Ambrogio Sparagna who, without a doubt, contributed in an important way to giving new life and vitality to the essence of Italian popular music, also through his intense activity as a scholar, researcher, teacher and popularizer.
I would define this interview as a beautiful journey, and an enrichment, which begins with some mention of Maestro Sparagna’s first experiences and encounters and passes through a reflection on the role of popular music, and the instruments connected to it, as music that creates links with people and territories, endowed with a great unifying force, simultaneously global and local.
What was the drive that first led you to study ethnomusicology, then to dedicate yourself to the diffusion of Italian popular music and to found, in 1976, the first school of popular music in Italy?
I started playing at a very young age and, in 1973, with my high school friends I founded a group in Formia called Canzoniere Popolare degli Aurunci. In those years there was the great boom of the so-called folk revival, so all of us kids were attracted to this type of situation. I started by being a singer and, above all, by recording songs: since I was a child I had this attention and it was easier for me than others, because I lived in a small village called Maranola (near Formia), where there was still a strong presence of popular singers and musicians, beyond the fact that there was this type of tradition in my family too.
So I immediately found myself inside what was a real youth cultural movement: despite living in the province, these things happened through the impulse of strong awareness on the part of cultural, political movements, the youth movement and everything that we let’s consider the season of the seventies.
In that period, it was also easy to meet people: I was lucky enough, in 1973, to meet Ignazio Buttitta in Gaeta, one of the greatest Sicilian poets and a fundamental figure in those years.
He himself gave us the courage to continue having this type of experience, even if it seemed a bit strange that very young people (I was just sixteen years old at the time) went around the countryside to record by chance: I made the first recordings made with a Geloso reel-to-reel recorder in a very amateur way. However, those experiences were fundamental because, after two or three years, we began to combine this small research in the surrounding towns with concerts connected to political parties, popular festivals, the “Avanti!” parties. etc., quickly finding ourselves doing fifty-sixty concerts a year.
This gave a strong boost to my activity, so much so that in September 1976 I enrolled at university, in the first ethnomusicology course held by Diego Carpitella and, simultaneously, towards the end of the year, we organized these first courses of accordion in Rome which achieved great success and then started courses in bagpipe, tambourine etc., making the popular music school of the Circolo Gianni Bosio become a sort of attraction.
In a very short time, we went from being little more than a dozen to hundreds and hundreds, and my students became teachers in turn: especially as regards the practice of the accordion, all of this became a phenomenon that over the years it is widely developed and enriched, affecting the whole of Italy, from north to south, with a strong predisposition in some areas where there was already the pre-existence of popular instruments.
Today, we can certainly say that around these instruments there is a real mass phenomenon, which also generates significant economic activity, both with regards to the production of the instruments of the so-called “popular lutherie”, which constitutes a very varied and composite in the panorama of violin making, both in terms of the success of some festivals, not least the success of the “Notte della Taranta”, of which I was the creator from 2003 to 2007.
All this has become a real movement that articulates in many initiatives, festivals and, above all, many people who play: teenagers, children, a real army of musicians, who are often not considered in the didactic or structured organization systems, even if today we find courses on popular instruments organised, however, in a somewhat headless way, in which everyone takes their own course.
In any case, beyond this aspect, the real fact, as I was saying, is that this is a mass phenomenon which around the recovery of popular music has also created a whole series of other possible developments, linked, above all, to a increase in the so-called internal areas, which constitute an important value in production and the local economy. We started from creating a movement that had, fundamentally, the need to recognize its own sense of identity: this was the matrix of everything and for me it still remains the main sign of this whole movement.
So it is a phenomenon that has increasingly grown, until it has become, as he said, a mass phenomenon…
Yes, they are mass phenomena. It is seventeen years ago, since 2007, that I founded the Italian Popular Orchestra (OPI) in Rome, at the Parco della Musica. In recent years, we have periodically carried out a residential activity, which then consists in the production of five or six original events per year, dedicated to the valorisation of Italian popular music in general and connected with the cycle of the seasons, such as the period of Christmas, the celebrations linked to Carnival, the May Day celebrations, the celebrations linked to summer dance and, lastly, a part dedicated to the Roman song in October.
In recent years, we are talking about over sixty thousand paying people: figures that cannot be considered secondary, compared to an important interest. Even now, what is happening in various regions is the push for the creation of regional popular orchestras, the phenomenon of conservatories, the phenomenon of other initiatives also linked to dance, for example, with the recovery of pizzica, tammurriate, the recovery of north of the tradition of the so-called pre-ballroom dances, in the entire area of the Tuscan-Romagnolo, Emilian Apennines, and everything that we call the jumping dance: they are all phenomena that together create a very strong attention. All of this, then, is marked by one fundamental thing: everyone plays, in an Italy that no longer plays, where music today is made with sequences.
This is a very strong sign of appropriation of a value and, for me, also a sign of an antagonistic culture: having children who, from the age of six or seven, start playing the Calabrian tarantellas, as well as the Abruzzo passatello, the pastorals in Basilicata, the pizzica in Salento or the tammurriate in Campania is a very strong sign of a condition that no longer sees young people as protagonists of a community sound experience. When I started, everyone played, there were groups, bands, while today there is the soloist who follows a different type of journey compared to the one I am describing and which, instead, essentially takes place within a community context.
