Fotografie dagli anni 50 del secolo scorso
Il 2 novembre 2005 si è aperta la mostra di foto in bianco/nero prese sul campo da A. Lomax e D. Carpitella durante la campagna degli anni ’50 del secolo scorso. La mostra è curata da Luisa del Giudice e Goffredo Plastino per conto dell’Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Los Angeles.
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Introduction to the Salento: History and Oral Tradition. -Luisa Del Giudice
The Salento (or “Terra d’Otranto”), at the southeastern-most tip of Italy’s heel, forms a distinct cultural area within the Regione of Puglia (Apulia). Over millennia, it has represented a crossroads between the East and West. Ancient Greek colonists overlaid Messapians there, only to be overlaid in turn as the Romans forged maritime commercial routes to the Eastern Mediterranean. After the 9th-century schism, made religious and definitive in 1054, the Salento became a political and religious battlefield in the conflicts between Byzantium and the Western Holy Roman Empire. During the later Crusades, it provided European knights passage to the Holy Land ¾ and thus suffered repeated reprisals by the Saracens. Today, as a result of European Union reconfigurations and growing demographic shifts, the region is once more a Mediterranean bridge. In its oral cultural expressions, aspects of these crossings, ancient and more recent, remain audible.
It is largely recognized that the immediate post-World War II period formed a watershed in Italian history and culture. A great number of Apulians emigrated from the region during this time. The mass exodus bled many parts of the rural landscape, rending its social fabric and its traditional cultures. Recordings from this era capture a still vigorous tradition of a pre-“Economic Boom” Italian generation for whom music-making in familial, informal urban settings, or places of work in fields, masseria or trullo, was the norm. The profound social changes which followed directly impacted the Salento’s oral and musical traditions. For example, the last remnants of ‘classic’ tarantismo were largely dispersed in the 1970’s, as was the practice of formally lamenting the dead.
Juxtaposed and successive historic realities can also be read on the man-made environment. Alongside Bronze Age dolmens and menhirs rise magnificent and abundant Romanesque and Baroque golden tufa churches, fortresses, and crypts, as well as an impressive and rich vernacular architecture, largely built of stone. Although the most notable among them ¾ the trullo (conical, beehive stone and stucco structures) ¾ have put Apulian towns like Alberobello on the United Nations list of heritage sites, there are besides: hundreds of miles of drystone stone walls, masserie (rural complexes), a variety of rough-hewn dwellings, animal shelters, wells, subterranean mills, and of course, the wild, stony, and barely inhabited landscapes down toward the tip of the heel, at Santa Maria di Leuca de Finibus Terrae (“Ends of the Earth”).
Although today much of Puglia appears lush and domesticated, terraced in vine and ancient, gnarled olive groves, it was due to the gargantuan efforts undertaken by un popolo di formiche (“a population of ants”) ¾ as Puglia-born writer and intellectual, Tommaso Fiore, described his people ¾ that made this possible. This tireless army patiently cleared stones from the land, assembled them in endless walls, and slowly transformed a craggy land into an austerely beautiful walled garden.
The physical challenges of Puglia’s natural environmentbesides those created by its history of deprivations and political oppressionmarked its people, their worldview, as well as their material and oral expressions. This cultural landscape can be glimpsed in occupational songs: those of women field hands (cf. Italian Treasury: Puglia, Rounder Records), of canti di trebbiatura (“threshing songs”), and canti della vendemmia (“harvest songs”). The sound of hammer against stone recalls what must have been a familiar sound in the Apulian aural landscape. The rural masserie, once densely inhabited, provided both a communal context of work experiences (e.g., stringing of tobacco leaves, threshing of wheat) and social celebrations, but also of darker rituals involving traditional music and dance, for this rural landscape also produced the culture of tarantismo (“tarantulism”).
Moroloja (funeral laments). The practice of lamenting the dead, once so widespread, and practiced as late as the 1970’s in the Salento, has now disappeared. Archaic elements of belief may be found in these funeral laments and seem to bear striking resemblance to documented ancient Greek practices. We find figures from the Graeco-Roman mythological world: e.g., Charon, Thanatos, the Fates, Fortune. And it is ultimately a pagan vision of death which we glimpse, rather than one informed by the Christian value of embracing death as a transition to a better life. In the worldview of the moroloja, the dead do not take that journey willingly, but must be coaxed and escorted on their way, through a series of practices meant to both pacify and render the spirit innocuous to the living, to assure their final passage and prevent their return.
