Carpe Diem #1509 Back to were we started ... Italy

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

We started our journey around the world on a quest for folkmusic in Italy and to make the circle complete (or closed) like a renga we will end our journey in Italy.

Italian folk music has a deep and complex history. Because national unification came late to the Italian peninsula, the traditional music of its many hundreds of cultures exhibit no homogeneous national character. Rather, each region and community possesses a unique musical tradition that reflects the history, language, and ethnic composition of that particular locale. These traditions reflect Italy's geographic position in southern Europe and in the centre of the Mediterranean; Celtic, Roma, and Slavic influences, as well as rough geography and the historic dominance of small city states, have all combined to allow diverse musical styles to coexist in close proximity.

Italian folk styles are very diverse, and include monophonic, polyphonic, and responsorial song, choral, instrumental and vocal music, and other styles. Choral singing and polyphonic song forms are primarily found in northern Italy, while south of Naples, solo singing is more common, and groups usually use unison singing in two or three parts carried by a single performer. Northern ballad-singing is syllabic, with a strict tempo and intelligible lyrics, while southern styles use a rubato tempo, and a strained, tense vocal style. Folk musicians use the dialect of their own regional tradition; this rejection of the standard Italian language in folk song is nearly universal. There is little perception of a common Italian folk tradition, and the country's folk music never became a national symbol.

Carnival of Venice

Italian folk songs include ballads, lyrical songs, lullabies and children's songs, seasonal songs based around holidays such as Christmas, life-cycle songs that celebrate weddings, baptisms and other important events, dance songs, cattle calls and occupational songs, tied to professions such as fishermen, shepherds and soldiers. Ballads (canti epico-lirici) and lyric songs (canti lirico-monostrofici) are two important categories. Ballads are most common in northern Italy, while lyric songs prevail further south. Ballads are closely tied to the English form, with some British ballads existing in exact correspondence with an Italian song. Other Italian ballads are more closely based on French models. Lyric songs are a diverse category that consist of lullabies, serenades and work songs, and are frequently improvised though based on a traditional repertoire.

Other Italian folk song traditions are less common than ballads and lyric songs. Strophic, religious laude, sometimes in Latin, are still occasionally performed, and epic songs are also known, especially those of the maggio celebration. Professional female singers perform dirges similar in style to those elsewhere in Europe. Yodeling exists in northern Italy, though it is most commonly associated with the folk musics of other Alpine nations. The Italian Carnival is associated with several song types, especially the Carnival of Bagolino, Brescia. Choirs and brass bands are a part of the mid-Lenten holiday, while the begging song tradition extends through many holidays throughout the year.

To end our journey around the world on our quest for folk music I have chosen the Carnival of Venice, as the above image shows. There is a wonderful piece of music titled "Carnival of Venice" by Paganini (1782-1840). And ... however this isn't really folkmusic ... it's a nice way to close this wonderful month.

But to give you all the opportunity to create your Japanese poetry based on folk music I also have a nice Italian folksong for your inspiration.

Make your choice, or maybe you dare to use both pieces of music ... it's up to you.

I ran through my archives and ran into a nice cascading haiku that fits this theme in a nice, but extraordinary way. I wrote this cascading haiku back in 2016 in response on a CDHK episode written by Hamish Managua Gunn.

Venice Carnival

dark green eyes

hidden behind a mask -

she's mysterious

she's mysterious

breathtaking glamorous mask

attractive force

attractive force

mystical and magical

who is she?

who is she?

thrills of unmasking at midnight

exposed to the world

exposed to the world

she turns into a man with

dark green eyes

© Chèvrefeuille

Well ... this was the last episode of our wonderful journey around the world on a quest for folkmusic. I hope you all enjoyed this wonderful month, this journey ... thank you all for participating in this journey.

This episode is NOW OPEN for your submissions and will remain open until September 6th at noon (CEST). I will try to publish our new weekend meditation later on. For now ... have fun!

Carpe Diem #1487 Dance of the Spider (Tarantella)

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

Welcome a the first episode of our new month of Carpe Diem Haiku Kai. July was about Imagination Without Limits and that month was a joy, but this month, August 2018, will be an adventure I think. I will take you on a journey around the world on a quest for folkmusic.

