* prelims
ISBN: 978-0-906305-33-1
PRISON SONGS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN
Photo: Saddam Hussein’s Red Prison in Suleimaniyah – Ed Emery
A volume containing papers presented at
the 16th Symposium of the Mediterranean Music Studies group pf the ICTMD,
University of the Aegean,
CONTENTS
[in alphabetical order of
authors]
1. The walls
of Yedi Kule: Re-imagining
the prison soundscape of the Eastern Mediterranean
through Rebetiko
Ali Fuat Aydin [Independent
researcher] [Abstract] [PDF of paper]
2. Prison Songs and
Luca
Battioni [
3. Salah Farzeit: Prison songs and dances of Tunisia
Ed Emery [SOAS / Free University] [Abstract] [PDF of paper]
4.
Feelings and fears of an outstanding fifteenth-century Northern Italian
prisoner
Gioia Filocamo
[Università di Parma] [Abstract] [PDF of paper]
5.
Singing the last: Personal biography and social protest in Rosa Balistreri’s "Noi siamo nell’inferno carcerati”
Simona Gatto [Universitat de Valencia] [Abstract] [PDF of paper]
6. On the trail of Bensoussane: Murder, colonial prisons, and memory through a
song from
Jonathan Glasser [William
and
7. Prison for the Brave:
Informality, incarceration, and politics of the unspeakable in mahraganat music prison songs
Dalia Ibraheem
[
8.
"La Morte di Caserio": The origins, reappearance trajectory and
historical misunderstanding of an iconic anarchist ballad
Riccardo La Spina
[Independent researcher] [Abstract] [PDF of paper]
9. Sceriffata
neoclassica: Parody and deconstruction of the
Neapolitan prison song
Giulio Minniti
[
10.
Healing tangos in Franco’s Prisons
Belén Pérez Castillo
[Universidad Complutense] [Abstract] [PDF of paper]
11.
“In the middle of the sea, there’s a fountain where prisoners go to drink”: The
role of watery symbols in singing and remembering the carceral
experience in early twentieth-century
Elisabetta Visaggio [King’s College,
13.
Sounding Together as a restorative act; the making of Carceral Scrivings
Maureen Wolloshin [Independent artistic researcher] [Abstract] [PDF of paper]
ABSTRACTS
1. The walls of Yedi Kule:
Re-imagining the prison soundscape of the Eastern Mediterranean through Rebetiko
Ali
Fuat Aydin [Independent
Researcher]
ABSTRACT: The prison has historically
functioned as a site of sensory and social disconnection, yet within the
Eastern Mediterranean, it has also acted as a fertile "sonic tourbillon" � a vortex where shared experiences of
marginality and resistance collide. This paper explores the prison soundscapes of the early 20th century through Rebetiko, focusing on the symbolic and material presence of
the Yedikule fortress. As a site of detention
spanning Ottoman and post-Ottoman transitions, Yedikule
resonates in the Rebetiko repertoire as a shared
cultural memory between Greek and Turkish-speaking populations.
Using "intervention theory," I argue that Rebetiko functioned as a critical research practice for the
incarcerated. Through the repetitive intensity of the bouzouki and the
"stammering" narratives of the lyrics, prisoners enacted a sonic re-territorialisation of carceral
space. I analyse how these songs served as vectors of
connection�linking the isolated individual to the subcultural
community � while articulating a radical disconnection from disciplinary
mechanisms. By examining specific songs referencing the "zindan", this paper situates the Mediterranean
prison as a resonant chamber where melodic modes (dromoi/makam)
create collective knowledge. These historical sonic interventions offer vital
insights into how music continues to bridge the ruptures of the Mediterranean
landscape.
