contact: Jeff Matthews

The index reference in the excerpts table (below) is "Street Music." MK's original chapter title is more ample. Thus:

Street Music
with a Cursory Aside on the Sorrowful Demise of the Quarter Tone

The gentleman is playing a 'hammered dulcimer,' a
distant relative of the zither and the etymologically
related Greek cithara, which has given us 'guitar'.  

Any day you choose walk along the street that leads from Piazza del Gesù Nuovo towards Via Duomo, slow down a little as you enter Piazza San Domenico Maggiore, and you will hear street musicians performing anything from tarantella to jazz to opera. A Botticelli-like woman in a diaphanous sky-blue dress plays harp at the entrance to Santa Chiara; a bearded man who looks as though he has just stepped down from the mountains, unlaced boots, holes in his trousers, plays tarantella on the accordion and sings with a rustic voice, no touristy confection there; a clean-cut man in a dark suit stands stiffly against a wall singing operatic arias with appropriate hand gestures, a deeply melancholy aspect to him. What’s his trouble? Appocundria*, I suspect.

Street music in Naples is a joy not to be passed by with a tight purse. So it was in the autumn of 1770 when the music historian Charles Burney visited the place and wrote:

This evening hearing in the street some genuine Neapolitan singing, accompanied by a calascioncino, a mandoline, and a violin; I sent for the whole band upstairs, but like other street music, it was best at a distance; in the room it was coarse, out of tune, and out of harmony; whereas, in the street, it seemed the contrary of all this: however, let it be heard where it will, the modulation and accompaniment are very extraordinary.

Burney, though peevish at times, hit on something: the open air is the street musician’s true medium. What happens there will not necessarily fly on stage. There we sacrifice our critical faculties for what moves the heart more.

So it was when the Sirens with their bonny voices tried to lure Ulysses to their fatal shore. Ulysses commands the crew to plug their ears while he has himself tied to the mast, ears unplugged — the point t being that he wants to be seduced by their song but prevented? — some cod psychology here— from being able to act on his desires? One of the Sirens, Parthenope, in despair over their failure to entice Ulysses, drowns herself, thereby giving her name to the ancient city that would one day arise in her wake, which in turn became Neapolis, then Naples.

A song might be said to have given birth to a city. Parthenope would later strike a deal with Christendom. At the church of Santa Caterina della Spina Corona, on via Guacci Nobile, there is a statue of her with water issuing from her breasts, which, so the Latin inscription Dum Vesevi Syrena Incendia Mulcet informs us, douses the flames of Vesuvius. The popular, more vulgar, name for la fontana della Spinacorona is la fontana della Zizze. Neapolitans are never less than familiar with their saints and mythic figures.

* An important word the attentive reader will remember from Chapter Three.


These are the chapters in Marius Kociejowski's [MK] The Serpent Coiled in Naples that currently have small excerpts on Naples, Life, Death & Miracles. There is also an extra item (after #15) from MK.

Ch.1 - introduction -   Ch.2 - An Octopus in Forcella -  Ch.3 - Listening to Naples  - Ch.4 - Lake Averno - 
Ch.5 - Street Music (above) -  Ch.6 - Leopardi - Ch.7 - R. di Sangro   - Ch.8 - Old Bones - Ch.9- The Devil -
Ch.10- Signor Volcano - Ch.10 (2) (3) -  Ch.11- Pulcinella - Ch.12. - Boom (below) - Ch.13 - Two women -
Ch.14- The Ghost Palace - Ch.15- An Infintesimal Particle -  (extra) Riccardo Carbone, photographer.

An onomatopoetic word: a tourist guide dropping a heavy stone onto the surface of Solfatara, an explosion in a factory making stuff it ought not to, the sound the tammorra makes, a big man’s voice. This journey begins with a familiar thumping against sun-dried goatskin stretchedover a circular wooden frame. This is not to suggest the tammorra was born here. Some variant of it can be found going all the way back through ancient Greek, Egyptian and Sumerian cultures, and it accompanied the Dionysian rites that were alive and well in Magna Graecia.

