Variation or contamination? Narrative instability in the Italian traditional song Donna lombarda

Abstract

This paper arises out of my doctoral research (Barwick 1985), which examined a large sample of documented versions of the Italian traditional narrative song (or 'ballad', to adopt the term by which such strophic narrative songs are generally known elsewhere in Europe), Donna lombarda (Nigra 1). In this sample of 479 , 120 of which were accompanied by musical information, no two versions were exactly alike . It became increasingly clear to me in the course of my research that neither melodic, musical, formulaic nor narrative analysis would yield a stable definition of the song; indeed, such detailed analysis forced me to confront the impossibility of reducing the song to a neat abstraction of any kind . Instead of talking of the 'song' Donna lombarda, I suggested we should rather discuss it as a 'song tradition'. The overall picture of narrative change given by the examination of narrative variation in the Italian versions of Donna lombarda supports a view of the song tradition as an inherently unstable process that can no more be defined in terms of a particular plot than in terms of a particular textual or melodic realisation; rather it is a temporal process, whose realisation is contingent upon the conditions of its performance. What are some of the implications of this perspective for consideration of the interaction of one song tradition with another, in other words, for the consideration of what has been in the past conceived as 'contamination' of two (presumably pure) essential songs? I will approach this point via a brief demonstration of the inherent instability of the narrative of the Donna lombarda song tradition as revealed in the documents analysed.