AFROVOCALITY

AFROVOCALITY

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“Those are memories that must be sung”: introducing the sonic legacy of Italian colonialism

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Gianpaolo Chiriacò and Emilio Tamburini, 2022, “Those are memories that must be sung”: introducing the sonic legacy of Italian colonialism, in FROM THE EUROPEAN SOUTH 11 (2022) 4–9.
SANCTUARY OF SLAVERY Relocating Race Through Sound in an Alpine Town

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Sanctuary of Slavery is a performance that took place in Schlanders, in the heart of the South Tyrolean Vinschgau Valley,1 in September 2018. It showcased the work of musicians and artists of African origin as well as asylum seekers and refugees residing in the region. Besides bringing to central areas of the alpine town individuals who had been marginalised in refugee houses, the performance successfully created, albeit temporarily, what human geographer Heather Merrill describes as ‘Black spaces’. Musical sounds and singing voices – resonating in the library, the Musikpavillon, and the main streets of Schlanders – relocated the discussion about race to its historical context. Through an ethnographic account and a focus on the role of sound in reshaping meaning, the article explores how the social divide based on race and the institutional separation based on the category of ‘linguistic groups’ interact with work exploitation and the Italian migration policies.

Gianpaolo Chiriacò 2024, “SANCTUARY OF SLAVERY Relocating Race Through Sound in an Alpine Town”, in Lingue Linguaggi 64, pp. 45-63-ISSN 2239-0367, e-ISSN 2239-0359 DOI 10.1285/i22390359v64p45.
La multivocalità di Gabriella Ghermandi: memorie postcoloniali, world music ed ethiojazz

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This article discusses the work of Gabriella Ghermandi as a singer by adopting the concept of multivocality. First, the analysis focuses on the theme of the memories of Italian colonial pasts, as it is central both in the novel that Ghermandi wrote and published in 2007 and in the first release of Atse Tewdros Project, the musical band that she founded and leads. The idea of tizita, as it is conceived in the Amharic language and in the Ethiopian culture in order to express a complex approach to memory has been incorporated in the analysis. Later, the investigation delves into Ghermandi’s musical choices and experiences while presenting the categories of world music and ethio-jazz. Finally, the second release of Atse Tewodros Project will be considered highlighting the ideas of mobility and multivocality. The standpoint presented draws from both popular music studies and ethnographic observations. The analyses of musical releases and musical elements has been supported by multiple conversations and interviews with Ghermandi and her band members, and by the observation of several concerts and performances.

Gianpaolo Chiriacò, 2025, La multivocalità di Gabriella Ghermandi: memorie postcoloniali, world music ed ethiojazz, in Archiv für Textmusikforschung, n.9,1 I 2025.
Entangled Histories and Voices: An Introduction

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The concept of ‘entangled history,’ coined by Shalini Randeria and Sebastian Conrad in the 1990s, has become more and more important in historical and cultural studies over the last two decades. ‘Entanglement’ is one of the concepts which try to overcome the partition of historical and cultural research along national lines and to take into account phenomena that occur across state borders and can only be analyzed from a transnational perspective. In the words of Conrad and Randeria (2002, 17): ‘history’ is a “complex network of shared histories,” which can only be investigated by transnational and relational perspectives (cf. Conrad/Randeria 2002, 14). As the authors stress, these new perspectives of the interconnectedness of the world and of processes of interaction and transfer do not tell us anything about the modalities of those interactions. Furthermore, they should not hide the fact that inequalities, relations of power and violence have always been and still are part of those processes.

