Folk music and Italian roots

Italian immigrants who arrived in Australia in the 1950s and 60s brought their folk music traditions with them. These traditions live on and flourish among second and third-generation Italians, who learn about Italy through songs, tales, and memories.

Kavisha Mazzella’s father hails from the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples, and her mother is Anglo-Burmese. Her parents migrated to Australia in the 1960s and brought with them their passion for music and storytelling. Elvira Andreoli’s parents are from le Marche and Campania. She was born in Melbourne and discovered music when she was about ten years old. She listened to her mother singing Italian pop music while washing the dishes.

Despite their different upbringing and backgrounds, Andreoli and Mazzella share a love for Italian folk music, in which they retrace their respective family histories and harbor an inherited nostalgia for a land they experienced second-hand.

They connect over their family stories of immigration.

After many years directing Joys of the Women Italian Choir in Fremantle, Mazzella founded the La Voce Della Luna, an Italian women’s choir created for the Melbourne season of the play Emma Celebrazione. Mazzella led the choir from 1996 to 2013 before passing the role of choirmaster on to Andreoli, who is still the director.
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Mazzella’s and Andreoli’s musical and professional careers are strikingly similar. They were both heavily influenced by the personal stories of their families and of an entire community that emigrated in the mid-twentieth century.

Mazella explains: The Italy I know lives in my imagination. It is based on the stories told to me by my aunts and grandmother. I connected to Italy through these people and asked myself, “How can I access this Italy?” This thirst for Italy comes from an eagerness to find my identity.

She firmly believes that the folk music she listened to as a child influenced the music she composes today. She is also open to other influences and traditions from across the globe, citing a recent interest in flamenco. Mazzella’s songwriting career began as a way to tell the story of immigrants and recount a past that she wanted desperately to bring to light. Her music pays tribute to the Italian immigrants, mostly farmers, who gave up everything they knew and came to Australia to give their sons and daughters a better future.
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For Elvira Andreoli, folk music is a channel to connect with her ancestors. “Instruments migrate with people; I see my father reflected in the new generations of people coming to Australia, enjoying folk music as much as the older generations,” she said. Music and song offer her direct emotional access to the nostalgia she feels for her family’s past.

Andreoli plays with a cover band called The Rustica Project, a band that celebrates and pays homage to Italian traditions. She takes inspiration from Mimmo Cavallaro, an Italian folk singer from Calabria, who modernized traditional folk music and made it accessible to young people. He changed pop music to folk music.
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Both singers play the same music and songs, usually pop songs, which they heard their parents and grandparents sing while working in the fields or the factories. For Mazzella, the older generation sang with “uneducated voices.” They didn’t follow a metric or song structure but provided a frame and rhythm for their day-to-day grind.

A key aspect highlighted by both Mazzella and Andreoli is the language of the songs. Their parents came to Australia at a time when Italy was still, linguistically speaking, fragmented. Each region had, and continues to have, its dialect. That was their first language, the language they spoke at home, and the language in which they thought. Andreoli commented:

There’s something special about hearing a dialect. When they first arrived in Australia, speaking dialect was very much “frowned upon.” You can actually feel a sense of the disappearance of dialect in Italy. Today, to rediscover true Italian traditions as well as dialect, you have to go to the immigrants abroad. Some time ago, I met up with my aunt, who lives in Italy, and when I asked her that we go together to buy girasi [cherries], she could not remember what that word meant.
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When asked about the health of dialect and folk music, Mazzella doesn’t believe dialect is destined for extinction. “Even folk music, it can almost disappear, imploding, only to suddenly come back to life and flourish,” Mazzella says.

In 2016, Kavisha worked in Hobart, Tasmania, with Italian immigrants who arrived in Hobart in the 50s to work on the Hydro Scheme. She was commissioned by the 10 Days on the Island Festival to create a show. She called it Mia Casa Mio Cuore, which incorporates stories of migration, gratitude to Australia, and nostalgia for the Bel Paese — and a perfect summary of folk music’s historical and social value. It is inscribed with the history, languages, customs, and traditions of a distant land, preserving its culture and identity in its new home and taking on a new life.

And, as Elvira points out, folk music brings the generations together. Older people are moved when they hear the songs they grew up with, alive and well and in the hands of an enthusiastic younger generation. Their music bridges space and time, with people from diverse backgrounds able to find resonances with their traditions in the folk music of others.
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Cover image: Songwriter and artist Kavisha Mazzella practicing sound-healing with bowl. Photo Manuele
Images provided by Sebastiano Motta, Manuele

Kavisha Mazzella can be found at Saint Mark’s Church on Clifton Hill in Melbourne every Monday night, practicing with her mixed choir, Lingua Madre Italian Folk Choir.
Elvira Andreoli and the Rustica Project are on Facebook and have a YouTube channel that is constantly updated with recordings and information about upcoming gigs.