Folk music includes both traditional music and the genre that evolved from it during the 20th century folk revival. The term originated in the 19th century, but is often applied to music older than that. Some types of folk music are also called world music. Traditional folk music has been defined in several ways: as music transmitted orally, music with unknown composers, or music performed by custom over a long period of time. It has been contrasted with commercial and classical styles.

Women dancing the Tarantella (By Apollon Mokritsky - Old Picture, Public Domain)

So this month will be a joyful one, because we will discover wonderful music. In every episode I will try to give you some background on the music and a musical video to inspire you. Let us start with this virtual journey around the world in search of folkmusic in Southern Italy with the Tarantella.

Let me tell you a little bit of the background of the Tarantella:

Tarantella is a group of various folk dances characterized by a fast upbeat tempo, usually in 6

₈ time (sometimes ¹⁸
₈ or ⁴
₄), accompanied by tambourines. It is among the most recognized forms of traditional southern Italian music.

In the Italian province of Taranto, Apulia, the bite of a locally common type of wolf spider, named "tarantula" after the region, was popularly believed to be highly venomous and to lead to a hysterical condition known as tarantism. This became known as the Tarantella.

Tarantism, as a ritual, has roots in the ancient Greek myths. Reportedly, victims who had collapsed or were convulsing would begin to dance with appropriate music and be revived as if a tarantula had bitten them. The music used to treat dancing mania appears to be similar to that used in the case of tarantism though little is known about either. Justus Hecker (1795–1850), describes in his work Epidemics of the Middle Ages:

[...] "A convulsion infuriated the human frame [...]. Entire communities of people would join hands, dance, leap, scream, and shake for hours [...]. Music appeared to be the only means of combating the strange epidemic [...] lively, shrill tunes, played on trumpets and fifes, excited the dancers; soft, calm harmonies, graduated from fast to slow, high to low, prove efficacious for the cure." [...]

The music used against spider bites featured drums and clarinets, was matched to the pace of the victim, and is only weakly connected to its later depiction in the tarantellas of Chopin, Liszt, Rossini, and Heller.

While most serious proponents speculated as to the direct physical benefits of the dancing rather than the power of the music a mid-18th century medical textbook gets the prevailing story backwards describing that tarantulas will be compelled to dance by violin music. It was thought that the Lycosa tarantula wolf spider had lent the name "tarantula" to an unrelated family of spiders, having been the species associated with Taranto, but since L. tarantula is not inherently deadly, the highly venomous Mediterranean black widow, Latrodectus tredecimguttatus, may have been the species originally associated with Taranto's manual grain harvest.

The above video shows you the Tarantella as it is performed in Apulia Italy as a kind of healing dance after a woman is bitten by a wolfspider (as legends tell us). It sounds awesome and I can imagine that this up tempo music makes the woman sweat a lot. Legend tells that through sweating the venomous poison of the Wolfspider is leaving the body and makes the woman healthy again. That's why the Tarantella is also called "Dance of the Spider".

cobweb trembles
a spider crawls to its prey
nimble dancer

© Chèvrefeuille

I hope you did like this episode and that it will inspire you to create Japanese poetry.

This episode is open for your submissions tonight at 7:00 PM (CEST) and will remain open until August 7th at noon (CEST). I will try to publish our next episode, Fado, later on. For now ... have fun!

PS.: I hope to publish our August prompt-list later this week.

Carpe Diem #1263 neighborhood of colors

Dear Haijin, visitors and travellers,

Welcome at a new episode, the last regular, in our month of "imagination without limits ". Today I have a beautiful Italian scene for you. Look at all those colors. This village lays against the mountains as you can see. All the houses have different colors and looks like a rainbow.  Isn't it beautiful? Must be a joy to live 

there.

rainbow
against mountains
joyful life

© Chèvrefeuille

This episode of CD Imagination is Now Open for your submissions and will remain open until October 4th at noon (CET ).  I will try to publish our new weekend-meditation later on. For now. .. have fun!

PS. Now Online our new CDHK prompt-list for October. You can find it above in the menu.

Carpe Diem #970 Italy

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

Europe is an awesome continent I think and therefore its a pleasure to be on this month's ginko straight through Europe. Today our next stop is Italy, also one of the co-founders of the EU (these co-founder countries are known as the Inner Six).
Italy home-country of one of our CDHK family-members, Georgia (a.k.a. Bastet), and the country were the European Haiku Society (EHS) is based. The EHS started in 2015 and this year the EHS celebrates its 1st anniversary. As you can see in the right of our Kai, I am a member of the EHS and there were already several haiku created by me published in our weekly newsletter Akisame. The EHS also has a seasonly magazine named Makoto, but this magzine is only for members.

