Mediterranean Music

Angela said:
I'm currently enamored with the music of the group L'Arpeggiata under the direction of Christine Pluhar.

Their Mediterraneo CD is just wonderful in my opinion.
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Very nice! Not sure if you are familiar with this band or song, but I really like it even though I wish I understood the lyrics. Interesting with the bagpipes too, northern Italian?

I don't have enough posts to put the link but if you look them up on you tube:

La Piva Dal Carner "Mery Dem-Icio"
 
Nikas said:
Very nice! Not sure if you are familiar with this band or song, but I really like it even though I wish I understood the lyrics. Interesting with the bagpipes too, northern Italian?

I don't have enough posts to put the link but if you look them up on you tube:

La Piva Dal Carner "Mery Dem-Icio"
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Thank-you. I'm so glad you liked it.

Yes, I'm familiar with the group...they recorded some of the music of my father's valleys in the Emilian Appennines. How on earth did you run across them? Extraordinary...it's such a "niche" music I guess you could say.

Lovely, all of it, but from a 'very' different tradition. This music is linked to more central and north/north western European music. A lot of it is meant for dancing the "giga" which northwesterners call the "jig". The playing of the piva has survived in the mountainous areas, in my father's valleys particularly due to the efforts of one family and then later a group of friends.

This is an example of the kind of "giga" danced in Emilia...I've amazed my "American" friends by knowing how to do it.:grin:

 
Bagpipes are (were) played all over Italy, in the Abruzzi for example, and Calabria, but the instruments differ by region.

This is the Emilian "Piva".

 
Angela said:
Thank-you. I'm so glad you liked it.

Yes, I'm familiar with the group...they recorded some of the music of my father's valleys in the Emilian Appennines. How on earth did you run across them? Extraordinary...it's such a "niche" music I guess you could say.

Lovely, all of it, but from a 'very' different tradition. This music is linked to more central and north/north western European music. A lot of it is meant for dancing the "giga" which northwesterners call the "jig". The playing of the piva has survived in the mountainous areas, in my father's valleys particularly due to the efforts of one family and then later a group of friends.

This is an example of the kind of "giga" danced in Emilia...I've amazed my "American" friends by knowing how to do it.:grin:
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Wonderful, thanks for sharing!

I came across them from a CD I bought a few years ago called "The Rough Guide To The Music Of Italy". I really enjoy folk music and this was a great collection! Pretty neat to see the giga!

Would it be too much trouble to ask what they are singing about in Mary Dem? My Italian friends do not appreciate folk music as much I do so I suspect they are making up the translation haha!
 
Angela said:
Bagpipes are (were) played all over Italy, in the Abruzzi for example, and Calabria, but the instruments differ by region.

This is the Emilian "Piva".
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Interesting, I would never have guessed that they were played across all of Italy! That is what makes traditional music so fascinating!
 
hope said:
Fabio Vetro is a favourite with me , very talented man..[ and a very nice person also]. I particularly like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lIrw5BEpGg
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I like it too, and I'm not a real fan of the pipes.

This is what I mean about bagpipe music in southern Italy. When you do hear it, which isn't very often, it's usually accompanied by a tamburello and used to play a tarantella.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJMaWE6zQs4

This one I like much better...the size of the thing lets him get that nice, deep tone. Well, you sound like an expert, so you can tell me...:)

Again, I'm amazed. How did you come across his music? Do you follow bagpipe music generally? Sorry if I'm being too inquisitive.
 
Dulce Pontes and Andrea Bocelli, O Mare E Tu, with singing in Portuguese, Italian, dancers, and English subtitles (well, sort of).

 
Angela said:
I like it too, and I'm not a real fan of the pipes.

This is what I mean about bagpipe music in southern Italy. When you do hear it, which isn't very often, it's usually accompanied by a tamburello and used to play a tarantella.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJMaWE6zQs4

This one I like much better...the size of the thing lets him get that nice, deep tone. Well, you sound like an expert, so you can tell me...:)

Again, I'm amazed. How did you come across his music? Do you follow bagpipe music generally? Sorry if I'm being too inquisitive.
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No I`m certainly no expert, Angela.
It happens, among the many genres of music I like, traditional folk is one. As you will know, quite often the pipes [ in one form or other] usually make an appearance in this music. It was via this interest, that I became aware of Fabio Vetro.
I admit, unlike yourself, I am not so inclined to the droning of the larger pipes, I more prefer uilleann, piva, small Scottish and Welsh pipes and the like, where the drone is softer.
As for tarentella, well yes of course, especially when the beat is quicker. Very hard to keep your feet still...:)

Also sorry for the belated reply, but I have only just seen your post.
 
In this video the contralto explains a bit about how it works before they sing. There is always the tenor or primo, the basses, the counter-base and the guitar (he simulates the sound of a guitar by putting his fingers against his mouth) for rhythm, and then the counter-tenor or contralto, the "woman's" part. (Unfortunately, women never participated, although they do now, or at least one does.)

The men know all the songs, of course, and their "parts". So, it's not always a planned performance. It can be very impromptu, and a group can form as men happen to meet.

This is the video:
 
I like this video of a group of "trallaleri" because it shows how they are teaching the tradition to the young. You also get to be "inside" the circle, so you can see the "director", the guitar, as well as the bass.

It looks like such great fun...

 
No thread on Mediterranean music would be complete without a song by Amalia Rodrigues.

This is the translation from the Portuguese of Estranha Forma de Mi Vida
It was by the will of God
that I live in this anxiety,
that all woes are mine,
that is mine all longing.
It was by the will of God.
What a strange way of life
has this heart of mine!
It lives in a lost way.
Who would cast it the spell?
What a strange way of life.
Independent heart,
heart that I do not command,
lives lost among the people,
stubbornly bleeding,
independent heart.
I shall accompany you no more.
Stop, cease to beat!
If you know not where you're going,
why insist you on running?
I shall accompany you no more.

