Introduction

In the Italy of the second half of the eighteenth century comedy had prevailed over tragedy, with authors such as Carlo Goldoni, Pietro Chiari and Carlo Gozzi. This was superseded by the tragic drama of Vittorio Alfieri, Vincenzo Monti, Ippolito Pindemonte, Ugo Foscolo, Silvio Pellico and Alessandro Manzoni. By the mid-nineteenth century the dearth of original texts for the theatre (the emphasis having shifted to opera) was compensated by the skill of 'great actors' such as Gustavo Modena, Adelaide Ristori, Tommaso Salvini and Ernesto Rossi. This has been referred to as drammaturgia dell'attore, the actor's drama, and it is notable that later, when in the rest of Europe the producer had taken over, in Italy the actor still predominated until at least the 1930s. Indeed, the term regista, 'director', was only coined by the linguist Bruno Migliorini in 1932. Alongside the early nineteenth-century tragedies, in response to the expectations of the emerging bourgeoisie, there was a post-Goldonian vein (as in Augusto Bon, Alberto Nota and others) which took the eighteenth-century dramatist’s realism and regionalism into the following century. Overlapping with this trend, and spreading into the period of verismo, is the first group of playwrights I shall discuss: they belong to the unification period and are representative of teatro a tesi, a theatre primarily concerned with ideas.

The relationship of the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ in popular music is one of the most complex, controversial and significant issues of the new millennium. Scholars have been drawn into the debate from across disciplines and with reference to work on musics from around the world. Arguments are not just academic; they are emotional and political, and concern the personal and the political, the micro and macro. Indeed, in straightforward analytic terms, as descriptions of networks and power relations, ‘global’ and ‘local’ are ill-defined terms, offering multiple vantage points. Whatever else, though, they have become vital for re-assessing questions of cultural imperialism, and that is what I am interested in here. I want to consider the creative and commercial relationships of the ‘local’ and ‘global’ in terms of ‘world’ music: how were these categories established, upon what terms; how are they maintained, to whose advantage (or disadvantage)? For most musicians, the creation and performance of music means involvement in a process : relationships produce music, relationships between musicians, relationships between musicians and their publics. It is in relationships that communication happens, and meanings are produced and felt. The question that interests me, then, is the nature of the local and global networks which motivate and propel the ‘world’ music scene and the relationship processes involved.

Everyone with an interest in pop has opinions about it - about its meanings, value, effects and significance. But some opinions - those of critics and academics, for example - claim more attention than others, largely because they have access to the public ear; and, actually, surprisingly little is known about ordinary fans’ interpretations. Does this matter? Articulate description of musical responses is always rare; but more is at stake here than the familiar ‘mystery’ of music.

The announcement of the 1994 Mercury Music Award, by a panel chaired by noted pop music scholar Simon Frith, led trade magazine Music Week (6 August 1994) to bemoan the involvement of ‘egghead academics and journalists who think too much for their own good’. Thirteen years earlier, the first international conference of the recently formed International Association for the Study of Popular Music was greeted with mocking incredulity in a London Times feature (16 June 1981), as was the first issue of the Cambridge University Press journal Popular Music. There seemed, evidently, to be an obvious incongruity here - high-value educational capital invested in the study of worthless music, rationality applied to the obstinately irrational, articulate discourse to the wantonly dumb; and this incongruity runs deep through the academy's involvement with pop. There are often suspicions that pop is being used. Thus male leftists, with the radical political commitments of the ‘1968 generation’, largely drive the shape of the early waves of scholarship, ‘rockist’, ‘masculinist’ and anti-establishment as it is.

There is a scene in Il Gattopardo ('The Leopard', 1958), the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896-1957), in which the character of Don Calogero, who represents the new aspiring bourgeois class, is invited for the first time to dinner at the Prince of Salina's summer residence. The Prince, who is also the narrator of the novel, describes Don Calogero's arrival with a high degree of stylistic virtuosity. Don Calogero - we are told - is the only guest who is not appropriately dressed for the occasion. In fact,he is wearing a formal frock-coat since he wants to show the aristocratic Salina family that he is wealthy enough to afford one. The Prince, however, is wearing an afternoon suit, as he has always done at his rural retreat in order not to embarrass the locals. Don Calogero's outfit is a real 'catastrophe' not so much for its fine fabric as for its cut, which reveals his stinginess and lack of style as he has chosen an incompetent local tailor instead of relying, as the true aristocrats did, on a more expert and expensive tailor based in England. In addition to this fault, the Prince remarks that not only are Don Calogero's shoes wrong but his shirt-collar is shapeless, details which act as clues to his defining trait: his hopeless lack of refined manners and elegance, despite his newly acquired wealth.