Italian Flag (referred to as "Il Tricolore"

All that I know of Italy I know from reading, the Internet, movies and so on. I have never been to that country, but as I think about Italy than I think of the Maffia, Pizza, the Pope, haute couture, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.

However ... all nice things and persons to talk about, but I love to take you on a trip to Tuscany, in the middle part of Italy, close to the Alps.

Tuscany

Tuscany is a region in central Italy with an area of about 23,000 square kilometers (8,900 square miles) and a population of about 3.8 million inhabitants (2013). The regional capital is Florence (Firenze).
Tuscany is known for its landscapes, traditions, history, artistic legacy and its influence on high culture. It is regarded as the birthplace of the Italian Renaissance and has been home to many figures influential in the history of art and science, and contains well-known museums such as the Uffizi and the Pitti Palace. Tuscany produces wines, including Chianti, Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, Morellino di Scansano and Brunello di Montalcino. Having a strong linguistic and cultural identity, it is sometimes considered "a nation within a nation".

Flag of Tuscany
 

Tuscany has a unique artistic legacy, and Florence is one of the world's most important water-colour centres, even so that it is often nicknamed the "art palace of Italy" (the city is also believed to have the largest concentration of Renaissance art and architecture in the world). Painters such as Cimabue and Giotto, the fathers of Italian painting, lived in Florence and Tuscany, as well as Arnolfo and Andrea Pisano, renewers of architecture and sculpture; Brunelleschi, Donatello and Masaccio, forefathers of the Renaissance; Ghiberti and the Della Robbias, Filippo Lippi and Angelico; Botticelli, Paolo Uccello, and the universal genius of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.

Several famous writers and poets are from Tuscany, most notably Florentine author Dante Alighieri. Tuscany's literary scene particularly thrived in the 13th century and the Renaissance.

In the 13th century, there were several major allegorical poems. One of these is by Brunetto Latini, who was a close friend of Dante. His Tesoretto is a short poem, in seven-syllable verses, rhyming in couplets, in which the author professes to be lost in a wilderness and to meet with a lady, who represents Nature, from whom he receives much instruction.

 

Brunetto-Latini

 

I was surprized to read about Brunetto Latini's "Tesoretto" in which he used seven (7) syllables verses, rhyming in couplets. I immediately thought about our own haiku (and tanka) in which we also use lines with 7 syllables. Just a nice "link" between Italy and haiku.

I found a nice series of Italian haiku. I couldn't retrieve an emailaddress to ask permission, so I publish them, but if you know one of the haiku poets used, please ask them if it's okay to use their haiku here at CDHK. Of course the rights of the used work stays with the authors. By the way the following three Italian Haijin won prizes in "The Basho Award" contest, which takes place once a year organized by the Italian Haiku Association (IHA).

Daniele Brancati

Brezza serale
i girasoli esausti
chinano il capo

Evening breeze
the exhausted sunflowers
bow their heads 

Sunflowers in Tuscany

Donatella Nardin

Fiori notturni -–
ne immortalo in un selfie
la caducita’

Night flowers
I catch their transiency
in a selfie

Maurizio Petruccioli

Stelle cadenti –
cercando un quadrifoglio
mi scordo il cielo

Falling stars
looking for a clover
I forget the sky

And on Daily Haiku I found a nice article in which the well known haiku poetess Antonella Filippi from Italy writes haiku about the seasons. An example of her work will follow hereafter. I couldn't retrieve an emailaddress or something to ask Antonella for permission. Of course the rights of the published work stays with her.

 

Antonella Filippi

ESTATE / SUMMER

luce del falò
la mia ombra danza
a mia insaputa

the light of a bonfire
my shadow dances
unknown to me

un guscio vuoto
consumato dal canto
rossa cicala

empty shell
consumed by its chirping
a red cicada

© Antonella Filippi

 

A wonderful episode this was to create, sorry for being this late with publishing. This episode is NOW OPEN for your submissions and will remain open until June 10th at noon (CET). I will publish our new episode, our first CD-Special by Joyce Lorenson, our "New Life"-kukai winner, later on. For now ... I hope I have inspired you to create haiku.