend the book, not least to Chinese students: here’s a Chinese edition.
Players can advance along the caravan route by naming cultural features that Italy shares with China (and I couldn’t write the clichés better than this article). Go right back to square one for any mention of:
For more party games, see the Oxford comma and Fantasy Daoist ritual; and for another enterprise, here. For more Chinese clichés, see here, and here. And for the 2002 Smithsonian Festival of the Silk Road, click here.
With our common image of Italy dominated by elite culture, it may seem to make a less obvious fieldsite for folk traditions than east Europe. But as I observed in my jottings from Lisbon (and in my posts on flamenco in Spain, starting here), there’s far more to musicking than opera houses and symphony orchestras. Even the court musical cultures of Italy were regional—there was no “Italy” until 1860, and regional consciousness still persists. As in China, where the “conservatoire style” dominates the media, the image of the iceberg is useful.
Local folk traditions are a major part of people’s social experience today, as throughout earlier history—alongside more elite productions such as the painting and sculpture, art music and opera that dominate our image of Italian culture (for early modern Europe, see here). Some regions show little or no influence from art music, others more. But we should adjust from our image of Barbara Strozzi and Artemisia Gentileschi [PC gone mad—Ed.] [What you gonna do about it? SJ], Verdi and Monteverdi, La Scala, and so on.
In Italy—whose population of around 60 million is comparable with a single province of China!—we find the usual interplay between general surveys “gazing at flowers from horseback” and detailed studies of one particular community. As ever, we may start with The New Grove dictionary of music and musicians, and The Garland encyclopedia of world music. Alessio Surian’s article for The Rough Guide to world music pays attention to the more recent roots scene, and Italy features regularly in Songlines.
I’ve already outlined some issues in the taxonomy of expressive culture in China (e.g. here). In her Grove article on Italian folk music, Tullia Magrini essayed a broad classification by style and structure rather than by region or context:
Narrative-singing (ballad, broadside ballad, storia, Sicilian orbi, and so on)
Lyrical singing
Others: including children’s songs and lullabies, work songs, polyphonic songs for entertainment (cf. Voices of the world).
After reverting to context in her penultimate category:
Ritual music—always among the most interesting rubrics, including life-cycle and calendrical rituals (the latter including carnival and Passion).
she concluded by outlining
dances and instruments—the latter including not only piffero and ciaramella shawms (for links to posts on shawms around the world—China, Tibet, south Asia, the Middle East, north Africa, Europe—click here) with bagpipe (piva) and the distinctive Sardinian launeddas, but also northern violin traditions.
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The fascist era discouraged meaningful study of folk traditions, so serious research began in the 1950s, as society continued to change. Gramsci’s contrast between subaltern and hegemonic cultures inspired the ground-breaking collaborations of Diego Carpitella with Ernesto De Martino and Alan Lomax.
Carpitella’s work with De Martino features in my post on taranta, which includes both their footage of taranta in Salento (1959) and funeral laments in Basilicata (1952). See also Healing with violin in the heel of Italy.
Meanwhile—just as Chinese fieldworkers were busy documenting their own regional traditions—Carpitella was also working with Alan Lomax (who said the 1950s were boring?!). Their 1954–56 audio recordings were published in 1958 as Folk music and song of Italy, and reissued (notes here). Many of the tracks are remarkable—such as Alla campagnola, a polyphonic love song sung by women of Ferroletto in Calabria while working in the fields, with both harmonies and unison cadential pitches taking one by surprise:
Moving north, the album also includes stornelli from Tuscany, a bagpipe saltarello from Citta Realle in Lazio, and a dance song from Val di Resia in Friuli.
For a review of more albums in the Lomax collection, see here. Italy was among the fields where he developed his ambitious Cantometrics project, exploring the links between styles of singing and social structures (see also Voices of the world). For his work with Zora Neale Hurston in the American South, see here. And for his remarkable archive, click here.
The pioneering work of Lomax and Carpitella inspired many impressive series of audio recordings on labels like Folkways, Dischi del sole, Albatros, I suoni (Fonit Cetra), and Ethnica. Meanwhile Carpitella edited the important journal Culture musicali (and I’m keen to read his analysis of The Rite of Spring!).
Following in their footsteps, among luminaries in Italian ethnomusicology were Roberto Leydi and Tullia Magrini, under whom such studies took root in Bologna. And as a welcome change from all those gondolas, Venice has become a lively centre for the promotion of folk cultures of Italy and further afield, with the Fondazione Cini, and ethnomusicologists Giovanni Giuriati and Giovanni de Zorzi (for an instance of the latter’s explorations, see here).
Despite all the “cultural homogenisation” epitomised by the vacuous inanities of Burlesque-only TV, RAI has played a role in promoting regional cultures.
The south The Mediterranean south has remained poor—Puglia, Basilicata, Calabria, as well as Campania, all have deep local traditions (for pizzica, see here, here, and here).
Again, Lomax and Carpitella made some fine recordings in Campania:
And apart from Sardinia (which I introduced here), Sicily is a rich field, introduced in early work by Giulio Fara and much studied since (see also Songs of Sicily). Further east, see Musics of Crete.
Central Italy and the north The poor south, attractive by virtue of its “otherness”, attracts a wealth of documentation; but the more affluent north also has significant pockets of folk activity. Roberto Leydi and others erased the old bias that considered the northern regions “corrupted” by economic and social development.
Fieldworkers have found distinctive traditions around Lazio, Abruzzo, Tuscany, Umbria, Le Marche, and Emilia. Tullia Magrini made a special study of the Maggio drammatico (cf. Morris dancing in England!). Note also her edited volume Music and gender: perspectives from the Mediterranean (2003).
All along the northern border of Italy, local traditions have been documented around Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardy, Veneto, Trentino, and Friuli. Again, we can consult the recordings of Lomax and Carpitella, with this 1972 LP from Piedmont, Emilia, and Lombardy:
In Ponte Caffaro, Brescia, fiddle bands accompany carnival:
The films of Renato Morelli are also impressive—see this trailer for Voci alte, on the festival of Premana in Lombardy.
In the 1990s, as another perk of my touring life, during interludes from playing Mozart opera in Parma and Ferrara I visited cultural offices there for a taste of their work documenting local folk traditions—somewhat evoking my exploratory visits to their counterparts in China. While doing gigs in Genova I also found trallalero choirs:
In the northeast, traditions are related to Slavic culture, with dances accompanied by violins or the piva bagpipe. Here’s a 1983 clip from Val di Resia in Friuli:
Collectors have also worked with emigrant communities (cf. Accordion crimes). Alan Lomax and Carla Bianco issued a fascinating album of their 1963–64 recordings in New York and Chicago (liner notes here), with a sequel recorded by his daughter Anna in New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island (playlist here)—from the latter, here’s a duet with piffero and ciaramella:
This may not immediately spring to mind when thinking of the soundscape of 60s’ New York.
And having long been a land of emigration, and internal migration (from rural south to industrial north), Italy is now also a vexed site for immigration, which will further enrich the picture.
While I’m not venturing into the roots scene here, it seems obligatory to cite Fabrizio De André’s wildly popular Crêuza de mä (1984), sung in Genovese dialect (here with Italian subtitles):
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All the energy in making audio recordings was admirable, helping us focus on the remarkable variety of regional soundscapes: both vocal and instrumental tracks are stunning. But it tended to entrench an image of disembodied, reified sound documents; the later shift towards visual anthropology places a greater stress on musicking in society. At LEAV in Milan Nicola Scaldaferri leads splendid collaborative projects, such as Musica Lucana and the Maggio in Accettura. And here’s a trailer for Rossella Scillacci’s fine 2007 ethnographic film Pratica e maestria on the zampogna in Basilicata:
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Here, as often, I can only “gaze at flowers from horseback”, but all this is a reminder that as in China, England, and everywhere, popular regional traditions persist alongside more elite cultures, changing along with society and encouraging us to revise a narrow concept of “culture”.
Recently I wrote a mini-series of posts on the fortune of expressive culture through the first fifteen years of the PRC, and the intrepid scholars who documented it—worth reading along with my tribute to the great Yang Yinliu:
This happens to be an important period for the relationship of politics and culture—the Maoist decades are a crucial bridge from the “old society” to the current reform era—but that’s not the only reason for studying it. One always seeks to gain a picture of change over the lifetimes of informants; if we had visited in the 1880s, or indeed the 880s, we would also have asked them how their social and cultural life had before the cataclysms of the Taiping uprising and the An Lushan rebellion respectively. While I’m critical of reified studies that are limited to the “salvage” of an idealized past, a diachronic approach is always valuable. For a recent volume on doing fieldwork in China, see here.
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I followed up that series with Great Female Singers Week (cf. A playlist of songs):
Again, these are part of larger series, in this case on gender (for a roundup, see here), jazz, and Mediterranean culture—to which you’ll find links in the above posts.
Expressive culture (both popular and elite) always makes a revealing prism through which to view social change—whether for China, Puglia, New York, or Vienna.
Reminded of Enza Pagliara by my recent post on the intoxicating pizzica (latest in a series on the riches of Mediterranean culture), by way of introduction here’s another perk of the musos’ touring life (cf. here, for Andalucia):
Many years ago I was doing a gig at the Ambronay festival with a baroque band accompanying the choir of New College Oxford. At the reception in the balmy grounds afterwards I found myself chatting with a distinguished-looking Italian woman from the audience—who turned out to be none other than Enza Pagliara. She told me how much she loved the choirboys’ voci bianche, and casually mentioned that she sang too—rather like Lionel Messi saying he likes kicking a ball around. So of course I was keen to learn about her music, and as we were saying goodbye she gave me her CD Frunte de luna.
It was only later when I listened to it, in awe, that I realized it should have been me attending her concert…
Here’s an exhilarating playlist:
Here she is in concert with an all-female group in Pizzica di Torchiarolo, which opens the playlist above:
A do te pizzico la zamara Dove ti ha pizzicato la zamara Menzu lu canaletto piglia rose e mina ‘mpettu In mezzo al canaletto piglia rose e butta sul petto Menzu lu canaletto de le nenne In mezzo al canaletto dei seni
Some of the folk-singers assembled for Frunte de luna (including members of Enza Pagliara’s family) can be heard in traditional solo and a cappella style on the CD
Aria stisa: canti di contadine e trattoristi di Torchiarolo (Le tradizioni musicali in Puglia) (Ethnica, 2008). Playlist:
Seemingly obviating the need to get one’s feet dirty, the world music scene in London is ever-thriving (see e.g. Flamenco in Chiswick). The other day I went to an invigorating concert by Amaraterra in the SOAS concert series, furthering satisfying my appetite for the riches of Mediterranean culture (for taranta, start here; see also under the Iberia and Italy tags).
Pizzica is the folk dance of Salento in the furthest reaches of southeastern Italy (the “heel of the Italian boot”). At a crossroads of civilisations, Salento has preserved its ancient Greek-Roman folk roots, with Dionysian festivals and the mythological bite of the tarantula that induces an irresistible urge to dance oneself into a trance-like state, accompanied by traditional tamburello drumming.
Formed in London in 2011 by passionate expats, Amaraterra has evolved into a thriving and multinational ensemble, while losing none of their traditional southern Italian flavour.
The crowd (apparently comprising most of the population of south Italy) did indeed have an irresistible urge to turn the demure Brunei Gallery into a throbbing dance venue. The intoxicating rhythms often suggest those of organetto and launeddas in Sardinia.
