Italian Music

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With more than four and half million Italian immigrants arriving to American between the years of 1876-1924, traditions, food, literature and an immense amount of Italian culture was slowly spread nationwide. With that, Italian music was also brought across seas. Music in New York City began developing rapidly during the nineteenth century as the number of immigrants and residents steadily increased. Italian music has become popular genre with many subdivisions. Italian music has also become an influential genre of music on other types of popular music.

The musical performance aspect of my paper was not an issue to complete. If you go to Little Italy, New York on any given weekend, especially around the holiday season or the San Gennaro Festival, musical performers are usually playing on the streets. There are many restaurants in Little Italy, Manhattan that have live entertainment; most of these musical performers will come to your table. When it came to comparing the musical traditions of Italy to the Italian-American performance that I observed, I had a little more trouble. Italian music is such a large topic to delve into–there are so many composers and different types of music that it made it difficult to narrow down my research for this paper. In future research among this community, I would suggest that the student is aware of what type of performance they are going to observe—I was unaware of whether the musician would be a Classical Italian performer or an Italian American performer. In my opinion, most of the performers in Little Italy, Manhattan seems to be Italian-American.

When Italian immigrants came to America, many were not welcomed in the communities of the Germans and Irish. The neighborhoods that the Itali...

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...from opera, Italian folk music, Italian-American, Italian techno, to instrumental classical. As with all music influenced by immigration, Italian music will continue to expand, evolve, and remain a prominent part of American culture.

References

Harr, James. Essays on Italian Poetry and Music in the Renassisance: 1350-1600. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

Jackson, Kenneth T. The Encyclopedia of New York City. 2nd ed. New York City: Yale University Press, 2010.

Rosselli, John. The Life of Verdi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

"Sicilian Culture: Tarantella Dance." Sicilian Culture. Cristaldi Communications, 23/03/2002. Web. 30 Nov 2011. .

"Similar Artists." Last.fm. Last.fm Ltd, 11/02/2009. Web. 30 Nov 2011. .

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