Le voci ritrovate
Canti e narrazioni di priogionieri
italiani della Grande Guerra
negli archivi sonori di Berlino
This book presents a collections of sound recordings of Italian prisoners of war, interned in German prison camps during the WWI.
Made in the field during 1918, these recordings are part of a largest collection that emerged from the work of the Phonographische Kommission, a research team composed of linguists, musicologists, and ethnologists, financed and supported by the highest German institutions with the aim of collecting and archiving the language, music and culture of prisoners of war from all the enemy nations and their colonies. The prisoners were recorded in the prison camps with the sound technologies available at that time: the gramophone, and the phonograph.
The book is dedicated to the voices of the forty-two Italian military prisoners who where recorded within that context. They came from different places in Calabria, Campania, Emilia-Romagna, Friuli, Lazio, Liguria, Lombardy, Piedmont, Apulia, Sardinia, Sicily, Tuscany, Umbria, Veneto and Molise. Most of them were of humble origins. The researchers asked them to perform songs and monologues and to recite given texts in their own dialects.
This collection witnesses, among other things, the historical attempt to create a new, sound-based ethnology by exploiting the context of war and imprisonment. The voices of the prisoners were captured within a complex intertwinement of scientific practices, nationalistic ideologies, and military institutions. Listening to them means to hear and to deal with the power of an archive that, making use of a coercive condition, labels and catalogues human beings as representatives of cultural or ethnical groups.
At the very same, the voice, sound of a living human body, vibrates in these recordings as a political presence which cannot be tamed. The sounding alterity of the persona, in the very act of speaking or singing, actively claims its own agency, touches the body of the listeners, and thus physically call the listeners themselves into question. Listening to these recordings thus can turn out to be an intimate and troubling experience, which reframes our sonic awareness and raises historical and ethical questions by locating them at the very center of a sonic bodily relation.
The volume is the result of many years of research, carried out by Ignazio Macchiarella for the musicological side and by Emilio Tamburini for the historical-cultural side. The four CDs attached contains the corpus of the archival documents in its entirety: the digitalized sound materials and the scans of documents, with data of the recorded prisoners and transcriptions of the pieces they performed.
This publication was made in collaboration with the Phonogrammarchiv of the Ethnologisches Museum of Berlin, the Lautarchiv of the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and the Labimus of the University of Cagliari.