Cassandre Balbar decorated the vocals on wind instruments, including bagpipes—another good intercultural topic to explore, with various zampogna types in Italy, gaida around southeast Europe (for Bulgaria, see Timothy Rice, May it fill your soul; for the duda / volynka of Hutsuls in Ukraine, click here), and even British versions. Here’s the fine documentary Zampogna: the soul of southern Italy (David Marker, 2011):
To return to my fantasy of Bach at the 18th-century Beijing court (see—and hear!—The Feuchtwang variations), the musicking of the European missionaries there makes an intriguing tangent to the varied material on all the diverse forms of musicking at the Qing court (a list to which I’ve now added Manchu shamans).
An authority here is François Picard (list of publications here, including this useful summary of relevant works—and note his CDs, introduced below).
Jesuit missionaries had established themselves as early as 1589 at the Ming court, and continued to find favour at the Qing courts of Kangxi and Qianlong. As Picard explains:
Their strategy was to convert the Chinese to Christianity, starting from the top. They did this, first of all, by demonstrating their status as experts and thus gaining access to the court; they then aimed to prove the superiority of the West, of Christendom, and therefore—syllogism—of Christianity, in the realms of science, astronomy, cartography, measurement, and music, the study of which belonged to the field of scholarship in both civilizations. Acoustics, instrument-making, notation, and performance were all part of that strategy of integration, competition, and persuasion.
Following Matteo Ricci (1562–1610), Adam Schall von Bell (1591–1666), and Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–88), Tomàs Pereira (1645–1708; for a range of studies, see here) is notable for his major compilation for the Kangxi emperor on the theory of Western (art!) music. This was completed by the Lazarist priest Teodorico Pedrini (1671–1746), who, reaching Beijing in 1711 (after an epic eight-year journey that puts the travails of British train commuters in perspective)* was active there along with Florian Bahr (1706–71) and Jean Walter (1708–59). Pereira and Pedrini are further discussed by several scholars, including Joyce Lindorff and Peter Allsop (e.g. here). The Jesuit priest Joseph-Marie Amiot (1718–93) arrived in Beijing in 1751.
Even transporting the keyboard instruments was a mind-boggling task for the missionaries. While they were braving such obstacles, Bach’s long-term residency in Leipzig was bearing fruit in a constant stream of creation.
François Picard’s work bears fruit in his collaboration with Jean-Christophe Frisch and his ensemble XVIII-XXI Musique des Lumières, notably an enterprising series of CDs—with contributions from the Fleur de Prunus ensemble and the choir of the Centre Catholique Chinois de Paris, and instructive liner notes with further references.
While the missionaries were not mainly concerned with documenting or performing Chinese music, Amiot notated some Chinese melodies, and some canticles were set to Chinese texts.
The Congregation of Musicians of the Northern Church in Beijing, numbering about thirty young musicians, including several Manchu princes, would accompany important celebrations, the most spectacular of which was the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Liuyejin, in gongche solfeggio with stave transnotation, Amiot 1754.
Some of Amiot’s Divertissements chinois, based on Kunqu melodies, are imaginatively recreated with Chinese instruments on the CD
Teodorico Pedrini: concert baroque à la cité interdite (Auvidis, 1996)
Here’s a playlist:
Other CDs in the project include
Joseph-Marie Amiot (1718-1793), Messe des jésuites de Pékin (Auvidis, 1998)
Chine: jésuites et courtisanes (Buda Records/Musique du monde, 2002)
Vêpres à la Vierge en Chine (2004)
In the chamber items with both baroque and Chinese instruments, the timbres blend well—and would do so even better had the latter been set up in 18th-century fashion, with silk or gut strings.
All this makes an intriguing if inconclusive exploration of elements: whereas ornamentation is common to both traditions, it’s more of a challenge to reconcile Chinese heterophony with the harmonic basis of baroque music. Amiot didn’t take the “superiority” of his musical culture for granted—Picard cites a perceptive passage:
Here, there is neither bass, not tenor, nor treble, everything is in unison, but that unison is varied according to the nature and capacity of each instrument [what we now call heterophony! SJ], and the composer’s skill, the beauty of the piece and the whole art of music lies in that variation. […] It would be of no avail to endeavour to prove to the Chinese that they must find pleasure in something in which they really find none at all.
In Picard’s notes for the Chine: jésuites et courtisanes CD he cites some contemporary reports relevant to the “suite-plucking” of the nobility, such as notes by courtier Gao Shiqi:
[The Kangxi emperor] ordered the ladies of the palace to play a melody, hidden behind a folding screen. He then said: “The people of the palace are excellent with string instruments (xiansuo).” He ordered his courtiers to show their art and successively play the hupo, pipa, and sanxianzi string instruments. He then said: “Play the qin piece “On the beach the geese are landing” (Pingsha luoyan) on the four string instruments—hupo, pipa, xianzi, and zheng—together.”
Adding female nobles to our list of performers, the emperor went on:
“The ladies of the palace have played the zheng zither since their childhood, to the point of forgetting to eat or sleep.** After ten years of efforts, they have attained sheer mystery [cf. Shenqi mipu].” He then ordered them to play “The moon is high” in a “changing tonality” (Bianyin yuer gao).
For more excursions in Qing ritual culture, see here.
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To return to my Bach fantasy, European art music performed by European musicians at the Chinese court is a perfectly valid topic. It’s a welcome clue to early Chinese exposure to Western music, which from the late 19th century would become a major and more pervasive theme. And Amiot’s arrangements of Chinese melodies may have been performed by Chinese musicians. But while it’d be nice to think of European missionaries learning Chinese style, whether on Chinese fiddles (tiqin, sihu) or on violin, I can’t see any evidence; their contacts with the broader society, and indeed their tastes, were circumscribed.
Of course, world music “fusion” in China goes back to the Tang dynasty and earlier. But in the Qing, even within the rarefied milieu of the court, and despite the efforts of the missionaries, I find little evidence of more significant interaction, such as Chinese performing European music on Chinese instruments or Europeans taking part in Chinese ensembles.
For the Vêpres à la Vierge CD I took part, implausibly, on baroque violin, erhu and shawm—but I never quite knew whom I was impersonating (an imaginary missionary, either steeped in Chinese style or not? Perhaps even a Chinese Catholic convert keen to bury his musical heritage beneath superior Western learning?!). My ears conditioned by exposure to living Chinese traditions that often go back beyond the Qing, I found our experiments tentative; we were on firmer ground with the purely Western items, which now sound more successful to me. Later in a couple of concerts I began doing some semi-chinoiserie noodling on the two types of fiddles (miantiao? tagliatelle?) that I, at least, found a bit more satisfying; but I still couldn’t work out who I was—me, I guess.
Anyway, I was content to get back to my work with the living folk ritual groups of Hebei and Shanxi—where besides indigenous traditions, Christian groups had come to adopt their own local shengguan wind ensembles for ritual observances.
For such imaginative cross-cultural time-travelling excursions, one might compare several projects on baroque music in Latin and south America, and the fine project of Jordi Savall and Hesperion XXI on the routes of slavery:
—in line with their previous work on medieval music, such as their versions of the medieval estampies (better received than ours…)
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In these two posts on the Qing court I’ve given just two instances of the great variety of musicking there. As you know, I don’t go in much for recreations. While such experiments are imaginative, as Taruskin reminds us, the whole social and aesthetic framework in which we experience them—our very ears—are quite different (see e.g. Bach and Daoist ritual); we can only hear them for what they are: our creative response, for our own tastes in our modern societies.
* Since this post entails historical re-enactment, many would doubtless welcome the nomination of Transport Minister Chris “Failing” Grayling to retrace Pedrini’s route.
** I dunno, these teenage kids on their mobiles, Typical!—Ed.
Struggling to encompass all this? I know I am. While we inevitably specialize in particular topics, it’s important to build bridges. I guess it’s that time of year when another guide to my diverse posts may come in handy—this is worth reading in conjunction with the homepage and my roundup this time last year.
I’ve added more entries to many of the sidebar categories and tags mentioned in that summary. I’ve now subheaded many of the categories; it’d be useful for the tags too, but it seems I can’t do that on my current WP plan. Of course, many of these headings overlap—fruitfully.
To accompany the visit of the Zhihua temple group to the British Museum in April, I also did a roundup of sources on the temple in the wider context of ritual in Beijing and further afield, including several posts on this site.
I’ve posted some more introductions to Local ritual, including
The WAM category (also with subheads!) also continues to grow, including more Proms; chinoiserie (Berlioz, as well as Ravel and Mahler, who have their own tags); and early music. Coverage of the infinite wonders of Bach continues, such as this. Try also this Haydn trio (part of a series on reception history). The humour subhead includes gems like The Mary Celeste. See also under conducting
I’ve given basic subheads to the language category (note this post on censorship), which also contains much drôlerie in both English and Chinese. Issues with speech and fluency (see stammering tag) continue to concern me, such as
More favourites may be found in the *MUST READ* category. Among other drôlerie, try this updated post, one of several on indexing and taxonomy; and more from the great Philomena Cunk.
Most satisfying is this collection of great songs—still not as eclectic as it might become:
The conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970), based on the 1951 novel by Alberto Moravia, is a most captivating film, visually sumptuous—with the gorgeous Jean-Louis Trintignant, Stefania Sandrelli, and Dominique Sanda bringing out the interplay of political and sexual themes.
As with Bertolucci’s other films like Last tango in Paris, music and dance play a crucial role. The soundtrack (by Georges Delerue) has the ambivalence of Cinema paradiso and Twin peaks. As with all the best film music, just the opening theme transports us instantly into the story’s troubled world. Here’s the complete film:
The female radio band near the opening (from 4.12) reminds me of Franco Cerri’s recollections in my post on Chet in Italy.
By way of comparison with the final dance, here’s the equivalent scene in Last Tango in Paris:
As this review observes, Last tango is not about sex but about pain.
Made in France four years after the disillusionment of 1968’s failures, it’s about characters who can’t see past their own emotional and psychological problems, who are solipsistic in the extreme, locking themselves away from everything they can’t face in the outside world.
Pauline Kael’s famous rave review, comparing the film’s importance to that of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, is critiqued in this retrospective, a particularly cogent view of the on-set abuse of Maria Schneider—a revelation that has severely marred the film’s image, which is regrettable since it’s a work in which deep emotions and anguish are conveyed. Among innumerable other reviews, Last tango is also the subject of this excellent 2011 discussion. See also under Godard.
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Bertolucci died in November 2018 (see also here), soon after Nic Roeg (for an assessment of both together, see here). Many more films to revisit, not least The sheltering sky (based, indeed, on the great novel by Paul Bowles, though he was less than keen on the result), The dreamers, and the epic 1900. And Godard died in 2022.
While the main theme of my blog is the maintenance of local Chinese ritual life (before, during, and since Maoism), it’s worth providing a roundup of recent posts on European cultures and politics—most of which have ramifications for, and links to, China.
Bernard Lortat-Jacob, Sardinian chronicles (1995, with CD; first edition 1990, in French).
How I envy Bernard his fields of study—apart from Sardinia, also Morocco, Romania, Albania…! As with flamenco (first of three posts here), he explores the riches of regional folk cultures around the Mediterranean, integrating changing musical and social practices into everyday life—which is precisely what fieldwork should be about (see also fieldwork tag).
I’ve introduced the riches of the regional folk cultures of Italy here. The concept of “Italy” is rather recent anyway, and there’s still a huge amount to explore in its regional traditions. So taxonomy falls short again: to subsume the folk culture of Sardinia under Italy is no more suitable than discussing Tibetan or Uyghur cultures under China (ha). And it’s another illustration how very blinkered is our search for sun and sea (cf. fado, football, and Fátima).
