& present

7:00 pm - 'Ghosts'. Alan Lomax’s field recordings in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Decamerone by Goffredo Plastino (Newcastle University)

We don’t know if Alan Lomax and Pier Paolo Pasolini did actually meet while Lomax was in Italy making his fieldwork, in 1954-55. However, many field recordings made by Lomax during his Italian research have been used by Pasolini in the making of his Decameron’s soundtrack.
The first indirect connection between Lomax and Pasolini is the issue 17-18 of the journal Nuovi Argomenti, published in 1956. A very special issue, for it includes: some unpublished chapters of the novel La ciociara by writer Alberto Moravia (also co-editor of the journal); the first edition of Pasolini’s celebrated poem Le ceneri di Gramsci (“Gramsci’s Ashes”); the first edition of the poem L’uva puttanella by Rocco Scotellaro - the so-called “peasant-poet”, one of the most significant Italian poets of the Neorealstic period; and a long essay by Lomax on Italian and Mediterranean folk musics, that will be the basis of his subsequent researches. An extraordinary issue of Nuovi Argomenti, then, that represents one of the highest moments of Italian left cultural movement in and since the ’50s, and testifies the role that Lomax has shortly played in that context.
The second oblique and “hidden” connection between Lomax and Pasolini is the movie Decameron (released in 1971). The soundtrack almost entirely consists of recordings made by Alan Lomax in Campania and Calabria, with the exception of two classic Neapolitan songs a a few second of religious vocal music. Some of these recordings were, at the time of the release of the movie, unpublished. Alan Lomax did know nothing about this use of his recordings by Pasolini; he is not mentioned in the opening credits, where there is reference only to Pasolini as editor of the soundtrack, and to Ennio Morricone as consultant.
The lecture will consider the use of Lomax’s Italian field recordings already in the Italian cinema of the 50s (specifically in the documentaries by Vittorio De Seta), and then the presence of Lomax’s recordings in Decameron’s soundtrack: through some movie’s excerpts, it will be explained what kind of work Pasolini did on the original recordings, and what meaning they have in the film.
Goffredo Plastino is Reader in Ethnomusicology at the International Centre for Music Studies, Newcastle University (United Kingdom). He has published widely on Lomax’ Italian and Spanish field recordings, on folk and popular Mediterranean musics, on jazz.

9:00 pm - 'Decamerone' (Pier Paolo Pasolini)
A woman who seduces a rich young man and subsequently humiliates him, a priest who misuses an exorcism in order to have sex, or a man who pretends to be handicapped in order to get inside a convent full of young nuns: in Il Decamerone, the first part of his 'Trilogy of life', Pasolini tells eight ironic tales from the book of the same name by Boccaccio about sexual temptation. The link between the various sequences is the painter Giotto, played by Pasolini himself, who attempts to complete a fresco.

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