Understood as a unity of word, music and gesture, the moroloja helped bring the uncontrolled and desperate grieving over the dead under control and provided a public forum for the theater death. Dressed in black, and holding a white hankerchief between her hands, the professional mourner, prefica (or réputa < Latin, `list, count’ that is, enumerate the good qualities of the dead person), would ritually tear her hair, beat her breast and knees, and in a sort of rhythmic dance, swaying back and forth, then begin her formal lament. The most effective laments were as emotionally intense as they were long, invoking the pathos of the listeners.
Luisa Del Giudice
[From: Salento, 1954: The Photographs of Alan Lomax, Ethnomusicologist – Salento, 1954: Le fotografie di Alan Lomax, etnomusicologo, 2006 and Introduction to: Italian Treasury: Puglia, Rounder Records (Alan Lomax Collection), 2003.]
Exhibition made possible through grants from the Italian Oral History Institute, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, and the Association for Cultural Equity at Hunter College, New York City.
I.O.H.I. – the ITALIAN ORAL HISTORY INSTITUTE
and the
Istituto Italiano di Cultura
cordially invite you to a lecture & exhibition opening:
Wednesday, November 2, 8:00 – 10:00 p.m.
at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura (IIC)
1023 Hilgard Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90024, (310) 443-3250
Illustrated Lecture (8:00 p.m.): The Watts Towers of Los Angeles and La Festa dei Gigli of Nola: A Shared Tradition, by Joseph Sciorra, Calandra Institute, CUNY, New York. The Watts Towers were the creation of Sabato (Simon) Rodia, a native of Campania, Italy, an area with a strong “dancing tower” festival tradition. This ethnographic grounding of the emblematic Los Angeles monument is rarely celebrated.
Exhibition Opening (9:00 p.m.): Alan Lomax in the Salento: Ethnographic Photographs from the 1950’s (Nov. 2 – 11) (Curators: Luisa Del Giudice and Goffredo Plastino). Presented by Anna Lomax Wood and Luisa Del Giudice. Black and white photographs taken on the pioneering Alan Lomax/Diego Carpitella ethnomusicologic field collecting campaigns of the 1950’s and 1960’s. The Salento (Puglia) is closely associated with the spider ritual of tarantismo as well as with Mediterranean funeral laments. (Photographs available for purchase; contributions to benefit the Italian Oral History Institute, a California non-profit institution.)
* * * * *
Exhibition made possible through the support of the Italian Oral History Institute, The Istituto Italiano di Cultura, and The Association for Cultural Equity at Hunter College, New York City.
Opening reception on Wednesday, November 2, generously offered by the George L. Graziadio Center for Italian Studies, California State University, Long Beach, and Italian organic wines by Dynamic Imports.
