The photographs and recordings of two ethnomusicologists tell the story of Sicily in 1954: a world still dominated by the toils of the lower classes, by popular songs and by places that have profoundly changed.
An exhibition (“Sicilia 1954”) hosted from 1 to 31 July in the Verification Room of Palazzo Steri in Palermo tells all of this. The exhibition – promoted by the University of Palermo, the puppet museum and the Alan Lomax study center – is curated by Sergio Bonanzinga and Rosario Perricone.
Before the inauguration, a seminar will be held on the two scholars who, between the summer of 1954 and January 1955, undertook a musical journey to Sicily. It all began with the arrival of the American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax who for his research relied on the national center for popular music studies (CNMP) and was often supported by Diego Carpitella, who two years earlier had already been involved in an important investigation ethnographic survey conducted in Basilicata with the ethnologist Ernesto de Martino. He later became a professor at La Sapienza University of Rome.
After Lomax’s death, the association headed by him and long presided over by his daughter Anna Lomax Wood Chairetakis, decided to make the digital version of the documentation collected with the investigation 70 years ago available in Italy.
The exhibition now brings together images and sounds collected among farmers and carters, accompanied by Lomax’s notes taken from his personal diary: a poor Sicily but where, in addition to the dignity of work, extraordinary expressive practices that have now been lost could be observed.
“With this exhibition – say the curators Sergio Bonanzinga and Rosario Perricone – we intend not only to celebrate a founding moment for ethnomusicological research in Sicily and in Italy, but also to celebrate a double anniversary: the seventieth anniversary of the musical journey to Sicily and the centenary of the birth of the maestro Diego Carpitella”.
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