CV: Ali Fuat Aydın is a virtuoso of the bağlama
and a researcher specialising in Western Aegean
musical traditions. His work encompasses Zeybek
culture, traditional Turkish music theory, and the standardisation
of folk instruments. Beyond organology and tuning
systems, Aydın has conducted significant studies
on the Greek music of Anatolia, focusing on Smyrneika
and its evolution into Rebetiko. As both a
practitioner and scholar, his work bridges performance and musicological
inquiry, exploring the shared sonic histories and cultural entanglements of the
Greco-Turkish landscape. He continues to investigate the intersections of
regional performance practices and historical memory.
E-mail: [email protected]
__________
2. Salah Farzeit, and the prison songs of Tunisia
Ed Emery [SOAS / Free University]
ABSTRACT:
Under the present regime in Tunisia the prisons are over-filled. Not least,
with young people (partly because of a draconian law imposing mandatory prison
for possession of cannabis). In Tunisian society, prison songs are powerfully
present in popular culture.
Much has been
written about the maluf traditional musics of Tunisia. Less attention has been paid to the
popular culture of mezwed (singing accompanied
by bagpipes and frame drums). Particularly represented by the singer and
instrumentalist (darbuka, bendir,
mezwed) Salah al-Farzeit [صالح
الفرزيط] [b.1953].
Farzeit spent time in prison. He is critical of the authorities
in Tunisia � not an easy position to hold in authoritarian times. His is the
voice of the underdog, the person excluded from polite society. A bad boy. In his songs he talks about the mezoued [bagpipe], and how it has become orientalised in Tunisia. And the songs of
the working man. And tarab.
And how people called him a bandit. The songs are
dense with local meanings.
He performs a genre known as dangari.
Characteristically he appears in the blue denim that is associated with the genre
(from dungaree). The genre has a little dance steps that go with it.
They are socially reckoned as being of little account. I shall explore an
original hypothesis for the roots and origins of this dangari
music, tracking it back to the Indian Ocean.
CV:
Ed Emery [m. 1966 Peterhouse, Cambridge] completed
his Masters in Ethnomusicology (MMus) at the School of Oriental and African
Studies [SOAS] in London in 2009. He has organIsed
two international conferences on the muwashshah
and zajal and their relationship to the Early
European lyric, and he is now pursuing a PhD on the same subject (�Re-writing
the sonnet: Poetics in an age of nakba and
imperial construction�) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. For the
past ten years he has been a Research Associate in the Centre for Migration and
Diaspora Studies at SOAS. He is also the organiser of The Free University, an
independent dissenting academy based at SOAS.
E-mail: [email protected]
__________
3. On the trail of Bensoussane:
Murder, colonial prisons, and memory through a song from Western
Algeria
Jonathan Glasser
[College of William and Mary]
ABSTRACT: �The
Song of Bensoussane� is a renowned qṣ�da from northwestern Algeria that recounts the murder of a young
Spanish woman and the trial that followed from the perspective of her killer.
The continued popularity of the narrative song is unusual, in that it has long
outlasted the late nineteenth-century context that it speaks of. It is also
unusual because much of the song is in the voice of its protagonist, and that
protagonist is a young Jewish man whose Arabic is clearly marked as Jewish. The
Jewish association of the song is accentuated by the fact that its most famous
recordings were made by Jewish artists.
Despite the hard-nosed realist
quality of the narrative, there has been a great deal of speculation about its
origins. The events and even location that gave rise to the narrative have
remained vague, and there are internal ambiguities about the narrator that make
it unclear whether it is recounted in the voice of the murderer or of someone
else. Furthermore, its continued popularity, both among Maghribi
Muslims and among older Jews in the Maghribi Jewish diaspora, raises questions about how this song interacts
with representations of Jews and of the colonial Algerian past.
This paper addresses the
ambiguities of �The Song of Bensoussane� through an archival approach.
Drawing on prisoner records in French archives as well as newspaper accounts, I
situate the narrative arc in actual events that took place in Oran beginning in
1889. I then trace the fate of Bensoussane in the
courts and eventually in an overseas penal colony. The fate of the murderer
then intersects with the compositional and recording history of the song. By
tracing the link between the earliest recordings and the prisoner�s life
history, I hope to resolve some of the ambiguities attached to the song while
also helping to make sense of its enduring affective power.