Sardinian chronicles is popular not only by virtue of its brevity and its engaging style, akin to travel writing, but from its rich ethnographic observation and its musical, social, and indeed psychological detail, with a series of encounters with individual musicians and their families—musicking as part of social interaction within changing local communities.
Like the late lamented Antoinet Schimmelpenninck for China, Bernard is gifted with a natural rapport. And as he unpacks his own involvement, his delights and tribulations form part of the picture. Sardinian chronicles has become a model for later texts—certainly mine (not least my latest film and book).
Despite the luxury tourist enclaves of latter years, the poverty of Sardinia is striking, far from the glamorous life of Tuscany or north Italy. Vendettas remains chronic among Sardinian shepherds—like the feuds of rival clans in south Fujian, and child chimney-sweeps, among the traditional heritages that UNESCO won’t be supporting…
Complementing his book, this beautiful 1989 film by Bernard (with Georges Luneau) makes a fine introduction to various kinds of musicking in Sardinian life:
Here one truly feels the “red-hot sociality” attributed to Chinese temple fairs.
Canto a tenores This style of a cappella vocal quartet (see e.g. from 16.40 in the film above) is one of the most entrancing vocal sounds anywhere in the world, let alone in Europe. Its sound ideal makes a fascinating contrast with that of the Swedish psalm—more for Lomax’s Cantometrics to explore. Though recently, inevitably, sucked into the heritage razzmatazz (nowhere is safe!) and a regular guest on the world-music circuit, commodification can’t hijack its presence in local society.
Liturgy On Lunissanti Holy Week in Castelsardo in northwest Sardinia (cf. calendrical rituals, or Athos), Bernard Lortat-Jacob has another gorgeous book
Canti di passione (1996; French edition 1998),
with photos by Bachisio Masia—a brilliant innovation of a scholarly work on folk liturgy which doubles as a coffee-table book!
Like Berliner’s Lives in jazz, it is just as detailed in musical as in social analysis—and as with Indian music, or indeed Madonna, a basic grasp of musical features can only enhance a more physical and intuitive response. Apart from the wonderful scenes in Bernard’s film (from 28.26), some video from 1992:
and 2011:
Here the magical canto a cuncordu vocal style evokes that of the secular tenores.
Launeddas The launeddas (Sachs–Hornbostel #422.3!!!) is another microcosm, with its locally renowned players and makers. With three pipes (one drone, two melodic), it’s a very distant cousin of the Chinese sheng mouth-organ. Again, Bernard’s film has some insightful scenes (from 46.14).
An early pioneer of launeddas studies was Andreas Bentzon (1936–71):
The minimalists would love the constant imperceptible transformations in these riffs!
Prominent among the masters with whom Bentzon studied were Efisio Melis and Antonio Lara (yet more rivals who made a tactical truce!). Their recordings from 1930 and 1961 are featured on a fine CD.
I haven’t yet caught the launeddasin situ, but I was delighted to hear the great Luigi Lai at the City of London festival in 1998, to which I had invited the equally distinguished qin master Lin Youren.
The manic melodic quality of the style is the basis for that of the organetto—one accordion type that Annie Proulx doesn’t quite cover (and to lower the tone, Captain Pugwash perhaps sowed the seed for my generation in Britain). A brief appreciation (of the organetto, not Captain Pugwash, as Nina Stibbe would explain) features below.
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By contrast, to show the limitations of casual visits by an outsider like me, here are some vignettes from a holiday I spent there with my partner from Mantua in the summer of 1998, when Bernard affably introduced us to his adopted village of Irgoli—his chapter about which in Sardinian chronicles is itself a kind of love song, with beautiful insights on guitar song (another major genre) in the bar.
Writing up my notes mainly on the beach, the contrast with my fieldwork in China was extreme—I was deep in my studies of Gaoluo and the Hebei ritual associations at the time.
And despite the ethnographic riches of, um, Chiswick, it’s ironic that I should be writing all this stuck here, sweltering (insert suitable headline here)—I should be there! I guess it’s called work–life balance.
Our hosts Totore Vacca and Doloretta are friendly—warm and natural. There are lots of musos around. We get by with speaking Italian, though of course they all speak Sardinian together.
On our first evening we go along to a festa for children’s singing, meeting the breezy, nay manic, organetto star Totore Chessa (see e.g. here and here; also featured in Bernard’s film above, and on the Sardinian chronicles CD). Totore uses his big fisarmonica (rather than his organetto) to accompany our hosts’ daughter Francesca. To conclude, the local priest makes a speech that reminds me of a Chinese cadre: family, pride, culture, blah blah.
One evening Totore drives us, manically, to the festa of Santa Margherita Bultei. The gig on a stage in the piazza is furnished with loud amplification. Several groups of dancers perform, one of which Salvatore accompanies, with singers and guitar. The other dance groups have their own organetto accompanists; and there are three groups of tenores, including the fine group from Orgosolo. An old codger goes round liberally dispensing local wine. This sure beats the Nether Wallop church fête.
The costumes seem rather fabricated to me, but it doesn’t affect the authenticity of the performances. The parameters of the music seem simple, narrow, but it’s still hard to grasp.
After the festa ends at 2.15am, the local organetto player Mario Bande invites Totore back to his place for a drink—which turns into an all-nighter. We’re tired enough after the long festa, unprepared for this further private party, but given that Totore is our lift, we tag along with some of the dancers. Their animated talk is incomprehensible, even to my Italian partner; yet if we had managed to understand more, it would have been a wonderful insight into local musical values. Story of my life…
The two of them are subtly sounding each other out. Mario’s uncle and grandfather were great players, and the latter collected many folk pieces, some of which Salvatore is said to have ripped off.
First Mario brings out various instruments for Totore to try out and appraise, then they have a protracted argument about the uniqueness of local dance styles. Totore, defending himself against the taint of plagiarism, makes the point that there can be no evidence that such pieces originated in this one village alone.
They’re not just arguing passionately about aesthetics (the local dancers are also vocal in support of the Bultei faction), with all the loving exploration of craftsmanship of instrument-making that Annie Proulx describes, but they also have a deep and insatiable need to keep playing and dancing. As soon as anyone even tries out a phrase, the dancers can’t help gyrating—a contagious kind of dancing mania. Everyone (except us!) gets involved. Eventually the party winds down, with diplomatic decorum apparently maintained, though we’re not privy to the nuances of their probings.
Totore is pure, other-wordly, childlike, living only for the organetto. He talks just the way he plays, in quickfire bursts and abrupt cadences, always upbeat, hectic, alert to the spark of the moment. People know he’s different.
Here he is with Luigi Lai in 2011:
Back to my notes, covered in wine and suntan lotion:
Totore drives just like he plays too. Still chattering away, he navigates the mountain roads at breakneck speed as the sun rises. He clearly know the roads as well as he knows his keyboard—like Daoist Li Bin as he chases round doing funerals in Yanggao. We get back to Irgoli by 7am. Only later that day do we learn that a shepherd had been shot dead at the edge of the village at 5am—another victim of local vendettas.
Another evening we take our hosts for a pizza in Orosei. They’re keen to go to a screening of Titanic. We make excuses—another of those moral dilemmas of the fieldworker. Solidarity (“Becoming at One with the People”) suggests that we try and share their world, but hey, we’re on holiday… Instead we find Totore Chessa propping up the bar. He drops in next day to invite us to another festa, but we’ve agreed to go to a gara poetica poetry joust in Orosei—which is no longer quite like this:
(As often I tend to cite older clips because they hint at change—more recent footage is easily found!)
On a visit to the museum at Nuoro we get a glimpse of how very much life has changed in Sardinia. Then Bernard and Maria arrive; after a trip to the beach we go to the wedding of their friends, where the tenores di Bitti and a group from Castelsardo are singing. As in China, this is how to experience folk music, rather than in sanitized stage renditions. Sure, it’s all a continuum…
And of course this is yet another instance of the diversity of all the cultures of Europe (like those of China, or Africa) from which Some Brits now seek to isolate themselves…
*Sequel to Deep in a dream*
(posts on a variety of trumpeters are listed here)
My brilliant friendPaola Zannoni (who gave me such a wonderful image for that Bach cello prelude), far more “deep in the dream” of Chet Baker than I, has given me her own playlist. She and her brother Fabio inherited their passion for Chet from their father Enzo (1925–98, R.I.P.), an avid participant in the modest yet passionate jazz scene in Verona.
In March 1959 Chet was busted again in Harlem, spending four months in Rikers Island gaol. Soon after his release he was touring in Europe, and in October he recorded the iconic Chet Baker in Milan. Not long after Paola was born, her father went to see Chet’s new film Urlatorialla sbarra (see below) in Milan, hearing him live there too.
As Paola notes, 1950s’ Milan was still a world of factory workers, the Fiat 1100, merry-go-rounds, and suburban dance bands. Local jazzers were keen, but way behind the USA. Franco Cerri recalled,
We should go back to the end of the war in 1945. We were playing for Radio Tevere, which had to sound like a Roman programme even though it was made in Milan—there was fascist propaganda at one end of the studio, with our group Smeraldo at the other.
This was the world onto which exploded the divine druggie Chet—so “cool” that deep down he envied Cerri his little apartment and his Fiat 1100!
In 1975, when Paola was 17, she went to hear Chet at the Umbria jazz festival. Later she played recorder and cello in the early music scene in north Italy, going on to devote herself to jazz, teaching, and her funky string quartet, always exploring. In 2007 she wrote a thesis on Chet in Milan. Paola’s brother Fabio, a flautist, is also active as a writer on music and organizer of contemporary music in Verona.
* * *
Of all Chet’s disciples around the world, it was surely in Italy that l’angelomaledetto was most idolized.
Whereas Miles fell in love with Europe (particularly Paris and Juliette Greco), for Chet Europe seems never to have been much more than a useful source of drugs. His tours read mainly as a squalid litany of dodgy dealers, dope busts, and duplicity. But it’s worth noting the many fine local jazzers who worked with him on his European tours—in what were often trying circumstances.
While I’m adjusting our focus on the American scene, it’s worth mentioning jazz behind the Iron Curtain, like Tomasz Stańko in Poland—where the counter-cultural message of jazz felt still more significant (cf. punk in the GDR).
Chet in Italy Chet’s first European tour began inauspiciously in Milan over New Year 1955, followed by Perugia, Rome, and Genoa, ending in Germany.
By 1959 audiences were drawn to l‘angelo like a moth to a flame. He took a role in the film Urlatori alla sbarra:
For all his romantic image, Chet was truculent and prone to tantrums, as he smuggled in pills, checked briefly into rehab, blagging dodgy prescriptions, and alienating his most devoted followers. He had a devoted following in Lucca, home of Puccini. He was finally busted there in summer 1960, languishing [as you do—Ed.] in jail until his trial in April 1961, where he received a rather light sentence.
Another romantic image now emerged as the tones of his angelic trumpet wafted from behind the prison walls. He was released early in December, even managing not to get deported. He resumed touring; briefly drug-free after his release, he soon resumed the habit. Meanwhile other jazzers kept dying (Deep in a dream, pp.153–83—sordid and depressing as the book is, it’s brilliant, do read it!).
He was welcomed back as a returning hero for a gig in Pescara in 1967 (Deep in a dream, pp.252–3):
The Rimbaud of jazz, often defeated but every time rising … the sweet and fragile boy grown in the slums of New York [sic!] … a bird whose wings are always broken, the defenseless victim of every violence in the wild city.
