Singing Songs of Execution in Early Modern Italy

This essay demonstrates that Italian execution ballads, while in many ways representative of a pan-European tradition of singing the news of crime and punishment, demonstrate a range of stylistic differences from their European counterparts that had significant consequences for the expression of emotion around public executions, and for the nature of the oral, sung performance of news in early modern Italy. Although Italian songsheets lacked the tune direction so common in other languages, the widespread availability of melodic formulas for set metrical forms means that a person without musical training could easily sing these songs. This has enormous repercussions for the dissemination of news in early modern Italy. If the uneducated masses were able to immediately sing these songs because they possessed a mental repertoire of melodies applicable to specific song-types, they would be able to more easily memorize their contents and re-perform them, thereby disseminating the information more widely. With their combination of news and entertainment (along with the occasional moral lesson) in an aurally accessible and memorable form, ballads were therefore an effective means of broadcasting and circulating the news in a period of low literacy rates.