* * * * *
This event is part of the IOHI multimedia festival: Italian Los Angeles: Celebrating Italian Life, Local History, and the Arts in Southern California (October 19 – December 9, 2005). More information at: http://www.iohi.org/aiha/index.html
Highlights:
Exhibitions:
– Leo Politi: Artist of the Angels (Oct. 23 – Dec. 4, opening Oct. 23, 1:00-4:00 p.m., Watts Towers Arts Center)
– Alan Lomax in the Salento: Ethnographic photographs from the 1950s (Nov. 2-11, opening Nov. 2, 9:00 p.m., Istituto Italiano di Cultura)
Concerts:
– Music from Mediterranean Italy: Musicàntica in concert (Nov. 4, 8:00 p.m., Armand Hammer Museum)
– Tarantelle e canti d’amore, I Giullari di Piazza (Nov. 6, 4:00 p.m., Remo Music Center, N. Hollywood)
Readings: Poets to Prose: Readings by Italian/American writers from So. California (Nov. 3, 8:00 p.m., Doubletree)
Workshops: Traditional Dance & Music (Nov. 3, 4, 5, St. Albans Church, Westwood)
Cultural & Historic Tour: “Chi Siamo: Italians of Los Angeles (Nov. 6, 8:30 a.m., departs Doubletree, Westwood)
* * * * *
Italian Los Angeles is offered in conjunction with the 38th annual conference of the American Italian Historical Association: Speaking Memory: Oral History, Oral Culture and Italians in America (November 3-6, 2005) which will gather over 160 speakers to Los Angeles (from Europe and North America) to discuss: history, language and literature, folk traditions and folk revivals, art and architecture, ethnic and religious minorities, gender and generation, oral history projects and genealogy, cinema and theatre, war experiences, music, food, sports, and more. Speaking Memory is the first AIHA conference ever to be held in Southern California. N.B. Conference attendance is by advance registration and pre-payment only (Registration and Payment at: http://www.iohi.org/aiha/conferenceregistration.html) Conference program and ongoing updates at: http://www.iohi.org/aiha/schedule.html. Times and dates subject to change without notice. Space is limited: register early
Conference Highlights: Keynote Speaker: Alessandro Portelli, Universita di Roma, La Sapienza: What Makes Oral History Different; UCLA programs: Rediscovering Columbus: Recent Research and the Repertorium Colombianum (Geoffrey Symcox); Oral history research workshop by the UCLA Oral History Program (Teresa Barnett); Sound and visual archives presentation by the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive (John Vallier).
* * * * *
Festival and Conference Sponsors: Italian Oral History Institute; American Italian Historical Association; Istituto Italiano di Cultura; George L. Graziadio Center for Italian Studies, California State University, Long Beach; National Italian American Foundation; UCLA (Center for Medieval and Renaissance Center; Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center; Center for European and Eurasian Studies; Department of Italian; Ethnomusicology Archive; Oral History Program); City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Dept.; Watts Towers Arts Center; The Association for Cultural Equity at Hunter College, New York City; Frank de Santis; San Gennaro Foundation Los Angeles; Italian Organic Wines from Dynamic Imports; St. Peters Italian Church.
Under the Auspices of the Consulate General of Italy in Los Angeles.
"Mi piace""Mi piace"
Pubblicato da festival | novembre 3, 2005, 6:42 PMIntroduction to the Salento: History and Oral Tradition. -Luisa Del Giudice
The Salento (or “Terra d’Otranto”), at the southeastern-most tip of Italy’s heel, forms a distinct cultural area within the Regione of Puglia (Apulia). Over millennia, it has represented a crossroads between the East and West. Ancient Greek colonists overlaid Messapians there, only to be overlaid in turn as the Romans forged maritime commercial routes to the Eastern Mediterranean. After the 9th-century schism, made religious and definitive in 1054, the Salento became a political and religious battlefield in the conflicts between Byzantium and the Western Holy Roman Empire. During the later Crusades, it provided European knights passage to the Holy Land ¾ and thus suffered repeated reprisals by the Saracens. Today, as a result of European Union reconfigurations and growing demographic shifts, the region is once more a Mediterranean bridge. In its oral cultural expressions, aspects of these crossings, ancient and more recent, remain audible.
It is largely recognized that the immediate post-World War II period formed a watershed in Italian history and culture. A great number of Apulians emigrated from the region during this time. The mass exodus bled many parts of the rural landscape, rending its social fabric and its traditional cultures. Recordings from this era capture a still vigorous tradition of a pre-“Economic Boom” Italian generation for whom music-making in familial, informal urban settings, or places of work in fields, masseria or trullo, was the norm. The profound social changes which followed directly impacted the Salento’s oral and musical traditions. For example, the last remnants of ‘classic’ tarantismo were largely dispersed in the 1970’s, as was the practice of formally lamenting the dead.