More and more boys are playing and more and more girls are playing extraordinary instruments, just think of what happened in Sardinia in the recovery of the launeddas, a very complicated instrument, which today is played by hundreds and hundreds of people, including many girls, who play this instrument which, Once upon a time, it was the exclusive prerogative of men. This is a sign of the vitality of popular music which, I hope, will also be highlighted by the institutions, above all to keep peripheral realities of the Apennine ridge alive, through an activity of valorisation of popular instruments which can also bind people to the territories highly subject to depopulation.
To give an example, recently, on the occasion of Dante’s celebrations in 2021, I did a lot of work on him, highlighting how he has remained in popular culture through the fundamental element of singing: I met many important popular poets, for example the Tuscan Edilio Romanelli, who, in his activities as an extemporaneous poet, used to sing verses in Dante’s tercets, in the same way as the popular world on which this poetic scaffolding rested for centuries.
His research activity on traditional Italian music began as early as the Seventies. In these fifty years of activity, have you noticed any changes in the approach and perception of Italian popular music?
I give a largely positive assessment of these fifty years that have passed. When I started playing it was me and a few others, convinced that we were the last masters of ceremonies of a world that had been extraordinary and that seemed to be destined for total extinction, the moment we went to hear the last singers. Fortunately, this was not the case and extraordinary interest was created.
Regarding this, in an interview he declared that “OPI is also a fascinating project of new popular music with original repertoires that tell of a new Italy of music that involves young people in search of an identity rhythm and opportunities for new sociality”…
Yes, the fact of being in Rome, of having a continuous activity, of choosing to stay in a place where we can gather young people who come from all regions, and also from various parts of the Mediterranean, given that often relationships with the music also take place through sounds from the other side of the sea (we frequently have projects that concern cultures from the African Mediterranean area, as well as from the Greek area, the Turkish area…) allows us to generate a new language, which also attracts a more varied audience and, above all, it facilitates discussion and the enthusiasm of encountering a repertoire that has an extraordinary charm and which can be contemporary music. Many young people today are making singing and popular instruments a basis of their primary artistic expression.
In your repertoire we also find original songs, not just reworkings of purely traditional songs: can we say that this is also a way to talk about current themes through traditional sounds? Is there the underlying idea of starting from tradition to tell the present, in some way?
We certainly talk about the present, not the past: we use the past as a basis. I have experience working on sources, represented both by the sound documentation that I have collected by recording music from north to south, from the Po Delta to Salento, and by collections of nineteenth-century popular poetry songs, which, due to my academic training, I have always given a lot of attention: from the Tuscan Niccolò Tommaseo, to the Piedmontese Costantino Nigra, to the Sicilian Giuseppe Pitrè, to the Neapolitan Luigi Molinaro Del Chiaro.
From that material I try to take some fundamental things that concern the poetic form and content, for example the use of strambotto and all those that are the typical ways of ancient Italian poetic culture, which was born with Saint Francis, passes through Dante, arrives in sixteenth century with the Laudi di San Filippo Neri, in the eighteenth century with the Canzoncine di Sant’Alfonso Maria De Liguori and becomes unique. On this poetic material I compose melodies that have a very strong metric determination, obviously maintaining what are, in my opinion, the conditions of approachability to the so-called popular models.
So I work on diatonic scales, I work on a sort of polymodality, using the meter of the language, which builds everything through the metric of the hendecasyllable, and there I go to do a whole job of melodic construction, inserting instrumental interludes between the verses, which were not taken into consideration before, but which are necessary to create shows connected to the contemporary. I give the example of a Lauda by San Filippo Neri which says “Whoever wants to ascend to heaven where God is seen, listen to my words. I have wanted it for a long time, because on this earth I see nothing but war”: this is a text written around the middle of the sixteenth century, but which, applied to today, seems incredibly contemporary, so I had to insert this text into a a sort of instrumental interlude on a rhythm that is typical of our skip, of our world, because that Lauda was linked to that type of condition.
Furthermore, around that Lauda, there was an important experience that he had along the way with respect to this mythical journey of his which takes him from Florence to Cassino, from Cassino to Gaeta and from Gaeta to Rome: if we dig into the depths , we realize that this type of experience has a universal character.
Popular song needs a profound, diachronic, analytical reading. So there are many implications that are put into play and it takes the awareness of placing texts, whether they are ancient, linked to the experience of the First World War or to the songs of the Resistance, to the peasant struggles of the 1950s, within a condition in which this type of message must be favored to be listened to less pompously and closer to the needs of ordinary people. This is the key to our success, demonstrated by the numbers, and I am very proud of it because it is a unique experience.
