PERFORMA’15: Proceedings of the International Conference on Musical Performance Actas do PERFORMA 2015: Encontro Internacional de Investigação em Performance Musical 290 Contemporary Music, Unofficial Languages, Subaltern Voices: Composing Musical Pieces on Sicilian Texts Marcello Messina 157 Universidade Federal do Acre, Brasil Abstract: This paper documents the composition and performance of two rare examples of musical composers to programme notes, weblogs and personal correspondence, is used as evidence alongside the content of the musical works, in order to explore the political implications of composing music in Keywords: Sicilian language, Composition, Contemporary music. the Italian political, economic, social and cultural context, produced in turn by the persistence of a de facto ethnocentric and monoglottic regime in the country, which subordinates Sicily and the South of the country to the Centre-North (Dickie, 1994; Dickie, 1997; Pugliese, 2008). The various by-products of this situation range from the island’s political and economic marginalisation in the context of national and continental interests, to several social problem, such as ever-growing unemployment and mass emigration. As evidences of this status-quo, it is sufficient to mention the recent investment gap in key areas such as railways and kindergartens, both in the range of more than 95% for the North against less than 5% in the South (Cannavale, 2014). The emigration from Sicily is massive, and around 70.000 people left between 2012 and 2013 (Tondo, 2014). Sicily is also the poorest Italian region in terms of average income (Corriere del Mezzogiorno, 2015) and the unemployment rate in the island is 21.0%, against the national Italian average of 12.2% and the Southern Italian average of 19.7% (Sicilia Informazioni, 2014). To these issues, one needs to add the partial and north-centric historical narratives, endorsed by the national institutions as to two of the founding historical moments of the Italian nation, i.e. the 1861 Unification and the second post-war period; and, complementary to this, the continuous defamation and criminalisation of Sicilian identity, not only in national media, but also diffused in every strata of society; finally, it is necessary to mention the violent hegemony exerted over Sicilian territory by the Mafia (or the mafias), who are often colluded with national institutions, and whose profits are often utilised elsewhere in Italian and European territory – the criminal organisations’ military domination over the island appears, at least, bizarre when one thinks about the intense deployment of the Sicilian territory for NATO and US military installations. All these elements combined together can help visualise the picture of Sicily as an oppressed territory. The Status of the Sicilian Language Sicilian is not recognised officially as a language despite possessing a large amount of oral and written traditions. Its non-recognition is also arbitrary if contextualised within the Italian legislation, which recognises other regional languages such as Sardinian or Friulan (Cravens, 2014, 211). Furthermore, while being still regularly spoken by a relatively high 157 Email: marcellomessina@mail.ru pieces that use Sicilian poetry as their textual material, namely, Emanuele Casale’s Composizione per voce (1997), written on a contemporary poem by Catanian poet Biagio Guerrera, who also premiered the piece in 1998; and my own composition Senza cialoma, on a selection of 19th century Sicilian street poems, premiered in 2013 by the Gnu ensemble. A variety of materials, ranging from interviews with the Sicilian. This paper takes as a starting point the denunciation of the subordinate status of Sicily within