In 1954, when the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax (1915- ) took a six-month trip to Italy together with Diego Carpitella to record original folk music, the country that he found was scarred by the Second World War and still dominated, in large areas of the southern countryside, by a rural and archaic culture. For the purpose of his research, however, Italy was an untouched paradise, as precious to an ethnomusicologist as Hungary had been to Bartó and Kodály.' ‘The tradition of Italian folk music is arguably one of the least spoiled, most vigorous, and varied of Western Europe’, he wrote. And yet Lomax realized that the situation was changing:

It is true that, as Italy underwent a major transformation from rural economy to city-based industry, folk music reminded urban people of the oppressive peasant life that they were eager to leave behind. In his massive study of the origins of the tarantella as a medicine ritual, the anthropologist Ernesto De Martino (1908–65) could still experience the richness of southern lore in connection with music. But in the new soundscape provided by radios, the jukebox and public television (which was introduced in 1954), folk music was non-existent.

On a cold winter evening in the mid-1990s a three-piece indie rock band named Kyzer Sozer performed at Liverpool's Lomax venue. There were around twenty or so people in the audience and most of them stood far back from the stage, clustering around the bar with pint glasses in hand and leaving the area in front of the stage quiet and deserted. This did not appear to bother the members of Kyzer Sozer and they launched energetically into a song entitled ‘Girls’. The band were well-rehearsed and ‘tight’ and the song revolved around a strong melody and dynamic variations in volume and pace, beginning with a softly strummed electric guitar accompanied by the deep throbbing beat of a Fender bass and bass drum, and then shifting to a slightly distorted riff-driven guitar sound that built up to a crescendo for the finale. Darren altered his powerful and resonant singing voice accordingly, varying its pitch and timbre. He had a shaved head and wore a feather boa and silver trousers which accentuated the twists of his body as he played the guitar and stretched towards the microphone. Chris stood beside him in training shoes, black jeans and a leather jacket that swung open to reveal a scarlet bra and bare stomach. Her hair flopped over one side of her face and shone as she accompanied her basslines with nods of her head. Sam sat at the back of the stage in a black shirt and purple velvet trousers that were largely obscured from view by his drum kit.

Attempts to define the label ‘world music’ – or those categories to which it is linked, such as worldbeat, ethnopop, New Age, sono mondiale, and musique métisse (hybrid music) – have long been marked by contradiction and controversy. It may be noted, for example, that the geographical reference to ‘the world’ which the label suggests has been defined in the narrowest of terms. World musics are taken to be those musics which come from outside the ‘normal’ Anglo-American (including Canadian and Australian) sources, and mainly from tropical countries. And because the attraction of world music is seen to lie in its use of rhythm, so essential to the aesthetics of African music, the term has usually been associated with musics from Africa and the African diaspora. With time, however, the umbrella covering world music has become more inclusive. It now covers American, Asian and European musics, albeit those of minority groups within these geographical areas. We may conclude, then, that world music is the product of aggrieved populations, either from third world countries (Africa and the African diasporas), or from disadvantaged population groups in a general sense. Given all this, it is both appalling and revealing to note that, within the global economy of popular music offered on MTV, the United States' main music video service, world music is taken to represent a tiny subculture.

Tradition: stimulus or millstone?

In newly unified Italy, the Italian literary tradition was particularly venerated. The period's leading poet, Giosue Carducci (1835-1907), in the vigorously anti-Romantic preface to his Rime ('Poems') of 1857,had identified only three poetic currents as worthy of cultivation in an 'Italian Italy': Classical Latin; the medieval and Renaissance tradition from Dante to Tasso; and the neo-Classical current from Alfieri to Leopardi. Carducci wrote academic studies on Dante, Petrarch and Leopardi, and echoed Dante's civic poetry in his invectives against those of his own contemporaries who seemed unworthy of their country's past. Both as a passionate Republican and democrat before 1871, and subsequently as a Monarchist, Carducci saw poetry as an elevated civic calling: the 'Congedo' ('Envoy') to the Rime nuove ('New Poems', 1887) famously pictures the poet as a blacksmith who, in his fiery soul, fashions glorious national memories into swords to fight for freedom, shields for protection, and garlands to celebrate victory. Thus, to inspire his contemporaries, Carducci’s public poetry draws on episodes from Italy’s history, often linking them into an ideal narrative culminating in unification. He celebrates Italy’s Roman heritage, the triumphs of its free medieval communes, its famous poets and, especially, the heroes of unification. Even his metrics illustrate his belief that the past could nourish the present: his Odi barbare (‘Barbarian Odes’) aim at the effect of classical Latin verse forms, as read during the ‘barbarian’ period when distinctions between vowel lengths were lost and rhythms were based instead on tonic stress.

Introduction

In the last hundred years the Church of Rome has formulated two great projects defining the Christian presence in society: those of Popes Leo XIII (1878-1903) and John XXIII (1958-63). The former was determined by the need to come to terms with the new situation created by the French Revolution; the latter was provoked by the need to adjust to the momentous changes which had taken place since the Second World War. Both projects represented major changes in the orientation of an institution that has always preferred to claim continuity rather than admit change, that 'sees restoration where others see revolution'. The projects focused, in the first case, on establishing the bases for a Christian reconquest of a hostile world; and, in the second case, on changing the Church's approach to an outside world no longer conceived as fundamentally hostile, hence one with which it could enter into dialogue.