Always running from the law, he spent summer 1976 in Rome, doing another troubled gig there in 1978. Through the 1980s he did further tours of Italy for adoring audiences, spreading chaos all around his circle. His last gigs in Rome in 1988 were punctuated by street busking to pay off his dealer. By May he lay dead on an Amsterdam pavement; the only mystery about his death was its circumstances.
* * *
But again, utterly dysfunctional as Chet’s life was, the tracks are mesmerizing. For Paola’s thesis she interviewed Renato Sellani and Franco Cerri, who appeared with Chet Baker in Milan in 1959. This is their version of My old flame:
And don’t forget the 1959 video of My funny Valentine, which I already featured.
So here’s a fine selection from Paola:
Indian Summer (Milan, again from 1959)—Paola: with a long, sweet, elegant solo that I LOVE)
Well you needn’t (a boppy version of the famous Monk standard):
These foolish things (whose lyrics Eric Maschwitz wrote as a love song to Anna May Wong!), with René Thomas on guitar:
Here I can’t resist playing two versions by Billie Holiday too—first from 1936, before the literal shot in the arm of the 1940s:
and then from 1952:
Back to Paola’s playlist—Autumn Leaves, with Paul Desmond on sax:
There will never be another you (Chet’s first solo here is a classic study piece for jazz trumpeters):
Ballata in forma di blues (Rome, 1962):
Paola’s selection is based on Chet’s genius as a trumpeter, but she also led me to another searingly intense sung ballad live on video, Almost Blue (also featured in the Let’s get lost film). While he was eminently capable of sounding befuddled and morose, this is on a par with his heart-rending My funny Valentine. His cover of an Elvis Costello song inspired by Chet’s The thrill is gone, it’s a late version from 1987, not long before his death:
There’s another, longer, version in his amazing Tokyo set, also from 1987:
If only I could have shared all these ballads with Natasha.
Listening to these late gigs, perhaps I was wrong to conclude:
Whereas most of the jazz greats, through their similar struggles with addiction, were constantly learning, honing their craft, Chet seems to have been gifted with his dreamy cool style very early, and then traded on his angelic image (largely for substances) for the rest of his surprisingly long life, settling for melancholy—without the constant explorations of the other great jazzers.
Even with those standards that he’d been playing year in, year out since the 1950s, he couldn’t help exploring, both in melodic invention and in the depth of his pain.
I often observe that notation is overestimated; still, many jazzers were obsessed with chord sequences, and often consulted scores. There’s discussion (e.g. here) of how familiar Chet was with theory and notation. As Gerry Mulligan observed, “Chet can read, but he doesn’t have to.” Anyway, his sense of harmonic melody was largely aural.
Chet appeared less often in England, but late in his life he was in fine form for a week at The Canteen in London in March 1983. His 1986 appearance at Ronnie Scotts, with Elvis Costello, was also great:
To think that I could have been there… 1986 was my first stay in China, but I now add this to the list of great gigs that I kick myself for missing—Amy Winehouse, Tennstedt doing Mahler, and so on.
Lastly, another of my favourite ballads, Time after time—the 1954 recording:
*Not suitable for those of a sensitive disposition!* [Red rag to a bull—Ed.]
This is one of the classic stories in our Fieldworkers’ joke manual, always coming to mind whenever some formal meeting prompts Chinese people to address me with the honorific nin 您 for “you” rather than the standard ni 你 (for a fine discussion, see here).
Dating from 1980s’ Beijing, the crucial pronouns of the story translate much less naturally into English than into other European languages, which still preserve the distinction between informal singular and honorific plural forms of the word for “you”:
So there’s this factory worker riding his rusty old bike home after his shift, trundling along in a daze. All of a sudden a big shiny Mercedes casually turns right just in front of him [as they do], and with no time to screech to a halt, the worker’s bike bumps into the gleaming car. As the chauffeur stops to inspect the damage, the furious worker leans over into the car and shouts,
“Your mother’s cunt!”
[Ni malegebi!]*
On behalf of the high-ranking Party apparatchik seated in the back, the chauffeur comes back with,
“Hey, comrade! How dare you speak so disrespectfully—don’t you realize there’s a VIP National Leader sitting in the back?”
Feigning an apology, the worker exclaims politely,
“Oh, I’m sooo sorry— I should have said, ‘Your esteemed… mother’s cunt!’
[Nin malegebi!]”
Getty Images.
In Italian the variants might go “La fica di tua madre” and “La fica di vostra madre” (cf. the vocabulary of Burlesque-only—Oh, and La vaca t’ha fat, also featuring posh car…).
On an Academy of Ancient Music tour of the States around 2002, a couple of my mates enjoyed the story, and wanted to hear me telling it in the original Chinese. Rodolfo, amazing fiddle player from Brazil, thought it would work well in Brazilian-Portuguese, so I talked him through it in English, and one evening after a gig in Nebraska, as the band was gathered in an unsalubrious pub, he did a near-simultaneous Brazilian-Portuguese translation while I told the Chinese version—which, beautifully, had ’em rolling in the aisles. It’s Not the Joke, it’s the Way you Tell it.
Among my Chinese mates this story is such a classic topos that now if I want to swear at one of them, all I have to do is mutter, “NIN…”
*For Miles, Keef, and Listen with motherfucker, see here. For some reason, Chinese bi is a tad less offensive than its English equivalent: see here. For the c-word in English, click here.
I heard these two stories independently, one in England, one in Italy, but they belong to the same family [like we do—note for the UKIPs].
A beggar waits at the lights every day for cars to stop so he can ask drivers to spare some change. When a chauffeured Rolls Royce purrs to a halt, he shuffles over and taps on the rear window. As the monocled boss presses a button, the window winds down silently; taking a scornful glance at the beggar, he remarks,
“Neither a borrower nor a lender be—William Shakespeare.”
He winds up the window and the car glides off, leaving the beggar disgruntled.
Same thing next day—he spots the Rolls Royce again, and shuffles over. As the boss wearily winds down his window, the beggar responds suavely,
“Cunt—D.H. Lawrence.”
I now find this was recounted by the great George Mikes in English humour for beginners (1980).
And here’s a variant from Mantua—birthplace of Virgil, need I add:
There’s this little guy in his clapped-out old Fiat Cinquecento, putting his foot down on a dual carriageway in town to try and beat a gleaming Mercedes. Indeed he clatters up to the lights ahead, but as he frantically revs up there the Mercedes glides up smoothly alongside. The posh driver glances over at the sweating pleb and observes suavely,
“Chi va piano, va sano e va lontano—Esopo.”
[The race is not to the swift—Aesop]*
As the lights turn green, the Mercedes purrs off and the little guy in his Fiat chugs along in hot pursuit. Putting his foot down again he does manage to overtake, but once more he has to screech to a halt at the next red light, and the Mercedes glides up again. This time the Fiat driver leans over and shouts,
“La vaca t’ha fat!—Virgilio.”
[You were made by a cow!—Virgil]
The different punchlines (the latter in Mantuan dialect, note) and their imputed sources each have their distinctive charm. Another one to file under International Cultural Exchange…
*Pedant’s corner: This is the driver’s attribution, of course: it does indeed resemble Aesop’s tale of the tortoise and the hare, but it’s actually an unattributed proverb zzzzz.
The wise and infinitely supportive Stephan Feuchtwang continues to inspire generations of anthropologists in China and worldwide (see also here) with his work on Chinese popular religion. He has just celebrated his 80th birthday—and so do we all!
Design: Lotte van Hulst.
For the party at the Tabernacle (a great venue, and, um, marker of the changing territorial identities of West London religious life!) his wonderful family played some popular and moving musical items, with the assembled guests on kazoos (anyone have a funky collective noun for kazoos in English, or measure word in Chinese?). And following my little foray into a world-music version of Bach earlier this year, we did a warmup act as a heartfelt tribute to Stephan, essaying a little medley from the Goldberg Variations—with me on erhu (one of many types of Chinese fiddles) and Rowan Pease (unsung Lucy Worsley of East Asian popular culture, currently embroiled in the China Quarterly struggle for academic freedom) on sanxian banjo (or should I say friction chordophone and plucked lute?) [Nah, give it a rest—The Plain People of Ireland].
That makes a total of five strings—and all without a safety net. Since Bach never wrote for either piano or sax (shades of WWJD), if his music can sound great (to us) on those instruments, then why not erhu and sanxian, eh. We haven’t tried adding a kazoo yet, though. As I said in my intro:
Just imagine that the Italian missionaries, like Pedrini, [1] at the court of the Qianlong emperor in 18th-century Beijing had invited Bach for a sabbatical—and indeed Stephan, although that was perhaps a little before even his time… So we’re going to essay a little medley from what should now be known as The Feuchtwang Variations. [2]
Since among Stephan’s many talents he is also a viola player (“Not a Lot of People Know That”), I can avail myself of a couple of the muso’s classic excuses:
[studiously] After intensive research on the performance practice of both Leipzig and Beijing in the 1740s, I can now say with some certainty that… it wouldn’t have sounded like this. [Cf. John Wilbraham’s remark.]
If you enjoy this half as much as we do, then we will have enjoyed it twice as much as you.
Framed by the Aria (itself infinitely enchanting—molten, ethereal, suspended in time), we played the first variation (blimey), then numbers 18 and 25—a perfect selection, eh. Short of recording daily until Steph’s 90th birthday, we’re never going to play it to our satisfaction (editing this is a similar challenge to editing one of my voiceovers), so meanwhile here’s an almost-recognizable attempt, just to give you a flavour—It’s the Thought that Counts. Just think yourselves lucky we didn’t do the repeats. Take It Away (and don’t bring it back):
Stephen Jones (erhu), Rowan Pease (sanxian, vocals). Recorded in Maidenhead, 14th November 2017.
“They said it couldn’t be done”—and they were right! (Cf. Bob Monkhouse).
Never having played the Goldberg Variations on a keyboard, I (like millions of others) am deeply familiar with it through recordings—notably that of the iconic Glenn Gould, of course. So at the age of 286 I’m almost in the position of a young player in a Chinese family shawm band, who begins to play the melodies on shawm after many years of aural experience (and let’s just be grateful I didn’t do an arrangement for large Shaanbei shawms—yet). Similarly, I hardly needed to consult Bach’s notation, except out of curiosity. At the same time, anyone playing the piece is inevitably conditioned by the experience of hearing Glenn Gould’s version.
We played the medley in F rather than G—less as a result of all my erudite research into 1740s’ pitch standards (not), but just because I like a lower tuning on the erhu.
Blending with invisible singers to left of picture. Stephan in red on left. Photo: Cordelia Pegge.
For the ecstatic Variation 18 we recruited a backing band consisting of Stephan’s daughters Rachel and Anna, along with Harriet Evans (outstanding scholar of the status of women in China). I arranged some personal lyrics, often in a kind of verbal hocket, incorporating (in stave 3) anthropology (with a little jest on the challenge, for some of us, of mastering the abstruse nature of Stephan’s theory!), (in stave 4) his dear wife Miranda, and his love of cycling:
For the recording, without vocal backup, Rowan and I take the upper parts wordlessly, in more ethereal vein. Do feel free to sing along with a partner of your choice (cf. the karaoke versions of Daoist ritual percussion in my film, from 24.09).
And then the slow and intense minor-key Variation 25 is just amazing. Here Rowan’s singing supplies further harmonic intensity, evoking Glenn Gould’s own occasional inadvertent vocals. [3] And with the sustained sound of the erhu, and all my one-finger chromatic slides (1st finger on the way up, 4th finger on the way down), it sounds even better—or rather, it could do in the right hands. Not unlike a Chinese ondes martenot—trad keyboards just can’t compete with the vocal quality of bowed instruments.