Juxtaposed and successive historic realities can also be read on the man-made environment. Alongside Bronze Age dolmens and menhirs rise magnificent and abundant Romanesque and Baroque golden tufa churches, fortresses, and crypts, as well as an impressive and rich vernacular architecture, largely built of stone. Although the most notable among them ¾ the trullo (conical, beehive stone and stucco structures) ¾ have put Apulian towns like Alberobello on the United Nations list of heritage sites, there are besides: hundreds of miles of drystone stone walls, masserie (rural complexes), a variety of rough-hewn dwellings, animal shelters, wells, subterranean mills, and of course, the wild, stony, and barely inhabited landscapes down toward the tip of the heel, at Santa Maria di Leuca de Finibus Terrae (“Ends of the Earth”).
Although today much of Puglia appears lush and domesticated, terraced in vine and ancient, gnarled olive groves, it was due to the gargantuan efforts undertaken by un popolo di formiche (“a population of ants”) ¾ as Puglia-born writer and intellectual, Tommaso Fiore, described his people ¾ that made this possible. This tireless army patiently cleared stones from the land, assembled them in endless walls, and slowly transformed a craggy land into an austerely beautiful walled garden.
The physical challenges of Puglia’s natural environmentbesides those created by its history of deprivations and political oppressionmarked its people, their worldview, as well as their material and oral expressions. This cultural landscape can be glimpsed in occupational songs: those of women field hands (cf. Italian Treasury: Puglia, Rounder Records), of canti di trebbiatura (“threshing songs”), and canti della vendemmia (“harvest songs”). The sound of hammer against stone recalls what must have been a familiar sound in the Apulian aural landscape. The rural masserie, once densely inhabited, provided both a communal context of work experiences (e.g., stringing of tobacco leaves, threshing of wheat) and social celebrations, but also of darker rituals involving traditional music and dance, for this rural landscape also produced the culture of tarantismo (“tarantulism”).
Moroloja (funeral laments). The practice of lamenting the dead, once so widespread, and practiced as late as the 1970’s in the Salento, has now disappeared. Archaic elements of belief may be found in these funeral laments and seem to bear striking resemblance to documented ancient Greek practices. We find figures from the Graeco-Roman mythological world: e.g., Charon, Thanatos, the Fates, Fortune. And it is ultimately a pagan vision of death which we glimpse, rather than one informed by the Christian value of embracing death as a transition to a better life. In the worldview of the moroloja, the dead do not take that journey willingly, but must be coaxed and escorted on their way, through a series of practices meant to both pacify and render the spirit innocuous to the living, to assure their final passage and prevent their return.
Understood as a unity of word, music and gesture, the moroloja helped bring the uncontrolled and desperate grieving over the dead under control and provided a public forum for the theater death. Dressed in black, and holding a white hankerchief between her hands, the professional mourner, prefica (or réputa < Latin, `list, count’ that is, enumerate the good qualities of the dead person), would ritually tear her hair, beat her breast and knees, and in a sort of rhythmic dance, swaying back and forth, then begin her formal lament. The most effective laments were as emotionally intense as they were long, invoking the pathos of the listeners.
Luisa Del Giudice
[From: Salento, 1954: The Photographs of Alan Lomax, Ethnomusicologist – Salento, 1954: Le fotografie di Alan Lomax, etnomusicologo, 2006 and Introduction to: Italian Treasury: Puglia, Rounder Records (Alan Lomax Collection), 2003.]
Exhibition made possible through grants from the Italian Oral History Institute, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, and the Association for Cultural Equity at Hunter College, New York City.
I.O.H.I. – the ITALIAN ORAL HISTORY INSTITUTE
and the
Istituto Italiano di Cultura
cordially invite you to a lecture & exhibition opening:
Wednesday, November 2, 8:00 – 10:00 p.m.
at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura (IIC)
1023 Hilgard Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90024, (310) 443-3250
Illustrated Lecture (8:00 p.m.): The Watts Towers of Los Angeles and La Festa dei Gigli of Nola: A Shared Tradition, by Joseph Sciorra, Calandra Institute, CUNY, New York. The Watts Towers were the creation of Sabato (Simon) Rodia, a native of Campania, Italy, an area with a strong “dancing tower” festival tradition. This ethnographic grounding of the emblematic Los Angeles monument is rarely celebrated.
