Sounding (Out) Nineteenth-Century Italy

Opera has long served as the 'soundtrack' of modern Italy.The most clamorous example of this is that, in both the popular and scholarly imagination, operatic activity on the nineteenth-century peninsula has been routinely associated with the Risorgimento: the struggle for independence and unity that led to Italy's birth as a nation-state in 1861.For many years, it was widely believed that opera played a pivotal role in fuelling patriotic fervour and discourse, with political 'messages' embedded in librettos, choruses promoting national fellow-feeling, and the famous cry of 'Viva VERDI!' carrying a double meaning. 1 More generally, vocalparticularly operaticsound has been the primary aural marker of Italy and Italianness for well over two centuries.Travel accounts by foreign visitors during the Grand Tour era already emphasized an Italian propensity for singing, a sonic imaginary reinvigorated during the first COVID-19 lockdown, when hundreds of Italians joined virtual choruses of 'Bella ciao' and 'Va pensiero' from their balconies. 2Indeed, while research by musicologists and cultural historians in the last 30 years has effectively debunked the myth that (certain) operatic works and composers were central to Italy's mid-nineteenth-century national awakening, the notion of an Italy and an Italian people united by voice remains enduringly powerful. 3 An unexpected proponent of this trope in the 1970s was Murray Schafer, the Canadian composer and environmentalist who is now regarded as a foundational figure in sound studies.In a study of the northern Italian agricultural village of Cembra, Schafer described not only the local soundscape but also the broader soundscape of the entire peninsula as 'a vocal soundscape'.He explained that 'voices come from all directions, from inside and outside, from men, women, children, birds and animals'. 4Schafer's goal was to document Cembra's sonic environment as faithfully as possible, hoping to preserve it from the erasure caused by modernization; he used recording equipment to capture some sounds and preserved others through written descriptions.Yet his focus throughout remained on the