Performing Naples
A Photographic Iconography
by Goffredo Plastino
The rediscovery of a unique, powerful and today almost unknown European music scene through the rare and never-before-seen photographs of its performers.
Since the 1880s, Neapolitan Song entered a new phase of popularity that further amplified its impact. Neapolitan songs were eagerly listened to, played and recorded worldwide, by following what many thought was then an irresistible musical ‘fashion’. In Performing Naples Goffredo Plastino explores for the first time the visual evidence of this global phenomenon: the photographs depicting itinerant musicians published in Europe as picture postcards. Self-produced by the bands for their promotion, printed by the venues or distributed during large-scale events, the photographs testified to the thriving vitality of a substantial music market. These fragile and rare ephemera embodied a figurative tradition shared between the singers, the players and their audiences, related to a well-established European ideal representation of the Neapolitans dating back to the 18th century. Unknown and startling, the images collected in this unique volume reveal to our gaze a performance culture long gone and all but forgotten, attesting to the essential role of photography in music iconography.
- By (author) Goffredo Plastino
Other Titles in this Series
Musical Images at the Court of Alfonso I d’Este
Patronage and Self-Representation in Early Sixteenth-Century Ferrara
Volume 8
Selling Pianos with Pictures
Commercial Art and Keyboard Instruments from the Eighteenth Century to the 1920s
Volume 4
Similar Books
A Collaborative Tapestry in Honour of Shirley Ann Brown / Une fresque brodée en l’honneur de Shirley Ann Brown
The Bayeux Tapestry Seen by her Colleagues and Friends / La Tapisserie de Bayeux vue par ses collègues et amis
Balthasar Caymox of Nuremberg
Early Modern German Print Publishers: Popular Prints of the Seventeenth Century
ENTANGLED AFRICA
Intra-African Relations Between Rain Forest and Mediterranean from Around 4,000 BCE to 1,500 CE
Gold, Silver and Glass: Power Networks, Cultural Identities, Technology Transfers and Agency across the Old World (7th Century BC – 1st Century AD)
Proceedings of a Conference Held at the British Museum, 16–18 June 2023
John Dunstaple Reading Boethius
John Dunstaple’s Annotations to Boethius’s “De institutione musica” in the Manuscript Oxford, Corpus Christi College Library, MS 118
Legal Visuality
Exegesis, Ambiguity, and Dissimulation of the Donation of Constantine in the Early Modern Period
Listening to the Swan Song
More-than-Human Beings and Sounds in Literature and Culture Through the Ages
Monastic Manuscripts from the Eastern Mediterranean (Sinai, Jerusalem, Antioch)
Production, Use, and Contexts
Music and Colonialism in Fascist Italy
Identity, Propaganda, and Ethnographic Representation
Volume 13
