Canti Paralleli: Neapolitan and Spanish Folk Songs

Parallel songs is more than a mere metaphor.
“Vite parallele” is the title of a Plutarco’s famous work, composed by 23 couples of biographies, each of them narrating the life of a Greek man and of a Roman one known by him: an open comparison between the two dominant cultures of his time.
Also our lives are parallel, they have followed distant artistic runs, but all of a sudden they have betted on a meeting.
Parallel the cultures we intend to compare by using the Neapolitan song as “adhesive” of various European traditions.
The Neapolitan song is universally recognized as one of the most significant experiences of the Italian vocal chamber music, for centuries.
During the whole nineteenth and twentieth century we assist at its extraordinary international spread thanks above all to the new economic logics, that also saw the publishers themselves protagonists of the bourgeois musical world.
The irrepressible need, on our behalf, to explore the repertoire of the so-called “classical” tradition, favours the approach with repertoires apparently distant but secretly similar.
It becomes natural to start our project just from Spanish music, because of a mutual cultural affinity, whose reasons, in the case of the Neapolitan tradition, stay in its historical events.
The more evident common denominator of such an approach is the symmetrical search and use of the popular music repertoire.
Many researchers have been worried about establishing differences between the popular song, anonymous creation, result of several individual realizations continuously increasing, and the folksy song, work, on the contrary, of a certain individual who becomes the interpreter of collective feelings.
Maybe in this context such a definite distinction may appear pernicious since every cultural demonstration crosses roads that escape to the rigidity of definitions.
But how to introduce the Neapolitan song so much used and at times abused?
A fecond solution comes from the meeting with a cultured and passionate musician Antonello Paliotti, who has rewritten pieces of the great repertoire, eager to find a possible compromise between the popular language and the writing of the contemporary music.
Here is a synthesis of Paliotti himself.
The Neapolitan song, in the period going from the end of the ninenteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, is essentially a product destined to a raising market, and above all to a Piedigrotta that has definitively lost its mytical-religious function. In this sense it is possible to recognize – above all in the Di Giacomo’s production – one of the last attempts to connect such product with the European “liederistica” maintaining at the same time strong bonds with a popular tradition still rather living at that time.
Today it is possible to approach that production both in an analytical way, departing from written documents and operating an elaboration, or a rewriting, that concerns the harmonic and rhythmic tissue, both departing from the oral tradition and from recording documents, working on the interpretation of the piece or better on the history of its interpretations.
We have chosen, first of all, to underline the “cultured” traces found in the original scores, often by referring to a protoimpressionistic writing, without neglecting the history, the overlappings, the conventions arrived through an interpretative tradition that we cannot ignore.
The history of the Neapolitan song, represented in this program by authentic masterpieces, is studded with an impressive corollary of anecdotes.
You can penetrate the single biographies of musicians such as Eduardo Di Capua or Mario Costa, who contributed, through a personal cosmopolitanism, to raise the quality of the Neapolitan song that had acquired ample space in the bourgeois salons, up to the famous Tosti, (who was from Abbruzzo but studied in S.Pietro a Majella) one of the most shining example of musician, organizer, teacher of the children of the English royal family (Queen Victoria gave him the prestigious title of “Sir”) with a European personality.
Equally, showed themselves unquiet poets of very high stature such as Giovanni Capurro (author of the “Carduccianelle”, composition in which he attempts a courageous experimentation of the barbaric metrics applied to the Neapolitan dialect, operation very appreciated by Carducci himself) or Salvatore Di Giacomo who, according to Croce, dignified, or better “invented” the literary Neapolitan dialect. An affirmation which caused an open polemic with the other great poet Ferdinando Russo, who will accuse Croce and Di Giacomo of removing the Neapolitan dialect from its popular roots.
Proof of the vivacity of a people that has always made of music and above all of vocality and theatre its expression.
After all Naples, according to a legend, has been founded by a siren: Partenope, who sings and…enchants!
And it is out of question that the Neapolitan culture has absorbed, during the centuries, the most varied solicitations from the musical languages, interacting as a sponge that absorbs but at the same time releases absolutely peculiar expressive codes, both from an harmonic point of view and from a melodic one.
For this reason it is plausible to talk about a “Neapolitan style”, as Charles Burney does in its Viaggio in Italia and it is this after all, the leading idea of the Disordinata storia della canzone napoletana by Roberto De Simone.
A brief excursus on the Spanish tradition is parallelly proposed.
Only a few know that the poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca (Granada 1898-1936) was also a fine musician. He played with a sure mastery both the guitar and the piano and he had a certain familiarity with the harmony.
Despite the fact that his parents had addressed him to literature, that constituted his principal world, he never left out music, addressing his search towards the popular songs of his country.
Like a careful ethnomusicologist, Lorca used to go in the country to draw liberally on a precious material, he knew how to reproduce personally accompanying himself.
They are harmonizations that he transcribed as simple traces in order to give a certain space to the imponderability of improvisation.
For the fans we can remember an historical recording of Federico Garcia Lorca going back to 1931, for the record company “La Voz de su Amo”. Lorca accompanies on the piano the famous singer and dancer Encarnacion Lopez Julvez, called the “Argentinita” who in her turn articulates the rhythm with the castagnets. A recording that had at that time an extraordinary success: the pieces then published such as “Anda jaleo” or “Los quatros Muleros” represented the allusive incitement to the struggle against the militias of the general Franco.
Also Manuel De Falla (Cadice-Cordoba 1876 Argentina 1946) shares with Lorca, of whom he was intimate friend, the passion for the folkloristic search. The result of his ethnomusicological researches is “Siete canciones populares espanolas”. But Falla, extremely refined composer, does not limit himself to a trace as accompaniment, because he elaborates a very personal harmonic and instrumental vision. A run that starts from “El pano moruno”, that is absolutely faithful to the popular dictation while respecting the original melody. Asturiana has an harmonic elaboration that completely transfigures the song; the “Seguidilla Murciana” and the “Nana” (original Andalusian song) perfectly folkloristic, the “Jota” and “Polo” original by Falla.
Giovanni Auletta © 2025