What those old revellers aimed for in their music and dance may have changed spiritual clothes but not their substance. The distance between the “Great Mother” Cybele, black goddess of the earth, and the Black Madonna of Montevergine is not as great as some Christians might like to think, although if time were to go into reverse, devotees of the former would probably remove some of the latter’s monotheistic traces as not adequately reflecting the plurality of existence.Those ancient dances were ecstatic, sometimes quite beyond the pale. BOOM. Another purpose for the instrument was its employment in physical and spiritual healing ceremonies.

Kociejowski spoke at length with Marcello Colasurdo (image, above) at the latter's home in the town of Pomigliano d'Arco. Colasurdo is widely known as a portatore della tradizione (bearer of the tradition)  of the tommarra. "The flat where Marcello lives seems to belong  to another time and  place. There is a strangely odd sense of being suspended, of there being nothing outside  its walls."

The tammorra was the instrument that addressed, and in turn was addressed by, the soul of the people. So it was then, so it is now. It is at the very heart of the tammurriata, which, as with Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring, is a celebration of fertility and sexual love. BOOM BOOM. The dance is as erotic as it is chaste, a dynamic that has been all but forgotten in modern culture, the man’s and the woman’s bodies never touching, although the lyrics to some of the songs they dance to leave no one in doubt as to their sexual import. There are even masculine and feminine approaches to the playing of the instrument, the men holding it in the right hand and the women in the left, which is how the ancients perceived the division of the sexes, the right side for men and the left, the sinister side, for women.*

*[Note that "left" and "sinister" are the same word in Italian and some other languages. jm]

There is another brief passage here, based on MK's discussion with Colasurdo.

Paola Gargiulo at the Officina della Tammorra on Vico San Severino is a maker of the instrument, a seller of it. She also gives musical workshops. Some nights you hear the thumping when you pass her place. Troubling though the idea of such workshops can be, and in many eyes signalling the death-knell of popular culture, there can be no doubting her sincerity. She has a peculiarly Catholic take on the history and playing of the instrument, but her religious exclusivity is not a barrier to absorbing the points she makes. If anything what she says is an amplification of what already resides in this rather pagan heart of mine. She brings the distant past into the present without sacrificing her religious principles. So I feel no contradiction whatsoever between past and present: the tammorra was put in the service of the gods and so
it continues, the only difference maybe that the old gang of deities has been whittled down to a gang of one.

These are my words, not hers: I’ll take the brunt of whatever she wishes to throw at me. She also has a deep distrust of what she calls an intellectual approach to the instrument, which I took to be a quiet warning. We began with the instrument itself and as she spoke, a wealth of experience in her passionate voice, it became incumbent on me to remember I am but a trespasser on an ancient turf she struggles to protect, which she knows is subject to contaminants from outside. One thing bothered me — the souvenir tammorras with painted scenes on them that she sells to tourists, but then she told me she needs to do so in order to survive. Anyway they are unplayable and admittedly, at times, I am too much the aesthete at other people’s expense.


These are the chapters in Marius Kociejowski's [MK] The Serpent Coiled in Naples that currently have small excerpts on Naples, Life, Death & Miracles. There is also an extra item (after #15) from MK.

Ch.1 - introduction -     Ch.2 - An Octopus in Forcella -  Ch.3 - Listening to Naples  - Ch.4 - Lake Averno - 
Ch.5 - Street Music  -  Ch.6 - Leopardi - Ch.7 - R. di Sangro   - Ch.8 - Old Bones - Ch.9- The Devil -
Ch.10- Signor Volcano - Ch.10 (2)-  Ch.11- Pulcinella - Ch.12 - Boom1 (above)- Boom (2) - Ch.13-Two Women-
Ch.14- The Ghost Palace - Ch.15- An Infintesimal Particle -       (extra) Riccardo Carbone, photographer.