Street Music and Narrative Traditions

Street Music and Narrative Traditions calls on international folksong and music scholars to consider the phenomenon of publicly-performed music traditions – time-honored as well as emergent – ​​in their widest geographic contexts. The essays span ancient to contemporary forms: from the blind urban players of Sicily to the performative contours accompanying Scandinavian cod fisheries, from the musical art of Scots minstrelsy to the Hip-Hop stylings of a young Aberdonian rapper, from the music of street festivals such as the Gigli of Nola, and Carnival, or the individual virtuosi of the genre, such as Sor Capanna of nineteenth-century Rome, to present-day Chicano music in a Salt Lake City farmer's market.The twenty contributions on sung narrative traditions in street contexts are geographically diverse and penned by some of the leading folksong and ethnomusicological scholars writing today. The volume also considers the Italy-Italian Diaspora nexus of musical activity and advocacy, documenting the historic repatriation of the Alan Lomax multimedia recordings, led by Anna Lomax Wood of the Association of Cultural Equity in New York, to an assembly of Sicilian cultural experts at Palermo's Pasqualino Museum in 2016.