Gianpaolo CHIRIACÒ, Gerhild FUCHS, Birgit MERTZ-BAUMGARTNER, 2022, Entangled Histories and Voices: An Introduction, in Archiv für Textmusikforschung, 07,2 I.
Voci nere. Storia e antropologia del canto afroamericano (book)

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Qual è il rapporto fra secoli di schiavitù e il falsetto di James Brown? In quale misura l’esperienza delle comunità nere americane si riflette nel timbro di Nina Simone o nei gesti vocali di Bobby McFerrin? Com’è possibile comprendere ciò che avviene oggi negli Stati Uniti, con il Black Lives Matter e l’elezione di Donald Trump, ascoltando le melodie di vocalist e attivisti? Voci nere risponde a queste domande sviluppando un’analisi critica dei modi in cui il canto afroamericano rappresenta allo stesso tempo uno stereotipo razziale e un potentissimo elemento culturale. Lo studio di registrazioni e incisioni sconosciute, unito al lavoro etnografico nel South Side di Chicago e all’uso di diversi media, genera un viaggio attraverso la storia americana che si muove lungo tracciati di memorie culturali e soniche, cercando di individuare i significati riposti nel canto di un solista o in quello di un coro. Storia e antropologia, etnomusicologia e cultural studies si fondono nel tentativo di approcciare le componenti corporee, letterarie, materiali, politiche e spirituali che connotano il potere della vocalità black.

Gianpaolo Chiriacò, 2018, Voci nere storia e antropologia del canto afroamericano, Mimesis.
“Chillu soldate, come chiagneva”La questione coloniale negli archivi sonori italiani

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In 1972 ethnomusicologists Diego Carpitella and Rudi Assuntino recorded Teresa Zarano in the
town of Marcianise, near Caserta. The 49 year-old woman sang some verses of a song that tells the
story of a young soldier who comes back from Africa only to discover that his mother is severely
ill. The verses – as Zarano already knew – use the same melody of “Faccetta nera”, a song that was
composed during the preparation of the Ethiopian invasion and that later became a hymn of the
regime and a symbol of fascist nostalgia.
The main goal of this article is to use Zarano’s song and other similar examples to investigate how
the memory of the Italian colonial project remained within musical traditions in Italian regions, as
they were analyzed and documented by Italian ethnomusicologists.
Using the theoretical framework of the ‘entangled histories’, I will show how songs composed
during the first and second Italo-Ethiopian wars have been acquired and reshaped, by soldiers as well
as by their parents and communities, during and after the colonial experience.
Simultaneously, the analysis will deal with the fluid passages from the media-dominated space
of popular music and the realm of oral tradition. Such passages are never linear and have often been
dismissed by researchers. To investigate these processes constitutes a fundamental task that allows
a different understanding of the historical entanglements as well as of the significant relics that the
colonial experience left through and within musical practices.

Gianpaolo Chiriacò, 2022, “Chillu soldate, come chiagneva”. La questione coloniale negli archivi sonori italiani, in Archiv für Textmusikforschung, n. 07,2 I 2022.
Abdi’s Shop and the Duka Azmari House. Musical Tracesof the Italian Colonial Project in Addis Ababa and in Italy

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During the final years of the Italian occupation in the Horn of Africa, Italian music labels produced and
commercialized records of traditional music from various Ethiopian regions. Some of the records
remained in Ethiopia. In other cases, the sonic material spread in different directions, in the form of 78
rpm discs, following the return of Italians to their homeland, as well as the routes of the Ethiopian
diaspora around the world. Of some of these discs, we ignore whether there are surviving copies.
This contribution addresses the following questions: is there a sonic memory of these recordings in
Addis Ababa and in Ethiopia? And how should we listen to such sonic memories of a colonial project
when we come across them in European archives? Through historical research and fieldwork, I will track
down the presence of the records both in Ethiopia and Italy. Then I will consider their history while
analyzing the role of the commodification of music as part of the attempt to build a fascist empire. In the last part of the contribution, I will discuss the Italian records of Ethiopian music as part of the field of ethnomusicology, paying particular attention to the ongoing debate around the history of the discipline
and issues of decolonization.

