https://orcid.org/0009-0008-4882-3854
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ABSTRACT
The poesia in ottava rima (‘poetry in octave rhyme’) is a living tradition of improvised-sung poetry widespread in the rural areas of Central Italy. In this article, I describe and interpret the interaction that takes place between two poet-performers and between poet-performers and the audience, highlighting the importance of embodiment and gesture during the poetic duel and the active role of listeners. This paper aims to highlight the strong binding of speech and gesture and the bodily expressiveness of the onstage improvised sung poetic duel, analysing the contrasto as a ‘vocal-gestural performance’. The ultimate aim of this study is to examine the ways in which visual information in the form of gestures contributes to the way musical performance is experienced. Furthermore, we apply insights from ethnomusicology and gesture studies, together with digital video and audio recording and associated analysis software, to the study of contrasto performance.
Acknowledgements
I am immensely grateful to all the participants of this research for accepting me in their spaces and scenes and for their invaluable insights into the matters discussed herein. Additionally, I express my profound gratitude to the editors and the two anonymous reviewers for allowing me to revise multiple drafts of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability/deposition statement
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Notes
1 The Tuscan poets are also called poeti a braccio (‘by armlength’) or poeti bernescanti (‘bernesque’), as they harken back to the tradition created by Renaissance Florentine poet Francesco Berni's Rifacimento dell'Orlando innamorato, which in the 1500s gave Boiardo’s poem a Tuscan and playful guise.
2 The octave poetry has been persisted, basically unchanged for seven centuries, from the Middle Ages to the present day: the ottava popolare (folk octave) preserves, intact, the metric structure of the cantari of the itinerant cantambanchi (charlatans) of the fourteenth century and the epic chivalric of the sixteenth century, such as the Orlando Furioso (1532) by Ludovico Ariosto and the Gerusalemme Liberata (1581) by Torquato Tasso (Agamennone Citation2002, Citation2017; Kezich Citation1986, Citation1996, Citation2013).
3 The term ‘octave’ here does not refer to the ‘octave’ in musical terms (the interval between one musical pitch and another with double its frequency) but only to the literary form of eight-line stanza.
4 In the Italian oral tradition, poets in octave rhyme were normally men. However, things have recently started to change, and some women have begun improvising in public performances. Today, female poets who participate in gatherings of poets in ottava rima, such as the one in Ribolla and Pomonte, are increasing year by year. In the past, however, female poets were rare, although their presence has been documented since the eighteenth century. According to Emilio Meliani, this was owing to the environments where ottava rima was practiced (the tavern, a place frequented only by men) and the journeys they would have to make (alone or in the company of other men) to travel to distant places where gatherings were held. The activity of the extemporary poet was thus ill-suited to the female figure in the society of the past (interview conducted in Ribolla on 10 April 2016).
5 From a methodological viewpoint, I attempted to integrate written sources taken from the conspicuous existing literature on ottava rima poetry in central Italy with first-hand oral sources: formal interviews and informal conversations with some of the most representative poets of this cultural tradition, and audiovisual recordings of poetic improvisations that I personally made during the gatherings of poets on the occasion of the Ribolla’s extemporaneous poetry meetings in 2011 and 2016. The films made in this time span also include the improvisations made during the celebration of the festival of cantamaggio or maggio (‘May’) by a team of Maremma maggerini (Squadra dei Torelli di Maremma) that I had the opportunity to film in Braccagni (Grosseto) in 2015; an annual meeting of poets in ottava rima in memory of the poet Lio Banchi which was held in Podere Pianizzoli in a farmhouse in Ghirlanda, a hamlet of Massa Marittima (Grosseto) in 2015; the 19th International Meeting of Poetic Improvisation in Pomonte (Scansano, Grosseto) in 2016; the gathering of extemporary poets that was held on the occasion of the Festa di Arci Caccia at the ‘Mario Grandi’ Social Center in Valpiana di Massa Marittima (Grosseto) in 2016.
6 All video recordings analysed in this article were made by the author, and all still images are excerpted from both the research footage and the author’s documentary Cantar l’Ottava (Citation2016) available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VyI-yY6QF4.
7 The poet-singers who participated in my fieldwork are as follows: Pietro and Donato De Acutis from Bacugno (Rieti), Enrico Rustici from Braccagni (Grosseto), Giampiero Giamogante from Sacco (Rieti), Irene Marconi from Massa Marittima (Grosseto), Emilio Meliani from Santa Maria a Monte (Pisa), Marco Betti from Figline Valdarno (Florence), Niccolino Grassi from Massa Marittima (Grosseto), Benito Mastacchini from Orbetello (Grosseto) but resident in Suvereto (Livorno) and Marco Calabrese from Bacugno (Rieti).
8 McNeill proposes language is inseparable from imagery: ‘Imagery is embodied in the gestures that universally and automatically occur with speech’ (Citation2005: 15).
9 The core concept of embodied music cognition is the idea that the body is at the centre of musical meaning-making (Godøy and Leman Citation2010).
