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Alan Lomax: L'anno più felice della mia vita. Un viaggio in Italia 1954-1955

L’anno più felice della mia vita (which includes a foreword by Martin Scorsese and a memoir by Anna Lomax Wood) consists of Alan Lomax’s published and archival texts about his Italian fieldwork (excerpts from essays, field notes, letters and scripts for the 1950s BBC radio programmes), alternating with 130 black-and-white photographs chosen from over 1300 made by Lomax. All the documents were selected, organised and annotated by Goffredo Plastino especially for this publication. My essay, ‘Un sentimento antico’ pp. 16–85 is therefore an integral part of the book, and should be better read in cross-reference with all the other sections.

This essay expounds and analyses the preconditions and features of Alan Lomax’s European work between 1950 and 1958 (McCarthyst blacklisting, expatriation, collaboration with BBC for radio programmes and field recordings, collaboration with Columbia Records for a world music series on LP), the making of his fieldwork on Italian folk music in 1954–1955 (in collaboration with Italian institutions and scholars), and the consequences of that fieldwork for Italian ethnomusicology, culture and cinema (also through the examination of the soundtrack of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1971 Decameron, based on Lomax’s recordings), and for the discipline at large.