CV: PENDING
E-mail: [email protected]
__________
4. Prison for the Brave: Informality, incarceration, and the politics of the unspeakable in mahraganat music prison songs
Dalia Ibraheem [
ABSTRACT: For more than
two years (2022-204), I worked with the cultural producers of a place-bound
electronic dance music genre in Egypt called mahraganat.
The singers of the genre are exclusively urban poor young men from popular
neighborhoods in Cairo and Alexandria. By the end of my first year, I realised the existence of a whole mahraganat
subgenre focusing on incarceration where artists either sing about the
imprisonment of their loved ones or their own experiences behind bars. Although
I was immersed in the social world of mahraganat,
I attribute my late discovery to the fact that artists employ coveted metaphors
and coded language to speak about prison. This presentation zooms in on this
subgenre of mahraganat prison songs to explore
the complicated relation between expressive culture, urban informality and the
incarceration of the urban poor.
Based on extensive fieldwork with mahraganat
singers and dancers, this presentation shows how the experience of prison is
part of everyday life in Egypt's urban popular neighborhoods. A considerable
number of young men in these neighborhoods are imprisoned for various stretches
of time over petty crimes like street fights, stealing electric current, or
drug use, or more serious crimes like drug-dealing or gang formation. By
analyzing the content, discourse and the semiotics of ten mahraganat
prison songs, I demonstrate how mahraganat
music muddles the line between the auto-biographical and socio-biographical in
these prison songs. Furthermore, I examine the coded language artists use to
refer to prisons in their songs and mahraganat
dance styles that are related to incarceration. I argue that mahraganat music and dance function as a tactical
medium through which artists and dancers instantiate
and comment on the experience of incarceration without being overtly political.
CV: Dalia Ibraheem is an anthropology PhD candidate at Rutgers
University. Ibraheem�s current interdisciplinary research on Egyptian mahraganat music investigates the generative
tensions between aesthetics, politics and the built environment. Her award
winning master�s thesis focused on organised
football fandom in Egypt; the Ultras and subject construction. Her research
interests include popular culture, music and sound, media city, sports, urban
ethnography, nationalism, regimes of mobility, youth and aspirations, global
blackness and anthropology of the state.
E-mail: [email protected]
__________
5. Healing tangos in Franco’s Prisons
Bel�n
P�rez Castillo [Universidad Complutense]
ABSTRACT:
Musical practices were common in Spanish prisons during and after the Civil
War. The daily presence of death � whether in the form of executions or as a
result of disease and hunger � permeated the macabre contrafacta
of well-known songs with which male and female prisoners mocked the final
curtain, referring to it with jocular names such as �la Pepa.� Alongside
collective singing, there existed a more individualized form of expression that
was no less rooted in solidarity. This practice was based on a collaborative
creative process and on a genre � the tango � that made it possible to
channel the feelings of loss and melancholy experienced by Spanish prisoners.
This proposal focuses on the processes of globalization and reterritorialization
of the tango (Pelinski, 2000; 2009) in order to
examine the songs composed by Daniel Ant�n during his imprisonment in 1939.
It analyzes psychological survival strategies through artistic expression (Sieburth, 2014) and the capacity of his songs to generate
feelings of empathy and cooperation (Margulis, 2019).
His tangos, the product of solidarity among prisoners, drew on shared
experiences and enabled them to rework and counteract the trauma of war and
imprisonment.
CV: Bel�n
P�rez Castillo is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Musicology at the Complutense University in Madrid. Her
research focuses on twentieth-century and contemporary Spanish music, especially
the connections between music and politics and music and exile. In 2014, she
began a line of research on musical activity in Spanish Civil War and postwar
prisons. In this field, she has been the Principal Researcher of the research
project �Captive music. Survival, redemption and rebellion in musical
practices in Franco�s prisons (1937-1945)� (166-MD-2021), and has published
several articles with publishers such as Peter Lang, Comares,
and Oxford University Press.