And OMG, how about this (for the theremin, click here):
Sure, our version goes a tad faster—again, not resulting from any holier-than-thou baroque authenticity, but because it helps the whole harmonic logic.
Among many fine harpsichord versions, here’s Scott Ross:
Returning briefly to the modern piano—Bach was of course performing and composing modern music, and maybe what appeals to me in Joanna MacGregor’s version is that it seems tastefully rooted in her whole experience of our own contemporary piano sounds. Here’s the hallucinatory final repeat of the Aria:
Still, Bach is amazing on tuned percussion too, like this:
It can also sound wonderful as a string trio:
And now I’m keen to hear Rachel Podger’s new arrangement with Chad Kelly:
All this wealth of divine music I offer in tribute to the great Professor Feuchtwang!
[1] For missionaries at the Qing court, see here. “They come over ‘ere, with their fancy harpsichords…” [2] Maybe I can concoct a couple of Chinese musicians in 1740s’ Leipzig from the Bach archives. If north African wind players were active at European courts of the day, then why not… International cultural exchange, eh. Note also Bach and Daoist ritual—not least Li Manshan’s classic remark. [3] This encomium could come in handy for Rowan’s CV: “Less irritating than Glenn Gould”—Dr S. Jones.
Apart from the sheer beauty of the music, it reminds me of group therapy sessions I’ve taken part in. Despite their protestations, all three stammerers seem to have overcome their imp-p-pediment; but again, singing does often offer a temporary reprieve.
The specious connection with stammering didn’t occur to me when I first relished the quartet from the pit at the Pesaro Rossini Festival in the early 1980s. Of course, joking aside, this is an excuse to play an exquisite composition, a departure from our usual diet of Bach, Daoist ritual, and Billie Holiday.
That’s the best version I can find online. I’m sure scholars of Italian opera can discuss at length the authenticity of such a style—one might assemble a less, um, operatic vocal ensemble, but that’s just me and my knit-your-own yogurt purism for you.
Might the aria have been an inspiration for Harpo‘s mute persona?!
* * *
My distinguished friend Hugh in Verona (where long ago I did my time in the pit at the Arena) draws my attention to this sextet (see also here), which might also be part of a group therapy session for stammerers:
Apart from simple consonants, diphthongs can also pose a challenge. But syllabic, rhythmic speech is an outmoded technique that offers only temporary relief…
As Hugh observes, such operatic set-pieces are known as concertato dello stupore—perhaps“ensemble of the nonplussed” rather than the charming “stupefaction ensemble”.
Here’s another wacky and exhilarating Rossini tongue-twister (with dindin for bells, tac-tà for hammer, bumbum for cannon, and so on):
For more stammering songs, click here; and for another tongue-twister, here.
You think I know Shag Nothing, but I know CHAGALL!
More genteel would be the old “I Don’t Know Much About Art, But I Know What I Like!”(groan from Myles). So, following Myles, I write this in the spirit of The Plain People of Ireland. As often, I’m seeking clues relevant to my own areas of study, making connections that can easily get buried beneath our individual specialities. Perhaps this post might be entitled Renaissance art for Dummies in the Field of Daoist Ritual Studies—not one of their bestsellers, I suspect.
Sassetta: St Francis giving his cloak to a poor soldier.
I first came across
Michael Baxandall, Painting and experience in fifteenth-century Italy: a primer in the social history of pictorial style (1st edition 1972)
It’s my kind of book, full of the practical detail of materials, technical skill, and patronage, as well as exploring changing perceptions. Quite short, and eminently readable, it gains much from having grown out of a series of lectures that he gave. It addresses issues that I hardly find in discussions of Chinese ritual and music (for any period), so I’d like to explore it at a certain length.
Baxandall opens by encapsulating, in plain and elegant language,** issues that, um, scholars of Daoist ritual (of all periods) should absorb:
A 15th-century painting is the deposit of a social relationship.
On one side there was the painter who made the picture, or at least supervised its making. On the other side there was somebody else who asked him to make it, provided funds for him to make it, reckoned on using it in some way or other. Both parties worked within institutions and conventions—commercial, religious, perceptual, in the widest sense social—that were different from ours and influenced the forms of what they together made.
He observes that
The picture trade was a very different thing from that in our own late romantic condition, in which painters paint what they think best and then look round for a buyer.
Exploring the mismatch between our concepts of “public” and “private”, he notes that
Private men’s commissions often had very public roles, often in public places. A more relevant distinction is between commissions controlled by large corporate institutions like the offices of cathedral works and commissions from individual men or small groups of people: collective or communal undertaking on the one hand, personal initiatives on the other. The painter was typically, though not invariably, employed by an individual or small group. […] In this he differed from the sculptor, who often worked for large commercial enterprises. (p.5)
He meshes all this with detailed technical discussion, like the use of ultramarine:
The exotic and dangerous character of ultramarine was a means of accent that we, for whom dark blue is probably no more striking than scarlet or vermilion, are likely to miss. (p.11)
Thus in the Sassetta painting above, the gown St Francis gives away is an ultramarine gown.
The contracts point to a sophistication about blues, a capacity to discriminate between one and another, with which our own culture does not equip us.
Baxandall notes change over the course of the Quattrocento:
While precious pigments become less prominent, a demand for pictorial skill becomes more so. […] It seems that clients were becoming less anxious to flaunt sheer opulence of material.
But he goes on:
It would be futile to account for this sort of development simply within the history of art. The diminishing role of gold in paintings is part of a general movement in western Europe at this time towards a kind of selective inhibition about display, and this show itself in many other kinds of behaviour too. It was just as conspicuous in the client’s clothes, for instance, which were abandoning gilt fabrics and gaudy hues for the restrained black of Burgundy. This was a fashion with elusive moral overtones.
[…]
The general shift away from gilt splendour must have had very complex and discrete sources indeed—a frightening social mobility with its problem of dissociating itself from the flashy new rich; the acute physical shortage of gold in the fifteenth century; a classical distaste for sensuous licence now seeping out from neo-Ciceronian humanism, reinforcing the more accessible sorts of Christian asceticism; in the case of dress, obscure technical reasons for the best quality of Dutch cloth being black anyway; above all, perhaps, the sheer rhythm of fashionable reaction. (pp.14–15)
To show how skill was becoming the natural alternative to precious pigment, and might now be understood as a conspicuous index of consumption, he returns to “the money of painting”—the costing of painting-materials, and frame, as against labour and skill.
You will no longer be surprised to learn that the Quattrocento division of labour between master and disciples (pp.19–23) reminds me of Daoist ritual specialists.
Baxandall goes on to note the differences in patrons’ demands for panel paintings and frescoes. He attempts to address the issue (even for the time of creation) of public response to painting:
The difficulty is that it is at any time eccentric to set down on paper a verbal response to the complex non-verbal stimulations paintings are designed to provide: the very fact of doing so must make a man untypical. (pp.24–5)
Aesthetic terms expressed in words are contingent, varying from age to age, and anyway elusive. Even with the vocabulary of such accounts, discussing that of a Milanese agent, Baxandall notes:
the problem of virile and sweet and air having different nuances for him than for us, but there is also the difficulty that he saw the pictures differently from us.
He goes on to explore different kinds of viewers’ own exercise of skill in appreciating a painting, with their different backgrounds:
… the equipment that the fifteenth-century painter’s public brought to complex visual stimulations like pictures. One is talking not about all fifteenth-century people, but about those whose response to works of art was important to the artist—the patronizing classes, one might say. […] The peasants and the urban poor play a very small part in the Renaissance culture that most interests us now, which may be deplorable but is a fact that must be accepted. […] So a certain profession, for instance, leads a man [sic—SJ] to discriminate particularly effectively in identifiable areas. (p.39)
Whatever [the painter’s] own specialized professional skills, he is himself a member of the society he works for and shares its visual experience and habit. (p.40)
And given that “most 15th-century pictures are religious pictures”, he asks in detail,
What is the religious function of religious pictures?
His answer, in brief, is that they were used “as respectively lucid, vivid and readily accessible stimuli to meditation on the Bible and the lives of Saints.” But he goes on to enquire:
What sort of painting would the religious public for pictures have found lucid, vividly memorable, and emotionally moving?
[…]
The fifteenth-century experience of a painting was not the painting we see now so much as a marriage between the painting and the beholder’s previous visualizing activity on the same matter. (pp.40–45)
Again he makes the crucial point:
15th-century pictorial development happened within fifteenth-century classes of emotional experience.
Alongside colour, he discusses the beholders’ appreciation of gesture and groupings, adducing dance and sacred drama.
It is doubtful if we have the right predispositions to see such refined innuendo at all spontaneously. (p.76)
And apart from their basic level of piety (largely lost to us today), many of the “patronizing classes” would have assessed the work partly through their knowledge of geometry and the harmonic series.
In Part III Baxandall attempts to sketch the “cognitive style” of the time, with the reservation that
A society’s visual practices are, in the nature of things, not all or even mostly represented in verbal records. (p.109)
Finally he reverses his main argument—that “the forms and styles of painting respond to social circumstances” (and so “noting bits of social convention that may sharpen our perception of the pictures”)—by suggesting that “the forms and styles of painting may sharpen our perception of the society” (p.151).
An old painting is the record of visual activity. One has to learn to read it, just as one has to learn to read a text from a different culture, even when one knows, in a limited sense, the language; both language and pictorial representations are conventional activities. […]
In sum,
Social history and art history are continuous, each offering necessary insights into the other.
Such reflections seem more sophisticated than the “autonomous”, timeless approaches still common in both WAM and Daoist ritual. To be fair, we are quite busy trying to document ritual sequences, hereditary titles, and so on—but the Renaissance scholars have just as much nitty-gritty to deal with too.
* * *
Carpaccio: Baptism of the Selenites, c1504–7 (detail). San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, Venice.
(The painting features a shawm band that I’d love to hear! For Venice’s musical contacts with the East, see e.g. here).
Baxandall ends with a caveat:
One will not approach the paintings on the philistine level of the illustrated social history.
I don’t think he quite had in mind
Alexander Lee, The ugly renaissance: sex, greed, violence and depravity in an age of beauty (2014),
a less technical, more sociological book with a firm political agenda that some may find more appealing than others (cf. this review of Catherine Fletcher, The beauty and the terror: an alternative history of the Italian Renaissance (2020).
Poking around beneath the glamorous surface image of the Renaissance, seemingly “an age of beauty and brilliance populated by men and women of angelic perfection”, he observes:
If the Renaissance is to be understood, it is necessary to acknowledge not just the awe-inspiring idealism of its cultural artefacts but also the realities which its artists endeavoured to conceal or reconfigure.
Lee explores the brutal social universe in which artists were immersed. Like Baxandall, he explores the relationship between artist and his assistants and apprentices:
The relationship was naturally based on work, and hence could often be punctuated by squabbles, or even dismissal. Michelangelo continually had trouble with his assistants, and had to sack several for poor workmanship, laziness, or even—in one particular case—because the lad in question was “a stuck-up little turd”.
Given that patrons were as important as artists in shaping the form and direction of Renaissance art,
Rather than being seduced by the splendor of the works they commissioned, it is essential to uncover the world behind the paintings; a world that was populated not by the perfect mastery of colour and harmony that is usually associated with the Renaissance, but by ambition, greed, rape, and murder.
He shows the often dubious motives of patrons. They often valued a commission “for the contribution it could make to reshaping the image of often extremely disreputable men”. Such works “were intended more to conceal the brutality, corruption, and violence on which power and influence were based than to celebrate the culture and learning of art’s greatest consumers”.