This is the performance:
 
Ensemble Micrologus, 12th to 16th century music.

 
Very nice, Maleth...I wasn't familiar with them...thank you.

Pergolesi's Stabat Mater:

 
This is a description by Dorothy Carrington, a student of Corsican polyphony, of the singers, who "...never... feel so united in their apartness, their insularity, as when performing this indigenous music inherited from their unremembered past. Fathers and sons and brothers and cousins stand or crouch in close formation, body to body, ear to ear, linked in the communion of singing with each other, with their race and with the hosts of their ancestors." "I had the impression of hearing a voice from the entrails of the earth. Song from the beginning of the world," she said after hearing singing one Christmas eve in a chapel in the Fiumorbu.

The Corsican group L'Alba singing "Sta Mane"...appropriate for the season, I think.
 
Angela said:
Very nice, Maleth...I wasn't familiar with them...thank you.
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You are most welcome Angela, thank you for all the one you posted and all the others. Love this music. My favorite thread I think :wary2:
 
Another selection from Spain







 
This is a typical Maltese 'Ghana' pronounced as ana, type of music sang in villages for centuries. The rhythm always circles on the same notes a,b,c,b and the lyrics are given lots of importance. It is generally played on guitars. The most popular will the the 'Spirtu Pront' where the singers just invent the lyrics there and then and always managing to make it rhyme. Some of the songs pass social messages and others can be very comical.

This was the music of the working class and unfortunately the number of singers have dwindled in the last year nearly to extinction. The closest type of music was from Andorra.


 
Maleth said:
This is a typical Maltese 'Ghana' pronounced as ana, type of music sang in villages for centuries. The rhythm always circles on the same notes a,b,c,b and the lyrics are given lots of importance. It is generally played on guitars. The most popular will the the 'Spirtu Pront' where the singers just invent the lyrics there and then and always managing to make it rhyme. Some of the songs pass social messages and others can be very comical.

This was the music of the working class and unfortunately the number of singers have dwindled in the last year nearly to extinction. The closest type of music was from Andorra.
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I think it's lovely, both melody and rhythm; I just wish I could understand the lyrics, although I could pick up a few words here and there.

We have something similar in Italy called stornelli, which are also meant to be improvised and to rhyme according to a set system. They can very often be insulting, stornelli a dispetto or stornelacci, which is part of a long tradition in the Mediterranean. Prominent Roman figures often were the brunt of what were probably similar kinds of 'dittys' or improvised songs. They can be sung by one person, or it can be a sort of competition between two people. Some of them can be very vulgar indeed, particularly when they're sung by old countrymen at the end of the night when they've had a little too much wine. Since not everybody even in Italy can sing, it can sometimes sound likes cats caterwauling!:LOL: Then there are the stornelli amorosi which were part of the courtship ritual where a boy sang underneath the girl's window. The difference is that the ones with which I'm familiar in Italy are all about the voice and the lyrics; the music is just a back note on guitar.

Anyway, this is one that immediately came to mind...it's by the great Claudio Villa and when I searched for it, a fun video of it popped up where the visuals are from the movie The Big Night, written, directed and acted in by Stanley Tucci, which is supposedly about two brothers from Italy trying to make a go of a restaurant in 1950's or 60's America, but which is actually, I think, about art and family love.

Here it is:

 
Angela said:
I think it's lovely, both melody and rhythm; I just wish I could understand the lyrics, although I could pick up a few words here and there.

We have something similar in Italy called stornelli, which are also meant to be improvised and to rhyme according to a set system. They can very often be insulting, stornelli a dispetto or stornelacci, which is part of a long tradition in the Mediterranean. Prominent Roman figures often were the brunt of what were probably similar kinds of 'dittys' or improvised songs. They can be sung by one person, or it can be a sort of competition between two people. Some of them can be very vulgar indeed, particularly when they're sung by old countrymen at the end of the night when they've had a little too much wine. Since not everybody even in Italy can sing, it can sometimes sound likes cats caterwauling!:LOL: Then there are the stornelli amorosi which were part of the courtship ritual where a boy sang underneath the girl's window. The difference is that the ones with which I'm familiar in Italy are all about the voice and the lyrics; the music is just a back note on guitar.

Anyway, this is one that immediately came to mind...it's by the great Claudio Villa and when I searched for it, a fun video of it popped up where the visuals are from the movie The Big Night, written, directed and acted in by Stanley Tucci, which is supposedly about two brothers from Italy trying to make a go of a restaurant in 1950's or 60's America, but which is actually, I think, about art and family love.
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Okayyyy, I can understand the similarity:). Something new to me. I love it, thou the vocals are expressed in a more refined mode. The typical 'Ghana' (aana) is sang in a very crude manner but the concept is very much the same!

Here is a quick rough translation for you

No music can rest my heart
No note can comfort me
No word can ease me
No kiss will make me forget


I was born only to love
only in it I find all beauty
Music art and all the other
without it everything all life willwither


with love everything looks morebeautiful
It transforms life to a symphony
all the creation that surrounds us
is transformed into poetry


because love is there to bond us
its a force that will never end
where there is no love there are no arts
and all will ebb to the lowest levels


Great work of arts are onlyaccomplished
with much love and dedication
and where there is its mark
you find only the best productions


and the biggest love around us
is the one that keeps us united
where its missing there is hate
and results in broken nations


this love is given to all creations
like the love between lovers
where it does not rein
there is no joy but only misery


and when this life will end
It will still rein in the heavens
 
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