E-mail: [email protected]
__________
6. Prison songs
and Italy
Luca Battioni [Brown
University]
ABSTRACT: Across
shifting political circumstances and epistemic frameworks, prison songs in
Italy have functioned as discursive sites through which contested constructions
of deviance, social cohesion, and moral order have been projected and
renegotiated. In my broader research, prison songs serve as an analytic
framework for examining artistic performances and musical productions in Italy
from the 1950s to the present.
This paper focuses more narrowly on
prison songs and Italy�s Southern Question through the lens of
1970s recordings, addressing critical questions of authenticity, resistance,
and commodification. As artifacts associated with
conditions of social exclusion and marginalization, prison songs have operated
both as forms of self-identification within carceral
spaces and as objects of political and aesthetic fascination beyond prison
walls.
Particular attention is given to the
work of anthropologist and poet Antonino Uccello and singer Rosa Balistreri,
whose engagements with prison repertoires brought the historical
marginalization of southern Italy and processes of internal colonization onto
the national stage. Their work is situated within a longer genealogical history
of prison songs that intersected with anthropological research, commercial
recording practices, and political protest. Prison songs, thus, emerge as an
elusive and contested �genre,� oscillating between being a performance
style, the musical expression of a specific space or a type of voice.
Ultimately, I argue that prison songs have been functioning as performative arenas for constituting, dismantling, reinscribing, or reimagining new
forms of political subjectivity and musical authenticity.
CV: Luca Battioni is a PhD candidate in Italian Studies at Brown
University and an MA candidate in Musicology/Ethnomusicology through the Open
Graduate Education Program. His research focuses on the politics of music,
voice, and incarceration in modern Italy. His doctoral project examines musical
circulation and cultural diplomacy under the Italian Fascist regime, while his
MA thesis analyzes how the performance of prison songs shapes political and
artistic subjectivities in the Italian context.
E-mail: [email protected]
__________
7. Feelings and fears of an outstanding fifteenth-century Northern
Italian prisoner
Gioia Filocamo [Conservatorio di musica �Giulio Briccialdi�
di Terni - Universit� di Parma]
ABSTRACT:
In the fifteenth-century laudario
of the Confraternity of Santa Maria della Morte in Bologna, a collection of 213 laude (short poems to be sung), 11 texts were composed in prison by
the nobleman Giovanni Marco Pio from Carpi (?-1469). He was imprisoned and beheaded in Ferrara
following a failed conspiracy against his uncle Borso
d�Este (1413-1471), Duke of Modena, Reggio, and Ferrara, the true referee of the Pio�s family
authority in Carpi, near Modena.
Giovanni Marco�s laude can be found
in MS 157 of the University Library of Bologna, containing the largest number
of poems among the 13 found so far belonging to the Bolognese Confraternity of
Death. These poems have already been published, but without any commentary on
their moralising content, which is proposed in this paper. What kind of
feelings appear in them? How did a nobleman reflect on the events that led to
his death, and on his life? The presence of such laude fits well with the most important purpose of the
Confraternity: founded in 1336, this institution set itself the goal of
comforting those condemned to death in the hours immediately preceding their
execution, the first in the world. In fact, the main aim of the Bolognese
brethren of Santa Maria della Morte
was a true transformation of the prisoner�s soul through a full and fast
conversion, which turned the criminal into a saint and made him a respectable
civic example.
CV: Gioia Filocamo
teaches Poetry for Music and Musical
Dramaturgy at the Conservatoire of Terni, and Music and Society in the Medieval and Renaissance
Age at the University of Parma, Italy. She
received a Diploma in Piano (1988), a Degree in Drama, Art,
and Music Studies (1994), a PhD in the Philology of
Music (2001), and a PhD in History (2015). She has held fellowships and
scholarships at
E-mail: [email protected]
__________
8. Singing the last: personal
biography and social protest in Rosa Balistreri’s
"Noi siamo nell’inferno carcerati”
Simona Gatto [Universitat de Valencia]
ABSTRACT:
Personal history and civil protest are deeply intertwined in the human and
artistic trajectory of Rosa Balistreri (1927�1990),
the foremost figure of Sicilian folk song and an irregular protagonist of
Italian musical culture in the 1960s and 1970s. Her powerful and original
poetics arise from an authentic urgency to recount the everyday tragedy of a
desperate, oppressed, and humiliated humanity�one to which she herself felt
she belonged. A denied childhood in the poor Sicily of the 1930s, male
violence, social injustice and imprisonment shaped her tormented biography and
fostered a strong political consciousness that found expression through song.