Lee also seriously questions the image of the period as one of “discovery” of the wider world:
In their dealings with Jews, Muslims, black Africans, and the Americas, the people of the Renaissance were not only much less open towards different cultures than has commonly been supposed, but were willing to use fresh experiences and new currents of thought to justify and encourage prejudice, persecution, and exploitation at every level.
I suspect such angles may not go unchallenged, but I find it refreshing. And these unpackings again augment my comments on the “Golden Age nostalgia” of the heritage industry in China.
* * *
China: jue libation vessel, Shang/Zhou dynasty.
Reception history has perhaps become a rather more established feature of visual culture (including the history of art) than for musical culture. The term “visual culture” itself reflects a more mature holistic approach, like that of “soundscape” for ritual music in China, and indeed the whole inclusive brief of ethnomusicology.
As I dip into Marcia Pointon’s History of art; a student’s handbook, she soon observes:
The meanings of the painting will be determined by where, how and by whom it is consumed.
[..]
Art historians are interested not only with objects with but with processes. […They] concern themselves with visual communication whatever its intended audiences or consumers.
[…]
Art historians investigate the origins, the connections between “high” and “low”, and the ways in which imagery such as this contributes to our understanding of a period of historical time, whether in the present or in the far distant past.
On one hand, as with music, we envy earlier viewers/audiences their familiarity with subjects/languages that we can no longer interpret easily, if at all. At the same time we have also lost the shock of the new.
We’re familiar with the idea of restoring old paintings to their original colours—negating their history?—but we can’t perform a similar operation on our eyes and minds. Doubtless there’s a vast scholarly literature on this, but one might be reluctant to remove the patina from Shang bronzes, restoring them to the condition of glossy new Italian kitchenware. For patina, see also Richard Taruskin’s comments on Gardiner’s Schumann.
Just as most people who experienced art in 15th-century “Italy” had access mainly to those works on public display in their particular city, so, long before CDs and youtube, Leipzig dwellers heard little music apart from Bach and the pieces by other composers that he selected, mostly within the Leipzig tradition. Some creators themselves might be so lucky as to travel, gaining a certain experience of other styles. And in both art forms, a majority of such work was contemporary—even the instruments that baroque musicians played were mostly modern.
To try and get to grips with what art and music meant at the time doesn’t make us able to experience it as did the “consumers” of the day—we can’t unsee Monet, TV, or skyscrapers any more than we can unhear Mahler and punk. And I hope our teeth are in a better state.
* * *
I also admire
Michael Jacobs, Everything is happening: journey into a painting (2015), [1]
on Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656)—with chapters by his friend Ed Vulliamy added after Jacobs’ untimely death. As Vulliamy observes,
In this half-book, beyond a fragment, we have not only a typically Jacobs-esque narrative of his life with Velázquez—one of chance encounters, aperitifs, musings and restless autobiography—but also this manifesto for the liberation of how we look at painting. (p.146)
Jacobs does that thing that people always do in blurbs:
—and the picaro simile is fitting. Jacobs was constantly deploring the “sunless” world of academia. He documents the shift in art history that was then occurring widely in scholarship:
Many of the younger lecturers and researchers, conscious perhaps of the lingering popular image of their discipline as a precious and elitist pursuit, began adopting what rapidly became the prevailing art-historical methodology—a pseudo-Marxist one. People who might once have become connoisseurs in tweeds reinvented themselves as boiler-suited proselytisers dedicated to exposing in art revealing traces of the social conditions of a period, often resorting in the process to a hermetic prose peppered with terms I had first come across in Foucault, such as “discourses” and “the gaze”. (p.44)
Oh all right then, I’ll go for a hat-trick:
You think I know Fuck Nothing, but I know FOUCAULT!
(Note on pronunciation: whereas I can only hear “You think I know Fuck Nothing, but I know FUCK ALL!” in the caricature-Nazi accent of Karl Böhm, the above bonmot clearly belongs on the foam-specked lips of an angry young Alexei Sayle.)
By contrast with the treatments of Baxendall and Lee (themselves quite different), Jacobs’ approach is based on including “us”, the viewers, as agents in the picture—whatever his reservations, he was inspired by Foucault.
Proust, writing on Rembrandt, had spoken about paintings as being not just beautiful objects but also the thoughts they inspired in their viewers. [Svetlana] Alpers was cited as saying that “looking at a work in a museum and looking at other people looking at a work in a museum is like taking part in the life story of this work and contributing to it.”
Still, Jacobs ploughed his own furrow. As Paul Stirton recalls,
Michael always believed in the wonder of looking. Yes, there may be a profound message in a painting, but Michael didn’t want to dress it up in philosophical trappings. By all means approach a painting in a scholarly manner, but never lose the wonder. (pp.179–80)
In his book about artists’ colonies at the end of the nineteenth century, The good and simple life, he is scathing about how most painters wanting to live that life considered “the downtrodden country folk … as little more than quaint components of the rural scene. Their social conscience was as little stirred by them as by pipe-playing goatherds in the Roman Campagna.” At moments, though he is the antithesis of a “political” art critic, Michael’s writing reads like Walter Benjamin fresh from his Frankfurt School, but with a glass of Sangria in his hand. (p.182)
From both his own experience and Thomas Struth’s photos of the public response to Las Meninas over several days, Jacobs recalls
All the faces of the bored, the transfixed, the distracted, the deeply serious, the adults whose only concern was to get the perfect snap, the school children who were wondering when their ordeal would be over, the others who fooled around or diligently made notes, the few whose lives were being transformed. (pp.69–70)
So (suitably) like Monty Python’s Proust sketch, Jacobs never quite got as far as discussing the painting “itself”—not so much due to his death, as by virtue of his propensity to dwell on personal reminiscences on modern Spanish history and his own relationship with it and the painting.
He remarks wryly on the images of Spain current in his youth, reminding me of images of China, not to mention Away from it all. He recalls a train journey in the early years of Spain’s transition to democracy, when he was reading a book that
gave no hint of Spain’s repressive military regime, but instead referred to the country’s “growing agricultural and industrial prosperity” and to the “happy coexistence of the old and the new”.
The book’s role as a catalyst for my early, life-changing Spanish journeys was due entirely to its black-and-white photos, which neglected this supposedly modern and prosperous country in favour of basket-laden donkeys, adobe-walled farms, palm groves, sun-scorched white alleys and other such images that endowed Spain with a predominantly medieval and African look. Even Madrid, so regularly criticized by past travellers for its brash modernity, was made to seem more exotic and rural than any other western city I had seen. The sole street-scene was one of a large flock of sheep being herded in front of a neo-Baroque, cathedral-like post-office building popularly dubbed “Our Lady of the Post”. (p.60)
He discusses the fortunes of Las Meninas during the civil war, as well as more recent events:
… closed shops wherever you looked, restaurants offering “crisis menus”, daily protests, and graffiti and posters revealing grievances with everyone and everything, from the monarchy, to the banks, to the multinationals, to the European Community, to the politicians who made Spain the country with the the highest number of politicians per capita in Europe. (p.72)
And he describes the painting’s changing frames and settings:
The Sala Velázquez was like a shrine. […] On entering this inner sanctuary, people took off their hats, spoke in low voices, and tiptoed around so as not to destroy the atmosphere of worshipful solemnity. Every so often someone would be observed bursting into tears.
There were of course others visitors who disliked this room’s churchlike theatricality and the sentimentally nationalistic and mindless emotional reactions it inspired. (p.115)
So as it stands, Jacobs’ book is concerned more with reception history than with the society of the time of the creation of Las Meninas (though he explored this elsewhere, and doubtless had voluminous notes on the painting to supplement existing research). Background on the society of Velazquez’s day is provided mainly by Vulliamy’s fine Introduction. Evoking Lee, he notes that Seville, far from “the great Babylon of Spain, map of all nations”,
was also headquarters of the Inquisition. Indeed, the “Golden Age” which followed the unification of Spain in 1492 was accomplished, writes Michael Jacobs, “in a spirit of brutal fanaticism”, with the expulsion or enforced conversion of Andalucia’s many Moors and Jews. This dogmatism and what we would now call “ethnic cleansing” [here Vulliamy writes with traumatic personal experience in Bosnia] had a major and insidious demographic impact on the city, yet Seville remained characterized by “an architecture … of great contrasts”, wrote Michael, “for alongside the Muslim-inspired love of decorative arts richness is an inherently Spanish love of the austere”.
For a similar approach that sets forth from 17th-century Delft to go global, note Timothy Brook’s brilliant book Vermeer’s hat.
* * *
Yama King painting from Ten Kings series, North Gaoluo 1990.
All these books incorporate ethnography and reception history far more than the fusty old reified appreciation of “autonomous” objets d’art. For China,
Craig Clunas, Art in China (1st edition 1997)
makes a useful, wide-ranging, and thoughtful introduction, exploring themes like genres, techniques, functions, patrons, markets, producers, class, and gender.
For instance, discussing a wooden sculpture of the female deity Guanyin from Shanxi carved c1200 CE, he describes its original multi-coloured decoration:
All this added to the immediacy of the image for worshippers, but it was covered over at some point, probably about 300–400 years later in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), when it was painted gold in imitation of a gilded metal sculpture. Such an aesthetic change must have gone hand in hand with some change in the understanding of what a successful image ought to look like, a change at the level of both popular belief and the attitudes of religious professionals which is as yet hardly understood. (pp.56–7)
Whereas much scholarship remains based on artefacts in museums and galleries, fieldwork reveals a vast further repository of images still used in ritual practice. One thinks of the vast hoard of religious statuettes found in rural Hunan, subject of fine research.
And apart from statues and temple murals, ritual paintings depicting the Ten Kings and the punishments of the underworld—hung out for temple fairs and funerals—suggest comparisons with Christian equivalents in medieval and Renaissance art. And they too must have changed their meanings for audiences over recent centuries. At least, illiterate rural audiences would be affected rather deeply, and modern viewers may be underwhelmed now that they are saturated with horror films and video games. But we learn rather little about this from the scholarship; Daoist culture tends to be reified. Meanwhile, household ritual specialists have continued to perform Ten Kings scriptures for funerals.
It reminds me, challenged as I am in the field of visual culture, that ritual images through the ages also need unpacking—assessing changing meanings there too, including early sources for music iconography.
This has a lot to do with reception history. Such studies of visual culture may feed into our experience of Bach and all kinds of early and folk music. If even scholars of WAM and Renaissance painting feel it germane, then studies of Chinese musical cultures, and of Daoist ritual, shouldn’t lag behind.
* * *
But I’d like to end with some more populist vignettes (“Typical!”) on the meanings of art.
Among the numerous virtues of Alan Bennett is his accessible promotion of painting, found in Untold Stories (pp.453–514) [2]—notably a talk he gave for the National Gallery, with the fine title “Going to the pictures”. These essays are also a passionate plea for culture to remain accessible, a rebuke to mercenary philistine governments.
He recalls an inauspicious early lecture he gave at Oxford on Richard II:
At the conclusion of this less than exciting paper I asked if there were any questions. There was an endless silence until finally one timid undergraduate at the back put up his hand.
“Could you tell me where you bought your shoes?”
We’ve all been there. But his remarks on painting are priceless:
Somewhere in the National Gallery I’d like there to be a notice saying, “You don’t have to like everything”. When you’re appointed a trustee, the director, Neil MacGregor, takes you round on an introductory tour. Mine was at 9am, when I find it hard to look the milkman in the eye, let alone a Titian.