10 Interview conducted in Ribolla on 10 April 2016.
11 Interview conducted in Ribolla on 10 April 2016.
12 In the 1960s and 1970s, the process of ‘depeasantisation’ that occurred in Italy during and after the economic boom led to profound economic and social transformations. The waning of the collective gathering places and occasions of rural life, such as taverns, vigils, village fairs, and country weddings—as well as the spread of television—has led to the progressive decay of traditional vocal practices.
13 Among the most renowned meetings of poets in octave rhyme, we can mention those held at Ribolla (Grosseto), Pomonte (Grosseto), Terranuova Bracciolini (Arezzo), Borbona (Rieti), and Bacugno (Rieti).
14 The casa del popolo was a social centre created at the end of the nineteenth century by the socialist party, widespread in almost all the Tuscan urban settlements. Culturally, the casa del popolo represented the visibility of the socialist movement, its stability, unity, and popular solidarity, as well as the sense of deep local roots and the preservation of memory. It also represented the secular counterpart of the Catholic oratory conducted in the churches.
15 Similar to the Tuscan contrasto, other forms of improvised sung poetry widespread in the Mediterranean, such as the chjam’è rispondi in Corsica (Ragni Citation2018) and the spirtu pront in Malta (Ciantar Citation2000), have also undergone a progressive spectacularisation and increasing staginess of the dialogic singing.
16 Interview conducted in Ribolla on 10 April 2016.
17 Interview conducted in Ribolla on 10 April 2016 and reported in the documentary Cantar l’Ottava.
18 This is a private place that can be accessed by only poets and a few fans of this traditional practice for the occasion.
19 ‘Il poeta cantando cerca di far sì che chi l’ascolta vibri con lui’ (interview conducted in Ribolla on 10 April 2016, reported in the documentary Cantar l’Ottava).
20 Domenico Gamberi, the organiser of the meeting ‘Incontri di poesia estemporanea’, refers to the case of a poet in octave rhyme who broke this rule and who was no longer invited to participate in the gathering of poets (personal informal communication, Ribolla 2011).
21 Gerhard Kubik (Citation1972) adopted the frame-by-frame technique while studying the xylophone music of Mozambique and Malawi. The purpose of filming was to see the gestures of percussionists and achieve a detailed analysis of the relationship between sound and movement.
22 McNeill (Citation2005) distinguished between four types of gestures: iconic, metaphoric, deictic, and beat.
23 Poet Marco Betti disagreed with this interpretation of time dilation to gain time in poetic invention. According to the poet, this is only an aesthetic motivation aimed at embellishing the melodic line with some vocal melisma (interview conducted in Ribolla on 10 April 2016).
24 Interview conducted in Ribolla on 10 April 2016.
25 My heart aches and closes / my feeling in front of your arsenal / you who are a lover of war / you bring the war in the international boundaries. But my intuition, you see, is not wrong / when I say he is a slave of the capital / The war makes sad the people / and is a bonanza for the capitalists.
26 The Vendée Wars were a series of civil conflicts that broke out at the time of the French Revolution, which saw the people of the Vendée, very Catholic and strongly loyal to the king, rise up against the revolutionary government, to re-establish the absolute monarchy of the Bourbons and oppose the restrictive measures imposed on Catholic worship.
27 History has seen the outcomes / Sometimes, war is the panacea / France, which has experienced sad days / when it had the enemy at home / Reactionaries with the priests, those mixed ones / They have sparked the war of Vendee. / If they had won by their action / we would still have the Pope as the ruler.
28 But the result of that equation / Other ones won, but the wind did not change / Look at Italy! its flag in action / but the Pope still reigns inside Parliament. / This, for us, it is a constriction / I instead will seek peace / Peace in Italy, priests far away! / Let they break the balls inside the Vatican!
29 You put the branch in the hand of an atheist / but that Italy was once insane / also (the sacrifice of) the believer was not in vain / who in a moment came out of the den. / He also had that gun in his hand / I speak of the partisan war / even if it is passed, even if it is antiquated / I still think it was a right war.
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Leonardo D’Amico
Leonardo D’Amico is a postdoctoral researcher at the University College Cork (Ireland). His research fields are Afro-Colombian music, Sub-Saharan Africa music, music of ethnic minorities in China and audiovisual ethnomusicology. He holds a PhD degree with honours in Musicology (2012) from the University of Valladolid. He taught Ethnomusicology at the University of Siena, University of Siena in Arezzo, University of Ferrara, Conservatory of Brescia, Conservatory of Mantua (Italy), and Yunnan University in Kunming (China). He held the position of chair of the Italian Committee of ICTM (2002–2012) and was co-founder of the ICTM Study Group on Audiovisual Ethnomusicology. He has published the following books: Folk Music Atlas: Africa (1998), Cumbia. La musica afrocolombiana (2002), Filmare la musica (2012), Griot. Il maestro della parola (2014), Musica dell’Africa Nera (2004) with A. Kaye, and Audiovisual Ethnomusicology. Filming Musical Cultures (2020). He is the founder and director of the Ethnomusicological Film Festival ‘Immagini & Suoni del Mondo’ in Florence, Italy.