Giovanna Marini, voice of an Italian folk song, has died

Giovanna Marini, voice of an Italian folk song, has died

Giovanna Marini, Italian singer-songwriter, ethnomusical researcher and folklorist, has died at the age of 87. Nicknamed “Italian Joan Baez” both for his music and for his signature short, white hair and sharp, intense gaze. Her diverse activity has made her one of the most important figures in the study, exploration and performance of the Italian pop music tradition, but she is also the author of her own songs and cantatas.

Giovanna Marini was born in Rome into a family of musicians. In 1959 he completed his classical guitar studies at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome and perfected his studies and practice with the greatest classical guitarist of the time, the Spaniard Andre’s Segovia. At the same time, he devoted himself to studying and practicing ancient string instruments such as the lute.

At the beginning of the 1960s, Marini became personally acquainted with the most important intellectuals and scholars of the Italian popular tradition, among whom Pier Paolo Pasolini stood out. (whose encounter is narrated by Marini himself in a live recording, which remains one of the best descriptions of Pasolini’s character and way of working), Italo Calvino (again also author of lyrics for Cantacronache), Roberto Leydi, Gianni Bosio, Diego Carpitella, Alberto Mario Cirese, Cesare Bermani, Giulio Angioni and Alessandro Portelli.

But it is the discovery of social singing, or the one whose definition probably goes back to Giovanna Marini herself (or Alberto Mario Cirese with his unsung oral traditions is still beginning to define itself as a sung oral history, in the sense of a popular recording of historical events through the privileged instrument of the song of anonymous composition and oral dissemination active in Italy in the sixties and in a society that transformed from a purely rural to an urban-industrial society.