Music of Italy - Venues, Festivals and Holidays

Venues, Festivals and Holidays

Venues for music in Italy include concerts at the many music conservatories, symphony halls and opera houses. Italy also has many well-known international music festivals each year, including the Festival of Spoleto, the Festival Puccini and the Wagner Festival in Ravello. Some festivals offer venues to younger composers in classical music by producing and staging winning entries in competitions. The winner, for example, of the "Orpheus" International Competition for New Opera and Chamber music—besides winning considerable prize money—gets to see his or her musical work performed at The Spoleto Festival. There are also dozens of privately sponsored master classes in music each year that put on concerts for the public. Italy is also a common destination for well-known orchestras from abroad; at almost any given time during the busiest season, at least one major orchestra from elsewhere in Europe or North America is playing a concert in Italy. Additionally, public music may be heard at dozens of pop and rock concerts throughout the year. Open-air opera may even be heard, for example, at the ancient Roman amphitheater, the Arena of Verona. Military bands, too, are popular in Italy. At a national level, one of the best-known of these is the concert band of the Guardia di Finanza (Italian Customs/Border Police); it performs many times a year.

Many theaters also routinely stage not just Italian translations of American musicals, but true Italian musical comedy, which are called by the English term musical. In Italian, that term describes a kind of musical drama not native to Italy, a form that employs the American idiom of jazz-pop-and rock-based music and rhythms to move a story along in a combination of songs and dialogue.

Music in religious rituals, especially Roman Catholic, manifests itself in a number of ways. Parish bands, for example, are quite common throughout Italy. They may be as small as four or five members to as many as 20 or 30. They commonly perform at religious festivals specific to a particular town, usually in honor of the town's patron saint. The historic orchestral/choral masterpieces performed in church by professionals are well-known; these include such works as the Stabat Mater by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi and Verdi's Requiem. The Second Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965 revolutionized music in the Roman Catholic Church, leading to an increase in the number of amateur choirs that perform regularly for services; the Council also encouraged the congregational singing of hymns, and a vast repertoire of new hymns has been composed in the last 40 years.

There is not a great deal of native Italian Christmas music. The most popular Italian Christmas carol is "Tu scendi dalle stelle", the modern Italian words to which were written by Pope Pius IX in 1870. The melody is a major-key version of an older, minor-key Neapolitan carol "Quanno Nascette Ninno". Other than that, Italians largely sing translations of carols that come from the German and English tradition ("Silent Night", for example). There is no native Italian secular Christmas music, which accounts for the popularity of Italian-language versions of "Jingle Bells" and "White Christmas".

The Festival of Italian Song (also known as the Sanremo Music Festival) is an important venue for popular music in Italy. It has been held annually since 1951 and is currently staged at the Teatro Ariston in Sanremo. It runs for one week in February, and gives veteran and new performers a chance to present new songs. Winning the contest has often been a springboard to industry success. The festival is televised nationally for three hours a night, is hosted by the best-known Italian TV personalities, and has been a vehicle for such performers as Domenico Modugno, perhaps the best-known Italian pop singer of the last 50 years.

Television variety shows are the widest venue for popular music. They change often, but Buona Domenica, Domenica In, and I raccomandati are popular. The longest running musical broadcast in Italy is La Corrida, a three-hour weekly program of amateurs and would-be musicians. It started on the radio in 1968 and moved to TV in 1988. The studio audience bring cow-bells and sirens and are encouraged to show good-natured disapproval. The city with the highest number of rock concerts (of national and international artists) is Milan, with a number close to the other European music capitals, as Paris, London and Berlin.