We were passing through the North Wing, I remember, and Neil was about to take me into one of the rooms when I said, “Oh, I don’t like Dutch pictures”, thereby seeming to dismiss Vermeer, De Hooch and indeed Rembrandt. And I saw a look of brief alarm pass over his face as if to say. “Who is this joker we’ve appointed?”
He cites his play A question of attribution, about (Michael Jacobs’ teacher) Anthony Blunt:
“What am I supposed to feel?” asks the policeman about going into the National Gallery.
“What do you feel?” asks Blunt.
“Baffled,” says Chubb, “and also knackered” … this last remark very much from the heart.
[… Blunt] tries to explain that the history of art shouldn’t be seen as simply a progress towards accurate or realistic reprentatation.
“Do we say Giotto isn’t a patch on Michelangelo because his figures are less lifelike?”
“Michelangelo?” says Chubb. “I don’t think his figures are lifelike frankly. The women aren’t. They’re just like men with tits. And the tits look as if they’ve been put on with an ice cream scoop. Has nobody pointed that out?”
“Not quite in those terms.”
In a *** passage AB blends hilarity with insight, evoking Baxandall:
In A question of attribution the Queen is made to have some doubts about paintings of the Annunciation.
“There are quite a lot of them,” says the Queen. “When we visited Florence we were taken round the art gallery there and well … I won’t say Annunciations were two a penny but they were certainly quite thick on the ground. And not all of them very convincing. My husband remarked that one of them looked to him like the messenger arriving from Littlewoods Pools. And that the Virgin was protesting that she had put a cross for no publicity.”
This last remark, though given to the Duke of Edinburgh, was actually another flag of distress, stemming from my unsuccessful attempts to assimilate and remember an article about the various positions of the Virgin’s hand, which are an elaborate semaphore of her feelings, a semaphore instantly understandable to contemporaries but, short of elaborate exposition, lost on us today. It’s a pretty out-of-the-way corner of art history but it leads me on to another question and another worry.
Floundering through some unreadable work on art history I’ve sometimes allowed myself the philistine thought that these elaborate expositions—gestures echoing other gestures, one picture calling up another and all underpinned with classical myth—that surely contemporaries could not have had all this at their fingertips or grasped by instinct what we can only attain by painstaking study and explication, and that this is pictures being given what’s been called “over meaning”. What made me repent, though, was when I started to think about my childhood and going to a different kind of pictures, the cinema.
When I was a boy we went to the pictures at least twice a week as most families did then, regardless of the merits of the film. I must have seen Citizen Kane when it came round for the first time, but with no thought that, apart from it being more boring, this was a different order of picture from George Formby, say, or Will Hay. And going to the pictures like this, unthinkingly, taking what was on offer week in week out was, I can see now, a sort of education, and induction into the subtle and complicated and not always conventional moral scheme that prevailed in the world of the cinema then, and which persisted with very little change until the early sixties.
Unpacking the complex attributes of two stock characters, he concludes:
The 20th-century audience had only to see a stock character on the screen to know instinctively what moral luggage he or she was carrying, the past they had, the future they could expect. And this was after, if one includes the silent films, not more than thirty years of going to the pictures. In the sixteenth century the audience or congregation would have been going to the pictures for 500 years at least, so how much more instinctive and instantaneous would their responses have been, how readily and unthinkingly they would have been able to decode their pictures—just as, as a not very precocious child of eight, I could decode mine.
And while it’s not yet true that the films of the thirties and forties would need decoding for a child of the present day, nevertheless that time may come; the period of settled morality and accepted beliefs which produced such films is as much over now as is the set of beliefs and assumptions that produced an allegory as complicated and difficult, for us at any rate, as Bronzino’s Allegory of Venus and Cupid.
Apart from any intrinsic merit this little tour of visual culture may have, for me it also suggests several angles barely explored for Daoist ritual.
OK then, just one last aperçu—this time from Kenneth Clark (thanks, Rod). On the contrast between reified art and social reception, here’s his typically urbane formulation in Civilization:
At some time in the 9th century one could have looked down the Seine and seen the prow of a Viking ship coming up the river. Looked at today in the British Museum, it is a powerful work of art; but to the mother of a family trying to settle down in her little hut, it would have seemed less agreeable.
On behalf of the splendid Craig Clunas, I accept full responsibility for any inanities in this post.
If you all play your cards right, I promise not to do this kind of thing too often. Craig and any other art historians who have managed to read this far might care to exact revenge by writing Specious Flapdoodle[famous 19th-century Baptist pastor—Ed.] about early music or Daoist ritual…
** Not, may I just say, the kind of moronic homespun language used by one maniacal Führer about another: “smart cookie” or “total nut-job”? Roll over Cicero.
This little digest is partly by way of cajoling my friend Nick, distinguished tenor [cheap at the price], into unleashing his amazing anagram tales on the world
(now featured on this blog: roundup here!).
Wordplay in English and other languages (not least Chinese) displays dazzling and indeed warped creativity. For “constrained writing”, the oeuvre of Oulipo is most celebrated.
I’ll content myself with one anagram, on Mike Keith’s fine site, an extraordinary version of Dante’s Inferno:
This is a simultaneous anagram and translation. The English text is both an anagram of and an approximate translation of the first four tercets of Canto III of Dante’s Inferno, from the original 13th-century Italian.
Original: Per me si va ne la citta dolente
Per me si va ne l’etterno dolore
Per me si va tra la perduta gente.
Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore;
Fecemi la divina podestate,
La somma sapienza e ‘l primo amore.
Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create
Se non etterne, e io etterno duro.
LASCIATE OGNE SPERANZA, VOI CH’INTRATE.
Queste parole di colore oscuro
vid’ io scritte al sommo d’una porta;
per ch’io: “Maestro, il senso lor m’e duro.”
Anagram: I am a portal to a sad place.
I am a cover to eternal fire.
Go, see our pit ooze craven memories.
Elite persistence moved some creator;
Divine omnipotence created me;
I am solo orgies of primal love.
Listen: ere me no denizens used our portal
I quit not, and I last eternal.
FOREGO ALL HOPE, ALL MEN THAT ENTER.
Crazed and curious, in a daze I sat
To see man pour out over a portal;
So I said: “Master, I cannot see its import.”
T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. “I’d assign it a
name: gnat dirt upset on drab pot toilet”
—attributed to Alastair Read rather than W.H. Auden, it seems.
I like the sound of the Finnish palindrome with 10,102 words—even if, as one commentator candidly observes, “It’s really not that much fun.” We can limber up with some shorter ones (here), like
saippuakuppinippukauppias—soap cup batch trader
[SJ: Aha, perhaps this is useful as Elk lubricant?]
No more Cicero, mon! [the Rastafarian has had his fill of the classics.]
Overheard at the flea-market: “Camel bible, Mac?”
“Cameraware, Mac?”
or the fine
An igloo costs a lot, Ed!
Amen. One made to last! So cool, Gina!
Now Derek can kiss Anais A. Nin, as I, an ass (I, knackered) won.
[extra points for proper names, as Mike Keith notes—the more evocative the better]
Olson, I won—see Saratoga repossess opera! Go, Tara, see Snow in Oslo.
Ajar? Aha! Maybe, Dan, omelet is opposite lemonade, by a Maharaja!
Some men interpret nine memos.
And longer ones like
“Traci, to regard nine men in drag,” Eric (in a play or an ironic art spot) warned, “I am not so bad.” “I’d never even seen knees … never even did a Boston maiden raw,” tops Traci, “nor in a royal panic. I regard nine men in drag —erotic art.”
Or a poem:
Amen, Icy Cinema [title and poem are separate palindromes] Amen, I can!
I stop elastic ire
To see La Dolce Vita.
Covet?
I moisten nose,
Sonnets I omit, evocative clod!
Ale? Esoteric?
It’s ale! Pots in a cinema!
There are word-unit palindromes too:
You swallow pills for anxious days and nights, and days, anxious for pills, swallow you.
And sure enough, some have risen to the challenge of the palindromic haiku (work in progress), like this one by Ailihphilia (sic):
Oak, dove, temple: hymn
In mutual autumn, in my
Helpmete vodka. O!
And then for the gourmet, there’s the menu from the “Moor Room”, a restaurant for palindromists:
Do, O Food [main course]
Tangy gnat
Koalas a la OK
La emu meal
Salad, alas
Gorge Grog[drinks]
Regal lager
Lemon o’ Mel
Desserts Stressed
Sugar a Gus
Bananas an’ a Nab
Some entries from “Drown In Word”, the (fictional) palindromic dictionary: Gigolo: Solo gig. Paranoia: I, on a rap. Semantic: It names. Pa Plato: Total pap.
Finally, the erudite David Hughes, himself no mean songster, draws my attention to this:
* * *
True, while any sophisticated artistic activity (which perhaps excludes the KKK songbook and poetry competition) may be seen as a bulwark against philistinism, none of this quite butters any parsnips in the task that currently confronts us—to resist with every pore the barbarity of the putrid tang emanating from the drab pot toilet of the White House. T. Eliot, top bard, would have been sad too. I’d assign it a name, all right.
On the Li family Daoists’ 2012 sojourn in Venice in 2012 we were guests of the Fondazione Cini, staying virtually alone on the tranquil little island of Isola San Giorgio, just across from bustling San Marco.
Chatting with our Cini hosts, the fragrant Chiara and Sabrina, they told me that when Venetians come across each other by chance they like to exclaim
“Fatalità!” (pronounced “Fataità!”)—“Fate!”
A quaint English equivalent might be “Fancy bumping into you!”
Fatalità! Venetian dwellers with the Li band, or “Selling the Daode jing at the door of Confucius” 在孔子門前賣道德經。
I gather “Fatalità!” is more commonly an interjection, as when telling a story (“And what should happen but…”) or (in reacting) “Fancy that!”. It can also be a humorous way of accepting fate, almost like the English “Typical!” or “That’s life!”.
Without regard to expense or the feelings of the public, the erudite Rod Conway Morris, himself a long-term chronicler of Venetian mores, has obligingly ferreted out a little discussion by Sandro Mattiazzi (Veneziani: Figli del Leone Alata, 2002), with pleasantly arcane examples of a quarrel between gondoliers and a dispute during the war with the Turks, both defused by the timely exclamation.
Fatalità is chance [caso], the fortuitous event that is yet the result of a necessity great or small, and is typical of the Venetian mentality. […] Don’t despair if you can’t find the way to your hotel, or if you’ve left your bag on top of some well. Chance, which has aided the Venetians for almost two thousand years, will surely come to your aid. Fatalità means that by randomly following another tourist you will arrive at your lost hotel, where perhaps you will find your bag on the porter’s desk. [my translation]
“Fate!” recalls fado, or (as I explained to Li Manshan) the Chinese ming 命… Those terms aren’t part of any such greeting, though in classical Chinese chen 臣 equates with the hackneyed “Ciao!”—itself borrowed from Venetian, and cognate with slave and Slav (for an erudite discussion, see here). Or the English “your humble servant”, mercifully abbreviated from “I trust I shall have the honour to remain your humble servant”, which is of course the correct form of address for foreigners to employ when staggering out of an East End pub at closing time.
Following an arcane exchange in The Times (“Have these people got no Holmes to go to?”—Myles. Mind you, I can’t talk) wherein it is established that Gautier’s Tra la, tra la, la-la-laire is not in fact a reference to the call of the inevitable ubiquitous gondolier, Rod observed in a letter (whose date of 1st April 2016 he assures me is merely coincidental—remember, the word “gullible” doesn’t appear in the OED):
The traditional gondolier’s cry (especially when rounding blind corners in canals) is “O-i!” This is also sometimes used by the inhabitants of the city as a jocular greeting.
