Music culture of Italy

From folk to classical, music has always played an important role in Italian culture. Having given birth to opera, for example, Italy provides many of the very foundations of the classical music tradition. Some of the instruments that are often associated with classical music, including the piano and violin, were invented in Italy, and many of the existing classical music forms can trace their roots back to innovations of 16th and 17th century Italian music (such as the symphony, concerto, and sonata).

Italian composers have played a major role in music since the Middle Ages. In the 1000s, Guido of Arezzo, an Italian monk, developed a revolutionary system of notation and method of sight-singing.

During the Renaissance, Giovanni Palestrina composed masterpieces of choral music for use in church services. The first operas were composed in Florence in the 1590s. Opera emerged as an art form during the Baroque period. Claudio Monteverdi was the first great composer of Baroque opera in the early 1600s. Important composers of the late 1600s and early 1700s included Alessandro Scarlatti, his son Domenico, and Antonio Vivaldi. Alessandro became best known for his operas, Domenico for his keyboard compositions, and Vivaldi for his works for violin. During the 1800s and early 1900s, popular operas were composed by Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini, Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Gioacchino Rossini.

Today, the entire infrastructure that supports music as a profession is extensive in Italy, including conservatories, opera houses, radio and television stations, recording studios, music festivals, and important centers of musicological research. Musical life in Italy remains extremely active, but very Italian-centered and hardly international. The only main international Italian pop-singers include 1970s pop-diva Mina, who sold 76 million records worldwide in her lifetime,[22] and singer Laura Pausini, who has sold 45 million albums.