The 78 rpm record production on themes that are generically of a Yuletide spirit is rather large: all the record companies operating in Italy until the 1950s actually believed it was important to provide a product in their catalogues that was sellable and much in demand. The same thing happened in the 1920s and 1930s in the United States where large communities of Italian emigrants lived and where the record market was growing quickly and sales were buoyant.

Catalog of Italian Records OKeh-Odeon Fonotipia 1924/25 made in the US.

Most of the recordings on the Christmas theme refer to the instrumental repertoire of the popular and/or folk tradition and mainly to the music for Italian zampogna alone or together with the oboe-like ciaramella; another large part regarded the vocal repertoire, or the vocal-instrumental one, and to a certain extent, that of various kinds of sketches, humorous or ironic, which have been so popular among the communities of Italian immigrants in the United States (see Sarica and Fugazzotto 1999).

The document included here was published by the Odeon record company with the dialectal title La nuvena di Natali. The authors were Ajello-Carrubba, and it was performed by the Tenore Carrubba, with an Orchestrina Tradizionale Siciliana. The recording recapitulates, with the obvious limits of duration imposed by the capacity of the recording medium, the kind of vocal-instrumental suite which even today is documented on most of the Sicilian territory and consists of the following: instrumental introduction, litanies, story or narrative song on the events of the Nativity, instrumental finale (usually a merry dance tune). In the central part of this Novena, furthermore, we can find once again those stylistic patterns as well as the musical themes and the verbal texts that were part of the folk or ballad singer’s musical tradition. The orbi, as the blind players were called, performed the novenas on request from their clients, in the houses or in the streets before the small altars. Pitré’s 19th century testimonies depict this tradition that was very much alive and active. But in the space of little more than a century the change was in some ways considerable. In the immediate post-war period the orbi certainly operated as players of novenas and other religious songs in Palermo and

The Litanies were followed by the story of the events of the Nativity. With a declamation from ballad singers that is alternated with the instrumental interludes, the Tenor Carrubba recites:

This mostly concerns quatrains of hendecasyllables with an alternating rhyme, the same metre of the Sicilian tales or ‘razioni that narrate the episodes of the Passion of the Christ. As in all the texts destined to the singing of the Novena for the devotees, in the last stanza the request for payment is made explicit: in this case drinks and foodstuffs

Even the third piece present in the record by Carrubba seems to belong to that broad Christmas repertoire spread until the start of the last century by the orbi. The proliferation of these sacred texts in dialect reached its peak in the 18th century and was encouraged, directly and indirectly, by the Church. The aim of the institutions was to foster the religious education of the lower classes by translating the Christian message into an easily accessible language. The orbi were the instrument of this cultural policy and the Clergy, at least for the whole of the 19th century directly controlled their activity. To the orbi themselves were destined the religious publications written in dialect, so that they could be disseminated among the people.

A well-known example of these texts, the most ancient Novena by an author ever seen, is the Il viaggio dulurusu di Maria Santissima e lu Patriarca San Giuseppi (see Conigliaro-Lipari-Scordato 1987; Garofalo 1990).  The text is attributed to the Priest of Monreale Antonino Diliberto who published it for the first time around the mid-18th century going under the pseudonym of Binidittu Annuleru.

The last part of the recording by Carrubba is an instrumental dance theme in tempo 6/8. As Pitré wrote in 1881, in some villages the Novena was performed by groups of five, eight or ten players of the village band. Four pieces were played, the first two imitated the Novena for zampogna; the third, that of the Litany; the fourth was chosen by the players or the owner of the house. This piece was always a merry dance tune played at the end of the recital. Even in eastern Sicily the Novena for zampogne, after the introduction and the slow-moving central part following the melody of Tu scendi dalle stelle, is brought to a close with the so-called ballettu.