O cancioneiro popular da imigração italiana : a leitura como processo de construção de sentidos na performance da canção

Abstract

Popular singing is one of the most meaningful expressions of the oral tradition left by itallian imigration in northeast Rio Grande do Sul, as it bonds both the cultural identity and memories of descendants of immigrants. During the 1980’s, the ECIRS project (Cultural Elements of Italian Imigration in the North East of Rio Grande do Sul) has surveyed and recorded a repertoire of more than 400 songs in the “Cancioneiro Popular da Imigração Italiana” collection. This research aims to understand the meaning processes in those performances, in order to study how the meanings attributed to their performance contribute to the maintenance of descendants of immigrants memories. Songs still sung by descendants of immigrants were selected for a comparative study, aiming to identify the construction process of new memories and meanings attributed to the singing practice. Relationships between the singing practices and the cultural identities of descendants of Italian immigrants were estabilished based on currrent Popular Culture studies. This work also proposes that the meanings in the “Cancioneiro Popular da Imigração Italiana” are derived not only from its performance but as well from many individual, social and cultural elements, all inextricably intertwined. The analysis methodology was based on José Luiz Martinez approach, inspired by Pierce’s semiotics, which proposes that musical inquiry should take in account the fields of Musical Semiosis, Musical Representation and Performance Practice.The analysis has shown that, nowadays, politics also plays a role in the construction of meanings in those songs, as choral ensembles usually originate from public or private iniciatives, usually associated with certain preservation politics discourses. It was also possible to identify that certain signs and musical structures are integral to the meaning processes in those songs, and that the meaning attributed to the pratice of those songs is also constructed in a gestalt-like fashion, in which listening habits and generations of individual expectations partake. The meanings attributed to those songs are estabilished both in the system as well as in the inter-relationship between all elements that constitute them during the performance, formed from their social and cultural context.