The Musical genre was not born on Broadway in the nineteenth century but in Naples in the sixteenth century

Apr 23, 2022 458

What a twist. The Musical genre was not born on Broadway in the nineteenth century but in Naples in the sixteenth century. A beautiful book has just been published in Italy by the publisher Argo and entitled "Il chiaro e lo scuro". The volume is edited by the well-known ethnomusicologist Gianfranco Salvatore, a great expert of Afro-European musical traditions and professor at the University of Salento.

At the origin of everything there are the African slaves who crowded Naples and mixed their language, their music and their art with that of their masters. And it is from the colored crowd that lives in the shadow of Vesuvius that new forms of expression come to life.

Such as the "moresca song" mostly considered an autochthonous musical genre and until now confused with other types of popular songs such as the villanelle. The presence of incomprehensible terms in these songs recited and danced has been mostly interpreted as a forgotten jargon.

Instead, these mysterious words and sounds belong to Kanuri, an African language widespread in Nigeria, Sudan and Cameroon. By shedding light on the mystery of the "moresche", this book brings to light a multicultural and multilingual reality where a relationship of sympathy, even empathy, is established between blacks and whites that has no comparison in Europe.

And which produces fusion artistic forms, in which blacks are protagonists, in advance of modern musical theater. What emerges from these pages, in short, is a melting-pot in Neapolitan sauce, where African cultures peacefully integrate with the local one. And they produce a half-black art.

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