Salvatore Morra (British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow, University of Cambridge), ‘Italian Arab Musical Encounters (1860-1960): Sound, Migrations and Power’

Abstract: This seminar concerns the histories of mobility and movement between Southern Europe (Italy) and North Africa (Tunisia, Egypt and Libya) through music. The talk aims to address musical exchanges between Italians and Arabs that followed Italian unification (1860s) and developed during Italian colonisation (1920s). Firstly, through several fieldworks in Tunis (2015–2017) and Marseille (2023), working on the Italian family of musical instruments seller – the Scotto (1927–1960s) - I will show how Italians contributed significantly to an exchange of knowledge, skills and craftsmanship during the protectorate era in Tunisia. Secondly, I will focus on Teresa De Rogatis (1893–1979), Neapolitan musician who lived in Egypt for more than forty years (1921–1963) and investigate how Italian music became a principal component of elite entertainment in Cairo, while I demonstrate how French and Italian cultural agendas competed for influence through the 1892 opera season at Cairo’s Khedivial Theatre. Finally, I will explore the newly found collection of discs 1930s (Cetra, Parlophon) of the IsMEO – Italian Institute for the Middle and Far East, tracing the ways in which these recordings have been intertwined with Italian colonial histories in Libya. Through archival sources from the past this research will provide a unique historical ethnography of Mediterranean interchanges between Italians and Arabs where music presents a locus for understanding the on-going migrations between Africa and Europe. Thus, it contributes to the broader emergence of what Peter Gatrell has deemed “refugeedom” focusing on (colonial) repatriate and (mere) migrant, where new historical routes coalesced (Ballinger, 2020).

Biography: Salvatore Morra is currently British Academy post-doctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge and Postdoctoral Research Associate at Trinity Hall. Since 2018 he is the music curator of ISMEO - The International Association for Mediterranean and Oriental Studies in Rome and vice-chair of the ICTMD study group Mediterranean Music Studies. He is also co-chair with Dr. Kawkab Tawfik of the recently founded study group “Music in the Indo-Mediterranean Muslim Worlds” of the International Musicological Society. His research focuses on musicological perspectives of Arabic music, interdisciplinary debates around post-colonial nationalism in the Maghreb and multiculturalism in the Mediterranean, including popular culture, liturgy, sound and media. Between 2020-2024, he thought lectures at the University of Tuscia in Viterbo Italy. As performer (guitar and oud), he has a longstanding interest in maqams, experimental improvisation, and he is the co-founder of the Maluf System, a post-revival movement of Tunisian music.