The Italian composer and ethnomusicologist Giovanna Marini died last Wednesday at the age of 87, in Rome, the city in which she was born and where she founded the School of Popular Music of Testaccio (a Roman neighborhood) in the 1970s, one of the achievements that remain to be remembered its history and for the records of Italian popular music.
“We will be forever grateful to Giovanna Marini for her precious and also courageous research work”, he wrote on social media, quoted by the daily Il Messaggero, the Italian folk singer-songwriter Angelo Branduardi. “We have lost a true storyteller.” Your school in Testaccio has classical music, jazz, ethnic music, country, lyrical, medieval or Renaissance music, open to all types of instruments and interpretations.
Giovanna Marini was born on January 19, 1937 in the Italian capital. She was a composer, singer, researcher, poet, passionate about madrigals and a gifted guitarist, the diary Corriere della Sera does not hesitate to crown her “queen of folk” and “protagonist of the New Italian Songbook and the rediscovery of popular singing”. Born into a family of several generations of musicians — her father, Giovanni Salviucci, was a composer and her mother, Ida Parpagliolo, a pianist and music teacher —, she was, as PÚBLICO critic Cristina Fernandes wrote in an interview with the composer, “a rebel by nature — at the age of 12 he ran away from a convent school.”
He began with training linked to classical music, graduating in Guitar at the Santa Cecília Conservatory, but a young man asked him at a party in 1958, when Marini, then 21 years old, was playing for the group of revelers: “Let Bach and sing us a song.” It was Pier Paolo Pasolini who asked him. Contact with several intellectuals of the time and his predilection for communism were part of the shape that his career would take. “The Italian Joan Baez”, writes the Messaggero.
According to what she told PÚBLICO at the time, the Italian poet and director was one of the people who awakened her to the riches of traditional music and the collection of sound testimonies of popular culture in her country, a project that also occupied Pasolini. He both investigated and recorded them, and was inspired by them for his own compositions. “My music aims to portray the moments of culture that have not yet been contaminated by the welfare society, the music that remains in the hands of those who live life in a different way, refuting the leveling of the cultural industry”, he said years ago to PUBLIC.
O Messaggero recalls that in 1964, Marini participated in the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto as part of the group Il Nuovo Canzionere Italiano, performing the anthem of resistance and peasant protest Bella Ciao. His recording and interpretation of the song, in 1975, became one of the indispensable recordings of our times, according to the publisher Harmonia Mundi.
Throughout his career, which now ended after a “brief illness”, as the Corriere della Sera, collaborated with bigger names such as Pasolini, Pippo Delbonno, Italo Calvino or Dario Fo. He also wrote music for cinema and theater.
Giovanna Marini performed several times in Portugal: in Viseu, at Teatro Viriato, and in Porto at Rivoli with the cantata Si Bemol, in 2000, the same show that she took to the Centro Cultural de Belém (CCB), in Lisbon, in the same year; she had already been at the CCB in 1999 with Partenze, 20 years after the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini; She also participated in the show Urlo, by Pippo Dellbono, at the Teatro Municipal da Guarda and at the Imaginarius festival, in Santa Maria da Feira, in 2006.
