Plastino Goffredo - Neapolitan postcards : the canzone napoletana as transnational subject

Neapolitan Postcards

Europea: Ethnomusicologies and Modernities

Series Editors: Philip V. Bohlman and Martin Stokes

The new millennium challenges ethnomusicologists, dedicated to studying the music of the world, to examine anew the Western musics they have treated as traditional, and to forge new approaches to world musics that are often overlooked because of their deceptive familiarity. As the modern discipline of ethnomusicology expanded during the second half of the twentieth century, influenced significantly by ethnographic methods in the social sciences, ethnomusicologys field increasingly shifted to the exoticized Other. The comparative methodologies previously generated by Europeanist scholars to study and privilege Western musics were deliberately discarded. Europe as a cultural area was banished to historical musicology, and European vernacular musics became the spoils left to folk-music and, later, popular-music studies.

Europea challenges ethnomusicology to return to Europe and to encounter its disciplinary past afresh, and the present is a timely moment to do so. European unity nervously but insistently asserts itself through the political and cultural agendas of the European Union, causing Europeans to reflect on a bitterly and violently fragmented past and its ongoing repercussions in the present, and to confront new challenges and opportunities for integration. There is also an intellectual moment to be seized as Europeans reformulate the history of the present, an opportunity to move beyond the fragmentation and atomism the later twentieth century has bequeathed and to enter into broader social, cultural, and political relationships.

Europea is not simply a reflection of and on the current state of research. Rather, the volumes in this series move in new directions and experiment with diverse approaches. The series establishes a forum that can engage scholars, musicians, and other interlocutors in debates and discussions crucial to understanding the present historical juncture. This dialogue, grounded in ethnomusicologys interdisciplinarity, will be animated by reflexive attention to the specific social configurations of knowledge of and scholarship on the musics of Europe. Such knowledge and its circulation as ethnomusicological scholarship are by no means dependent on professional academics, but rather are conditioned, as elsewhere, by complex interactions between universities, museums, amateur organizations, state agencies, and markets. Both the broader view to which ethnomusicology aspires and the critical edge necessary to understanding the present moment are served by broadening the base on which academic discussion proceeds.

Europe will emerge from the volumes as a space for critical dialogue, embracing competing and often antagonistic voices from across the continent, across the Atlantic, across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and across a world altered ineluctably by European colonialism and globalization. The diverse subjects and interdisciplinary approaches in individual volumes capture something ofand, in a small way, become part ofthe jangling polyphony through which the New Europe has explosively taken musical shape in public discourse, in expressive culture, and, increasingly, in political form. Europea: Ethnomusicologies and Modernities aims to provide a critical framework necessary to capture something of the turbulent dynamics of music performance, engaging the forces that inform and deform, contest and mediate the senses of identity, selfhood, belonging, and progress that shape European musical experience in Europe and across the world.

1. Celtic Modern: Music at the Global Fringe , edited by Martin Stokes and Philip V. Bohlman, 2003.
2. Albanian Urban Lyric Song in the 1930s , by Eno Koo, 2004.
3. The Mediterranean in Music: Critical Perspectives, Common Concerns, Cultural Differences , edited by David Cooper and Kevin Dawe, 2005.
4. On a Rock in the Middle of the Ocean: Songs and Singers in Tory Island , Ireland , by Lillis Laoire, 2005.
5. Transported by Song: Corsican Voices from Oral Tradition to World Stage , by Caroline Bithell, 2007.
6. Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman Ecumene: Music, Image, and Regional Political Discourse , edited by Donna A. Buchanan, 2007.
7. Music and Musicians in Crete: Performance and Ethnography in a Mediterranean Island Society , by Kevin Dawe, 2007.
8. The New (Ethno)musicologies , edited by Henry Stobart, 2008.
9. Balkan Refrain: Form and Tradition in European Folk Song , by Dimitrije O. Golemovi, 2010.
10. Music and Displacement: Diasporas, Mobilities, and Dislocations in Europe and Beyond , edited by Erik Levi and Florian Scheding, 2010.
11. Balkan Epic: Song, History, Modernity , edited by Philip V. Bohlman and Nada Petkovi, 2012.
12. What Makes Music European: Looking beyond Sound , by Marcello Sorce Keller, 2012.
13. The Past Is Always Present: The Revival of the Byzantine Musical Tradition at Mount Athos , Tore Tvarn Lind, 2012.
14. Becoming an Ethnomusicologist: A Miscellany of Influences , by Bruno Nettl, 2013.
15. Empire of Song: Europe and Nation in the Eurovision Song Contest , by Dafni Tragaki, 2013.
16. Revival and Reconciliation: Sacred Music in the Making of European Modernity , by Philip V. Bohlman, 2013.
17. Smi Musical Performance and the Politics of Indigeneity in Northern Europe , by Thomas R. Hilder, 2014.
18. This Thing Called Music: Essays in Honor of Bruno Nettl , edited by Victoria Lindsay Levine and Philip V. Bohlman, 2015.
19. Musical Exodus: Al-Andalus and its Jewish Diasporas, edited by Ruth Davis, 2015.

Neapolitan Postcards

The Canzone Napoletana as Transnational Subject

Edited by Goffredo Plastino and Joseph Sciorra

Rowman & Littlefield

Lanham Boulder New York London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield

A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

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Copyright 2016 by Goffredo Plastino and Joseph Sciorra

All rights reserved . No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Plastino, Goffredo, editor. | Sciorra, Joseph, editor.

Title: Neapolitan postcards : the canzone napoletana as transnational subject / edited by Goffredo Plastino and Joseph Sciorra.

Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, [2016] | ?2016 | Series: Europea : ethnomusicologies and modernities | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016002713 | ISBN 9780810881594 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810881600 (electronic)

Subjects: LCSH: Songs, NeapolitanHistory and criticism. | Songs, NeapolitanUnited StatesHistory and criticism. | Songs, NeapolitanGreeceHistory and criticism. | Songs, NeapolitanArgentinaHistory and criticism. | Music and transnationalism. | Dissemination of music. | Italian AmericansNew York (State) New YorkMusicHistory and criticism.

Classification: LCC ML2533.8.N2 N43 2016 | DDC 782.421640945/73dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016002713

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.