Exhibition Opening (9:00 p.m.): Alan Lomax in the Salento: Ethnographic Photographs from the 1950’s (Nov. 2 – 11) (Curators: Luisa Del Giudice and Goffredo Plastino). Presented by Anna Lomax Wood and Luisa Del Giudice. Black and white photographs taken on the pioneering Alan Lomax/Diego Carpitella ethnomusicologic field collecting campaigns of the 1950’s and 1960’s. The Salento (Puglia) is closely associated with the spider ritual of tarantismo as well as with Mediterranean funeral laments. (Photographs available for purchase; contributions to benefit the Italian Oral History Institute, a California non-profit institution.)
* * * * *
Exhibition made possible through the support of the Italian Oral History Institute, The Istituto Italiano di Cultura, and The Association for Cultural Equity at Hunter College, New York City.
Opening reception on Wednesday, November 2, generously offered by the George L. Graziadio Center for Italian Studies, California State University, Long Beach, and Italian organic wines by Dynamic Imports.
* * * * *
This event is part of the IOHI multimedia festival: Italian Los Angeles: Celebrating Italian Life, Local History, and the Arts in Southern California (October 19 – December 9, 2005). More information at: http://www.iohi.org/aiha/index.html
Highlights:
Exhibitions:
– Leo Politi: Artist of the Angels (Oct. 23 – Dec. 4, opening Oct. 23, 1:00-4:00 p.m., Watts Towers Arts Center)
– Alan Lomax in the Salento: Ethnographic photographs from the 1950s (Nov. 2-11, opening Nov. 2, 9:00 p.m., Istituto Italiano di Cultura)
Concerts:
– Music from Mediterranean Italy: Musicàntica in concert (Nov. 4, 8:00 p.m., Armand Hammer Museum)
– Tarantelle e canti d’amore, I Giullari di Piazza (Nov. 6, 4:00 p.m., Remo Music Center, N. Hollywood)
Readings: Poets to Prose: Readings by Italian/American writers from So. California (Nov. 3, 8:00 p.m., Doubletree)
Workshops: Traditional Dance & Music (Nov. 3, 4, 5, St. Albans Church, Westwood)
Cultural & Historic Tour: “Chi Siamo: Italians of Los Angeles (Nov. 6, 8:30 a.m., departs Doubletree, Westwood)
* * * * *
Italian Los Angeles is offered in conjunction with the 38th annual conference of the American Italian Historical Association: Speaking Memory: Oral History, Oral Culture and Italians in America (November 3-6, 2005) which will gather over 160 speakers to Los Angeles (from Europe and North America) to discuss: history, language and literature, folk traditions and folk revivals, art and architecture, ethnic and religious minorities, gender and generation, oral history projects and genealogy, cinema and theatre, war experiences, music, food, sports, and more. Speaking Memory is the first AIHA conference ever to be held in Southern California. N.B. Conference attendance is by advance registration and pre-payment only (Registration and Payment at: http://www.iohi.org/aiha/conferenceregistration.html) Conference program and ongoing updates at: http://www.iohi.org/aiha/schedule.html. Times and dates subject to change without notice. Space is limited: register early
Conference Highlights: Keynote Speaker: Alessandro Portelli, Universita di Roma, La Sapienza: What Makes Oral History Different; UCLA programs: Rediscovering Columbus: Recent Research and the Repertorium Colombianum (Geoffrey Symcox); Oral history research workshop by the UCLA Oral History Program (Teresa Barnett); Sound and visual archives presentation by the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive (John Vallier).
* * * * *
Festival and Conference Sponsors: Italian Oral History Institute; American Italian Historical Association; Istituto Italiano di Cultura; George L. Graziadio Center for Italian Studies, California State University, Long Beach; National Italian American Foundation; UCLA (Center for Medieval and Renaissance Center; Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center; Center for European and Eurasian Studies; Department of Italian; Ethnomusicology Archive; Oral History Program); City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Dept.; Watts Towers Arts Center; The Association for Cultural Equity at Hunter College, New York City; Frank de Santis; San Gennaro Foundation Los Angeles; Italian Organic Wines from Dynamic Imports; St. Peters Italian Church.
Under the Auspices of the Consulate General of Italy in Los Angeles.
"Mi piace""Mi piace"
Pubblicato da festival | novembre 3, 2005, 6:42 PM