I imagine that if popular songs remained an end in themselves, as they were born, perhaps they would not have the same success…
The text of popular songs has been handed down for centuries: there are songs that even have a root in the so-called courtly poetry, at the dawn of the history of Italian poetry, or in the Canticle of the Creatures of Saint Francis. This is a type of teaching that then became practice, and is present in many Italian popular songs which, for example, use the same type of paragraphs as when Saint Francis speaks of the so-called “creatures”, to talk about love, relationship between people etc. So the texts and the poetry have remained anchored for centuries, while the music has transformed: remaining in the example of the Canticle of the Creatures, on which I am working in depth, the contemporaries of Saint Francis say that he had also put the music and sang it, then obviously we lost that music, but the word remained: the song remained, with its rule which was then transmitted for centuries. The same goes for other popular songs: in every place there is a different way of singing, but the narratives are the same.
A curiosity: has the approach to studying and recording always been the same or has it changed in these fifty years of research activity?
Obviously it was further enriched: at the beginning I wrote the songs of the Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare, like all my companions, then I began to pay greater attention and study, together with analytical work, with a great ethnomusicologist like Diego Carpitella, with whom I graduated, was obviously important to me. Then, progressively, I found my path, which has always been dotted with attention to study, form, instruments, but also to the language, dialects and so-called minority cultures (Grico, Arbereshe culture…) : I have a philologist approach in trying to understand the connection between the written word and the sung word, which is completely different. One thing I have certainly always had is a strong attention towards poetry.
You brought Italian popular music to the world: what is its impact and how was your first contact abroad?
It has always been a great success. I started in 1986, I undertook a career abroad, and I must say that it generated a lot of confidence in me and made me become a musician, thanks also to the experience in France, where, between 1991 and 1992, I was, together with Giovanna Marini, teacher of ethnomusicology at the University of Saint-Denis in Paris. We, having this charm of melody that dialogues with rhythm, have always been musicians in great demand.
When I was the director of the “Notte della Taranta”, I brought the Notte della Taranta Orchestra to Beijing and it was a resounding success, with fifty thousand people seeing the concert and many dancing beneath us. We also had a lot of success in Mexico, Brazil, Kazakhstan, where we did, with the Astana conservatory, an activity linked to the choir boys who were enthusiastic about singing in Italian.
Furthermore, when we went abroad, we tried to meet the most interesting realities, for example with the tours we did in Paraguay, in Brazil, where we did things inside the alagados of Salvador de Bahia and in the places where there is more sense of humanity, which this music is strong in expressing.
Ambrogio Sparagna We could say that it is music that unites…
Yes, it’s local and global at the same time: it’s much easier to unite people with this music than with politics.
Given the numerous performances and trips abroad he has made, he will also have had the opportunity to get to know and approach the traditional music of the various territories.
Everywhere we have been, from Libya, to Iran, to Iraq we have tried to combine ourselves with local artists, like the example I gave before of Kazakhstan, without ever making an exclusive expression of work: this has significantly favored us. For example, recently, we were in Dubai during the Expo and we called three musicians from the city, who we knew through a global network of popular music, and managed to do a concert together with them, which had enormous success and went in the traditional live broadcast of the news. As I said before, with this music you can definitely be closer to others and meet each other, even if you don’t speak the same language.
Let’s say that it is a universal language and, as he said, at the same time local linked to culture, society and customs.
Exactly, an example of a founding element is the tambourine, which is found everywhere, or a flute, or a string, which could be the mandola: going to the various countries you realize that there are instruments that have the same structure, managing to adapt despite the differences in scales and modes.
She plays one of the most identifying instruments of the popular genre: the accordion. What do you think is the value it brings to Italian popular music?
As regards the accordion, the fundamental thing is that it is an instrument that was born during the industrial revolution and already within it has this link with the archaic world and the modern world: the first to play it were the farmers who then became workers, or who, for example, lived in Paris and then went to live in the colonies taking it with them, like the Italians who went to Argentina or Brazil. Another fundamental thing is that, being an instrument with a diatonic structure, over the years there have been a series of prototypes that have led to the development of this instrument: the chromatic accordion is the direct derivation of the first accordion.
However, I believe that, for a wide-ranging diffusion of this instrument, it is essential to formalize a typology of models that are uniform, such as the eight-bass and two-row standard, which has its own classification, to avoid there being many very different from each other. I myself have made some small variations which, however, have not changed the nature of the instrument in any way, except enriching its expressive capabilities: although I was among the first to play accordions that had more rows and more basses, I remain convinced of the The idea that the accordion should remain an instrument with eight basses and two melodic lines.
Are there any new projects coming up?
As I mentioned before, I am working a lot on the Cantico delle Creature as the basis of Italian song, recovering in the archive a series of materials connected to its development, also through the Franciscan tradition and the tradition which sees a great presence of this song, which becomes a sort of “custody of Creation”, and which I believe is a contemporary and necessary song, given what we are undergoing in this period.
Leave us a message for the readers, if you like.
I am very pleased to have done this interview. Continue reading this magazine which I consider very important and, above all, I consider it very important to talk about instruments in a broad sense, as you are doing, not based only on typological issues, but describing the instrument within the context, because, outside the context, the instrument does not have the same value.