I respectfully submit, m’Lud, that had they gone on to use the honorific form of address, the greeting might have become “O-i vo-i!”, evoking Venice’s Jewish heritage (I’ll spare you my fantasy reconstruction of the temporal and spatial vowel-shift). And given the city’s Turkish connection, I’m also still hoping Rod will further unearth the greeting “Ey-up!“—which, in turn, became the correct form of address when entering a kebab shop in Barnsley (cf. my haiku on Morris dancing). The joys of multiculturalism…
Inspired by Rod’s stimulating review, if you read in the gazette of the imbroglio over an arsenal of contraband artichokes; and if you’ve ever been quarantined after zany scampi and pistachio marzipan in the ghetto, or worn sequined pantaloons to a regatta—actually, even if you haven’t, which (let’s face it) is more likely—then you should tip your imaginary hat to the Venetian language. For a borrowing from Turkish, see The kiosk in Turkey and Europe; for Indian influences, see Tickety-boo.
As a change from the Rite of Gran visits York and Li Manshan, I do hope you know Cinema Paradiso(Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988), and its soundtrack. Morricone’s* music comes into its own in the overwhelming final sequence—not merely sentimental but a triumph over prurient censorship. You really have to watch the film all the way through—but hey, here goes:
Even in concert, the Big Tune is irresistible—all the more so with violin playing like this, from a 2011 Prom:
In the right hands, it would sound great on the erhu too.
For more on Italian film, see here, and indeed here.
* Actually, it being a father–son collaboration, I should perhaps write Morricones’—hmm.
* For younger readers whose grasp of Old English is less than perfect, a “pillarbox” was an ancient device into which were inserted objects called “letters”, written on paper (often with a “pen”) and enclosed in an “envelope” with a “stamp” attached. By a mysterious alchemical process, the addressee would often receive such missives within the space of a mere few days.
I’ve mentioned several distinctive terms in the vocabulary of former socialist countries, like China and the GDR. But still more usefully:
It’s good to learn that what is called caffé corretto in Italy (an espresso “corrected”, with grappa, or what the Chinese term with blunt accuracy dub “white spirit”) was known in Communist Albania as a Lumumba. (Garton Ash, The file, p.45). Well, you do need a snifter to get through all those Norman Wisdom films. (Cf. elsewhere in north Europe, where it is a somewhat different beverage.)
This is rather in the spirit (sic) of the cubalibre, [1] one of my favourite tipples in Spain as a change from my standard G&T. By contrast with the mealy-mouthed measures of English pubs (which should come with a microscope), both are notable because you are presented with a large tumbler into which the waiter pours an unlimited quantity of gin/rum/bacardi, leaving only a token amount of room for a casual dash of tonic/coke.
The cubalibre is quite familiar to our Spanish waiter, but I always enjoy the little ritual we go through whereby he looks enquiringly at the range of spirits behind the bar while I specify, with one of my few fluent phrases,
… con Ron, por favor!
Back in Blighty, the Spanish influence on my own domestic aperitifs is clear in my generous measures from the Azure Cloud Bottle—to which my address on the home page pays fitting homage. I ring the changes by buying the occasional bottle of Tanqueray, purely in homage to Amy.
In China, where the 1957 Anti-Rightist backlash following the Hundred Flowers movement was prompted in no small measure by the recent Hungarian uprising, the threat of liberal agitation was charmingly known as goulash deviationism. That sounds funny to us now, even if at the time it was a taint that could ruin people’s lives and destroy whole families.
The Lumumba never caught on in China—whyever would you want to dilute white spirit? But they did stage a rally to protest his killing in 1961:
[1] “Free Cuba”—descriptive or prescriptive?! Cf. the British tabloid headline
“Free Nelson Mandela”,
to which a reader wrote in,
“I dunno what a Nelson Mandela is, but if it’s free, can I have one please?”
And now we have this headline, which could do with a bit of punctuation:
On brief trips to Venice, the dream of timeless aesthetic delight may override reflection on social change. My 2012 stay there with the Li band was largely untrammelled by such thoughts—partly because I was preoccupied with my daily tasks as minder, roadie, and stage manager. Like most visitors, I was just thrilled to be there, especially with them.
Some months later, staying with Li Manshan in his village, I go online to show his next-door neighbour some images of this magical place, unimaginable to Yanggao dwellers. As I reinforce the myth, the Li band’s visit there indeed seems like a miracle.
But Venice makes a notable example of the conflict between image and ethnography. Among the vast corpus of writings, Jan Morris’s Venice is a classic. I realise I should also seek writings by Venetians, or at least Italians, to supplement the outsider perspective. But here I’ll dip into Polly Coles’s book The politics of washing: real life in Venice (2013), which explores “the uneasy relationship between the Venice in which a few thousand people live out their daily lives and the Venice that is an impossibly beautiful stage set”.
It may seem like living in a museum, or a theme park. Most of the twenty million visitors each year are day-trippers. Over the past three decades the fixed population has dwindled from 120,000 to 55,000—fewer than a thousand years ago.
Yet despite the constant fall in population, real people also live here. One may dismiss their real lives as merely “hideous encounters with domestic necessity”, to cite Compton Mackenzie’s wonderful recollection of his meeting with Henry James. Beset by ordering washing machines and taking the kids to school, Polly Coles begins to feel guilty about the sheer quantity of art that she has not looked at since she became a resident. “The Venetian dream lasts only as long as you can keep it detached from reality and, most particularly, from the reality of modern Italy”. Finding a haberdashery shop shutting down, Polly Coles observes the ineluctable usurping of the variety of suppliers of daily needs by shops selling pizza, ice cream, glass, and masks—a monoculture in which “people are constantly re-enacting the same limited roles: as purveyors or consumers of the city as museum or playground”. “What kind of beauty is barren? Is dead beautiful?”
Squiero at San Trovaso. My photo, 2012.
After a while one almost forgets “the inestimable privilege of a daily life without cars”. Greetings between friends are no less gentle, kind, and humorous than in any Italian town. Given that thousands of strangers are traipsing through their living room (literally) every day, I’m amazed how courteous and laidback Venetian dwellers are; one feels no more ripped off than elsewhere. While they are long accustomed to outsiders (they have no choice), perhaps it’s partly because one can never be in a hurry here—although residents and “infantilised” tourists can still be recognised from their pace, their whole body language. As Polly Coles observes, the shared necessity of walking lends an illusion of classlessness.
By contrast, she also comments well on the wider issue (in Italian, and other European languages) of choosing lei or tu, as opposed to the deceptively classless English “you” (pp.155–9). Meanwhile, the Venetian language (rather than dialect) seems cool, indeed zany (an English borrowing from Venetian), with lots of z and weird stuff going on (see also here). I like drio (“busy”). And do read Some Venetian greetings.
Not only are the sestieri like separate villages, but even recently I heard of a 100-year old woman who had only ventured twice as far as San Marco.
While Venice has long been celebrated as a racial and cultural melting-pot, Alexander Lee’s The ugly Renaissance can warn us against celebrating its multi-culturalism too naively. Polly Coles goes on to note the current ethnic contradictions, with its white tourists serviced by East European cleaners and African street vendors (163–70). She’s good on ritual too—like her dissection of Midnight Mass in San Marco during acqua alta, “neither hushed nor holy”, with a “general air of distraction” (pp.111–113). And Carnival: “somebody has organized an enormous party in your backyard but it’s not your party and you don’t know any of the guests”.
After my stay there with the Li band in April 2012, I went back that August to flat-sit on the Guidecca for friends, allowing me time both to reflect on Venice and continue writing my book.
From my diary:
Senses heightened, changing light—large drops of rain, clouds, sunset, gulls bobbing on the waves. Simple pleasures. How long might it be before one began taking for granted the panorama of churches and pastel palaces and windows and balconies and bridges? Even the street signs are delightful.
I emerge from a narrow vicolo into a broad campo. Many canals are as narrow as alleys too.
Just using the wooden shutters is a delight, with their little head of a man, like a chess piece, to hold them in place.
Where does all this arty sensibility get us? How does listening to Monteverdi in an elegant flat on the Giudecca differ from listening to Abba in a council flat on the North Circular with flying geese on the walls? The shared goal, presumably, is happiness.
Supposing some waggish sculptor decided to pre-empt the pigeons by designing a pigeon on top of Our Lord’s head at the apex of a church, would a pigeon come and perch on that too? How many pigeons would he have to sculpt on top of each other for the pigeons to decide, “Stuff this for a lark“? Or would it only be grist to their mill?
It comes as a relief to see some typical ugly modern buildings on the Giudecca, tucked away behind the elegant facade. The walk to my local supermarket, through miniature courtyards bedecked with flowers, has to be the most picturesque ever—but once inside, the standard produce of daily necessities brings a welcome semblance of normality.
From a certain distance on what passes as terra firma, the sight of passengers on a vaporetto evokes a silent search for truth, some mysterious voyage, a pact. I don’t think this comes entirely from Don’t Look Now. Of course it’s not quite like that for the passengers on the vaporetto (cf. Coles, pp.118–24).
Cruise liners have become common, another nail in the coffin. One morning as I emerge from the flat I have a surreal vision. Usually I’m blessed with a wonderful glimpse of the Zattere across the canal through the archway at the end of my narrow alleyway, but today all I can see is a gleaming white tower-block, seemingly constructed overnight, obliterating the pristine view, blocking out the sky “like a genetically reconstructed dinosaur that has escaped from Jurassic Park and is wreaking havoc in the world of human beings” (Coles). And it’s moving too—or is it the Giudecca moving?
If the wholehearted Chinese adoption of tourism is hardly an unmitigated blessing, the march of “progress” and “development” seems unstoppable—compounded by the commodifying agendas of cultural heritage projects. All this is one reason why even scholars of Daoism might pause before adding to the unchanging image of ancient grandeur, rather incorporating ethnography into their accounts.
For both folk and art music in the time of Vermeer, click here.
Transcription by Diego Carpitella.
From Blue kite (Tian Zhuangzhuang, 1993).
On procession the statue of the Madonna was carried on a float, with a guard of honour, fireworks, and incense, touring the parish (China again..). A powerful metaphor for submission was the carrying of heavy candles on procession. The boundaries of the community were defined both by the procession and by the smells and tastes of the festa, with feasting at home and on the streets.
Cesti’s opera was premiered in Vienna; the composer died the following year, and I haven’t yet seen evidence of further performances—staging it would have been a massive undertaking. So audiences in Italy may even have been denied the opportunity of a good giggle, although word must have spread. Still, in Italy, over a century after the tomato was first recorded there, one might suppose that the word pomodoro (the pomo referring generally to fruit, not to the apple) at least had become part of the vocabulary of the elite who were the audience for such spectacles. But then, they would also be familiar with the ancient story—although from the simple synopsis one might not imagine that it called for elaborate stage machinery to depict tableaus like shipwrecks and collapsing towers:
One important prelude to the Mussolini regime was Gabriele D’Annunzio’s regime at Fiume. Meanwhile violence became ever more common—as a means of asserting local power and advancing wealth, status, and authority, and to counter the spectre of Bolshevism. Bosworth looks at the uneven distribution of fascism in the provinces. The murder of Matteotti in 1924 was a turning point leading to dictatorship and the elimination of dissent. Opponents of the regime were sentenced to confino exile. During his exile on the island of Lipari, erstwhile fascist Leandro Arpinetti took up cooking, while lamenting that the locals were “somnolent poltroons”—a term that I must incorporate into my lexicon of invective (cf. 
Stephen Jones: a blog 