The significance of these projects for Italian Catholic culture is obvious in view of the authority of papal pronouncements in the production and propagation of Catholic doctrine. It is well known that the Marxist critic Antonio Gramsci discussed the Catholic Church as an ideological apparatus with its own institutional grassroots structure (parishes and dioceses) and cadres (clergy) whose task was to guide and instruct the faithful about their place in the world. This was traditionally achieved, first, in a largely didactic manner through liturgical activity (sermons, cathechism) to ensure that the simple verities of the faith were continually reaffirmed; and, second, by controlling the orthodoxy of intellectual expression through disciplinary measures such as excommunication.

1860–1900

In the years immediately following the unification of Italy, serious musical activity throughout the peninsula was still overwhelmingly dominated by opera, as it had been during the Risorgimento period. In all the major cities, and many smaller ones too, the operatic public was large and various, and was still at least as interested in new operas as in established 'classics'. At this time, one senior living Italian opera composer towered above all others, dwarfing them so drastically that most of them are nowadays hardly remembered even in their own country: Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) is now regarded everywhere as the only really lastingly important Italian composer who was active across the third quarter of the nineteenth century, and indeed as one of the greatest opera composers who ever lived. Although Verdi became markedly less prolific in his later years, many (perhaps most) of his finest works date from after 1860, and Aida (1871), Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893) have long been rated among the highest achievements of Italian genius in any field. However, by the time the two last-mentioned operas were written, the semi-retired Verdi had come to occupy a less unquestionably central place in Italian musical life, and new creative developments were emerging which in various ways showed signs of transforming the character of the new music being written at the time.

Some of the strongest claims for the political importance of popular music have been made by its greatest enemies. Its most radical effects have been identified by those who most despise the pleasures of rock and pop. From the earliest days of rock'n'roll, priests, parents and politicians have warned of the dangers inherent in the rhythms, the voices, the words and the images of the music. And each new wave in pop history has been greeted by the outcry of those who fear for its consequences. In the West, the political right has been terrified that it will undermine capitalism, family life and traditional values. Racists have seen it as a threat to ‘white purity’. Communists have seen it as subverting the socialist dream. These enemies have warned of its extraordinary power to influence the way people think and act. Their fears have not just prompted outbursts of indignation, but have actually resulted in policies and practices that directly affect the production and consumption of pop. Censorship has been a constant feature of the music's history. Under communism and capitalism, in the name of apartheid and Islam, pop music has been banned and musicians punished.

In 1995, Bob Dole led a campaign in the United States Senate against the conglomerate Time-Warner. He attacked the company for its promotion of rap artists like Snoop Doggy Dogg, who were signed to a Time- Warner subsidiary and who, said Dole, were promoting attitudes and behaviour that were an affront to the American people. Dole’s campaign succeeded, and Time-Warner severed its links with its subsidiary. At the same time in Britain, the government introduced the Criminal Justice Act which, among other things, outlawed particular forms of musical performance. A decade earlier, the Parents’Music Resource Centre, led by the so-called ‘Washington Wives’ (including Tipper Gore, wife of Al Gore), persuaded record companies to introduce a system of labelling to identify music that might cause offence.

Unification and the questione della lingua

Before the political unification of Italy, Italian was a language used, outside Tuscany and Rome, only by the literate few. Even by these, it was reserved chiefly for writing: in everyday conversation, the great majority of Italians either had to or chose to use one of the dialects of Italy or, in certain areas, a minority language such as French. By the end of the twentieth century, well over 90 per cent of Italians could speak the national language, but most still chose to use dialect or a minority language as well. The process of the diffusion of Italian against a background of continuing linguistic diversity has been a long and difficult one, and it has led to discussions on important cultural and social issues, such as whether the national language should be allowed to develop naturally or should be based on a particular model; how conservative and selective, or tolerant of innovation and variety, it should be; how it was to be disseminated and taught; and, on the other hand, what status should be accorded to languages other than the standard.

In some respects, these discussions have continued the questione della lingua which first came to a head in the sixteenth century. In that period a consensus was reached that the literary language of the Italian states should be based on the Tuscan used in the fourteenth century by the indisputably most elegant writers, Petrarch and Boccaccio. This solution was apparently backward-looking, but it proved the most viable and attractive, given the political fragmentation and vulnerability of Italy and the waning cultural prestige of contemporary Tuscany.

The music industry question is straightforward: how to make money out of music? But the answer is ‘with difficulty’, and pop music as we know it now has been shaped by the problems of making music a commodity and the challenges of adapting money-making practices to changing technologies.

The underlying issue is metaphysical. Music is, by its nature, non-material. It can be heard but not held. It lasts only as long as it plays. It is not something that can, in any direct way, be owned. How to turn this intangible, time-bound aural experience into something that can be bought and sold is thus the question that has driven popular music history since the first wandering performers sang for their supper, and I will examine the changing solutions to this problem shortly. But there's another issue here that needs noting. Music is a universal human practice, like talking or tool making. All of us can do it; all of us do do it: sing to ourselves or our children, hum and chant, dance and tap out a rhythm. To make money out of music, then, means differentiating one set of musical practices (for which we'll pay) from another (for which we don't). The very ubiquity of music in everyday life means that the line between music we make for ourselves and the music for which we go to market is rather more blurred than the music industry would like.