At school with the cantastorie

Continuing with the activity involving teachers in training and fresher courses aimed at updating intercultural music teaching methods, begun last year, the Intercultural Institute for Comparative Music Studies, with Mauro Geraci and Gabriella Santini has organised a refresher workshop for secondary school teachers from 27 to 29 October 2011. Entitled “At school with the cantastorie”, the workshop is coordinated by Mauro Geraci and Gabriella Santini, two scholars of cultural anthropology and ethnomusicology who for several years have been studying the phenomenon of street or ballad singing (cantastorie literally means “story singers”) in Italy. The workshop aims to analyse and recover for teaching purposes the street singers’ poetic and music repertories as well as explore their potential for performances, communication and knowledge. In the general picture of raising awareness among teachers about topics in the history of popular traditions and ethnomusicology and to promote multicultural teaching methods more receptive to anthropological issues, the course will present experiments that can be reproduced in the classroom in Italian middle schools (11 to 14 year olds) based on the study of the traditional forms of representation used by the pueti-cantastorii (poet-ballad-singers) in Sicily.

The experiments will involve learning compositional and expositional techniques – with all the literary, musical, graphic and acting aspects – so as to introduce the teachers gradually to the critical perspectives adopted by ballad singers to memorise, conceive, document, construct, represent and reflect past and present stories in front of constantly changing street audiences. For these purposes, the course will be divided into two workshops and a recital to be held at the Giorgio Cini Foundation by Mauro Geraci, an anthropologist for years acknowledged as a scrupulous interpreter and continuer of the poetics of Sicilian street singers through his considerable concert activities.
The musical dimension will be explored with the aid of audiovisual supports. They will play a very important role in the overall cantastorie study project since they enable teachers to appreciate the communicative potential of rhythmic and melodic patterns, and the declamatory style and improvisation used to set the music to previously invented stories, ballads or cuntrasti (flyting). At times the music and words will be accompanied by scene posters – visual, graphic and schematic elaborations of the stories and their contradictions. A discussion of gesture and drama, lastly, will complete the overall view of the multimedia and multidisciplinary aspects – in short of the poetic realism used by the ballad singers in tragic, humorous, if not downright comic form, as they strive to expound in the streets their thoughts on events of the past and present.

Info
Istituto Interculturale di Studi Musicali Comparati
tel. +39 041 2710357 +39 041 5230555
e-mail musica.comparata@cini.it