Gianpaolo Chiriacò, 2022, Abdi’s Shop and the Duka Azmari House. Musical Tracesof the Italian Colonial Project in Addis Ababa and in Italy, in From the European South, 11 (2022), 48–63.
“Today you have day off”: un’artista etiope-italiana e il mondo dell’arte postcoloniale

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Gabriella Ghermandi is an Ethiopian-born storyteller and vocalist based in Bologna (Italy), who writes in Italian, sings in Amharic, and articulates her works around the (removed) memory of the experience of Italian soldiers in Ethiopia. Gabriella and I visited the 2015 Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art. The exhibition, held every two years, is particularly interesting when seen through the lenses of Ghermandi’s work, for it started more than 120 years ago as a celebration of (Western) nation-states, and it still carries that heritage. However, for the 2015 edition, Okwui Enwezor, a Nigerian art critic and curator, was selected as the main curator of the exhibition, making him the first African person to be appointed to this position. His promise to put together a “postcolonial Biennale” inspired our visit and, as a result, it produced this contribution in the form of a conversation. Our preliminary hypothesis was that Enwezor’s original ideas had to come terms with national interests and the cultural politics that lie behind such big events. Therefore, we decided to use the 2015 Venice Biennale as a space to discuss several issues: Ethiopian history and its connection with Italy; functions and values of traditional art and music; the business of world music; Ethiopian diaspora and Italian cultural identities; stereotypical representations of Africa; and the role and the image of women in contemporary Africa. What emerges is a reflection on the reasons, limits and motivations of singing and music-making, where the works of art symbolically represent the backdrop of an investigation into the practices and the life of a diasporic performer.

Gianpaolo Chiriacò con Gabriella Ghermandi 2018, “Today you have day off”: un’artista etiope-italiana e il mondo dell’arte postcoloniale”, in From the European South, n. 3/2018, pp. 99-114.
Sound Recordings and Dignity Takings: Reflections on the Racialization of Migrants in Contemporary Italy

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In this Article, I will rely on my encounter with Badara Seck, a wellknown vocalist from Senegal who has been active in Italy for about two decades. My interview with this expert in cross cultural collaboration provided interesting insights into the ways in which musicology and discourses around music can involve both dignity takings and dignity restoration. I will propose strategies to address dignity takings and dignity restoration in the practice of ethnographic fieldwork. In addition, I will extend the concepts of dignity takings and dignity restoration to the case study of sound archives.

Gianpaolo Chiriacò (2018), “Sound Recordings and Dignity Takings: Reflections on the Racialization of Migrants in Contemporary Italy”, in Contemporary Italy, 92 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 991 (2018). Available at: https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cklawreview/vol92/iss3/14
When the Stars begins to fall. Exoticism, Blues Aesthetic and Representations of Singing in the American South

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Between 1800 and 1863 – the years of the Emancipation Proclamation – many travellers from Europe or the North of the United States visited the Southern States and provided particular descriptions of the socio-geographic of that land. Many of their stories included descriptions of musical practices – and in particular singing performances – of Afro American slaves. The trips continued long after the end of the civil war, although in different forms. A philanthropic endeavour seemed to be the main driver for such explorers, whose reports often included pictures that visually supported the descriptions of the musical performances observed.The aim of this contribute is to analyze the relationship between literary descriptions and visual images that describe African-American vocal performances during slavery. What emerges is a conflation of exotic sentiments towards musical practices, memories of sonic landscapes, and a somewhat nostalgic imagination. Then, the focus will be on the ex-slave narratives and how they have constructed a memory and an imagination later defined as blues aesthetic. In conclusion, extracts from the exhibition When the Stars Begin to Fall (Studium Museum, Harlem, 2014) will be discussed in order to prove that the dialectic between exoticism and blues aesthetic is still active in the representations of the South of Uniterd States that move between sonic memories and imagination.
Gianpaolo Chiriacò 2016, “When the Stars begins to fall. Exoticism, Blues Aesthetic and Representations of Singing in the American South”, in Idomeneo (2016), n. 21, pp. 115-126 – ISSN 2038-0313 – DOI 10.1285/i20380313v21p115.