Languages from the Cradle - lullabies of Europe

Italian Lullabies
Italy has preserved a folk-song pattern that is at once extraordinarily old and extremely varied. Change seems to come about, only when invasion alters the ethnic character of a region, or a social and psychological revolution completely upsets the structure of the old society.
To understand the variety of the Italian folk songs and the lullabies included in the folk tradition, we have to consider that Italy remained split into a great number of provinces and regions, once city-states, each of which developed its own dialect and its own songs.
If we listen to the lullabies of music sources collected by Alan Lomax and available at the Biblioteca Nazionale in Roma, or at the Sound Archive of The British Library in London, we can get a good picture of the feelings of a mother in the peasant life of the old days.
Especially in the South of Italy, the melodies and the words reflect the women’s pain and frustrations of a patriarchal society with Euro-Asiatic influences. The lullabies of Southern Italy are beautiful, but many are real moans of despair. In contrast, the lullabies from North Italy are generally joyful or apprehensively tender, except for some from the Venetian lagoon.
In 1950, a detailed ethnomusicological research by Alan Lomax and Diego Arpitella reports the following statement: The brilliant Italian cities rapidly developed a high culture the roots of which were in the civilization of the classical past rather than in local folk culture; and the peasants in the hills and villages were left to their old ways. This split between city and country, which still persists, also gave rise to an urban folk song, but this represents only that part of Italian folk music which has been most influenced by Italy’s cosmopolitan fine-art music.
In fact, lullabies of the peasant society and patriarchal context should not be mixed up with those of “learned” origin the lyrics of which have been written by writers, almost all men, while the oral tradition was managed almost entirely by women of different ages, including old women and young teenagers. In fact, in Italy the lullabies were sung by all the women of a house (grandmothers, aunts, sisters…). “Very often”, as Roberto Leydi, one of the most important experts in folk music, wrote in 1950: It has been noticed an attitude of embarrassment and resistance by the Italian women to whom it has been asked to sing a lullaby. A process of defence is set to protect something that is very intimate, very personal, strongly connected with a specific and secret inner heritage that should not been disclosed..
It goes without saying that Italian modern lifestyle and media world brought different contents in contemporary lullabies, both in terms of music and lyrics.
We can find quite many CDs and audio files on internet of contemporary lullabies, but very rarely we find magnetic appeal or the sort of charm that those old songs, passed through mother and daughter, distilled by the experience and life through the centuries, still have.
Nevertheless, a lullaby in its essence can easily be considered as a composition beyond time and space, belonging to a collective poetic heritage.
These poetic heritages is self-generated through mothers and fathers singing their own variations and giving the opportunity for even more future variations, and yet maintain a universal structure and tension.

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Disclaimer: The project Languages from the cradle has been funded with support from the European Commission. This document reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.