Le voci ritrovate OAN

Ignazio Macchiarella
Emilio Tamburini

GEOS Ethnomusicology series.

Oral tradition sound recordings collected in CD-book format (book and compact disc). Founded in 1998 by Roberto Leydi and Pietro Sassu.

The volume presents a special unpublished corpus of sound recordings and documentary materials concerning Italian soldiers detained in German prison camps during the Great War. Produced in the field in 1918, this corpus is part of a much larger collection curated by the Phonographische Kommission, a research team composed of linguists, musicologists, and ethnologists, directly funded by Kaiser Wilhelm II, with the aim of collecting, through the voices of prisoners, elements on the language, music, and culture of the peoples whose armies fought against the Vierbund (Quadruple Alliance).

Thanks to this documentation activity, we now have the voices of forty-two Italian soldiers from various locations in Calabria, Campania, Emilia-Romagna, Friuli, Lazio, Liguria, Lombardy, Piedmont, Puglia, Sardinia, Sicily, Tuscany, Umbria, and Veneto, plus a representative of the Arbëresh minority in Molise.

The corpus of Italian materials is reproduced in its entirety on the four accompanying compact discs, containing audio files (CDs 1-3) and scans of paper sources, including data on individual soldiers and notes on their actions (CD 4).

The volume also reports the results of preliminary analytical work on the corpus carried out by Ignazio Macchiarella for the musicological aspect and by Emilio Tamburini for the historical-cultural aspect, with a foreword by Britta Lange, one of the leading scholars of collections created in German prison camps during the First World War.

The work was carried out in collaboration with the Phonogrammarchiv of the Ethnologisches Museum zu Berlin, the Lautarchiv of the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, and Labimus/Department of History, Cultural Heritage, and Territory of the University of Cagliari.