My
study focuses on the album "Noi siamo nell�inferno carcerati"
(1974), in which Balistreri explores, across sixteen
tracks, the multiple dimensions of prison life: despair, remorse, indignation,
the desire for vengeance, and the anguish of prisoners� mothers. The
repertoire combines Sicilian traditional songs drawn from nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century folk collections with pieces Balistreri
reportedly learned during her own periods of incarceration in Palermo�s Vicaria prison. Through her rough, deeply expressive vocal
timbre, Balistreri transforms personal suffering into
a collective narrative, offering her body and voice to the last and the
marginalized in a project that is simultaneously poetic and political.
CV: After
graduating with honours with an MA in Foreign Languages and Literatures from
the Universit� della Calabria
(
Her
research interests include biographical research on female performers, gender
and performance practice in Renaissance music, and the interactions between
popular and cultivated repertoires. She is also a singer and percussionist,
specializing in Southern Italian folk traditions and early music repertoire.
E-mail: [email protected]
__________
9. "La Morte di
Caserio": the origins, reappearance trajectory
and historical misunderstanding of an iconic anarchist ballad
Riccardo La Spina
ABSTRACT:
PENDING
E-mail:
[email protected]
__________
10. Sceriffata neoclassica: Parody and deconstruction of Neapolitan prison song
Giulio Minniti [University of Cambridge]
ABSTRACT: Early
1990s, Salerno � a mid-sized dull and ordinary port city in Southern
Italy.� Gianfranco Marziano, a virtuoso amateur
guitarist and singer-songwriter, self-produces albums that he will only share
among his friends. This allows him complete control over the contents of his
songs, resulting, among other things, in some of the most blasphemous songs
ever written.
In a few years, word of mouth rises his uncanny songs to minor fame in his hometown. Come
E-Mule first and YouTube later, and in a dozen years
his oeuvre spills over the internet without his authorisation.
Outrageous, weird, improbable songs never intended for larger circulation
became available to the entire world (although he is still an underground and
obscure author, virtually unknown even in his native region Campania).
Of all of Marziano�s uncountable
parodies of musical stereotypes, I focus on Sceriffata
neoclassica, his take on �prison song�. Here,
he distorts the sacred topoi of the
genre�the narrative of suffering, the performance of crime, the memories of
trial and judgement, the inevitable invocation to the
mamma�down to unfathomable pits of crassness. Sceriffata
neoclassica is a unique divertissement
where the stereotypical apparatus of a traditional prison song is deconstructed
via its squalid inflation: by satirising the
genre�s conventions, this song exposes the rigid, codified structures that
underpin our understanding of the musical prison narrative.
CV: PENDING
E-mail: [email protected]
__________
11. “In the
middle of the sea, there’s a fountain where prisoners go to drink”: The role of
watery symbols in singing and remembering the carceral
experience in early twentieth-century Southern Italy
Elisabetta Visaggio [King’s College,
ABSTRACT:
This paper will focus on two canti
or
'outside' the social network of a community.
CV: Elisabetta Visaggio is a PhD
candidate at King's College London, where she also teaches. Through a Memory
Studies approach, her work revolves around the analysis of symbols and tropes
mobilised by the oral culture remembering emigration from Southern Italy at the
turn of the twentieth century and after WWII. Her research interests also
include the entanglement between memories and myths. She has presented her work
at conferences internationally.
E-mail: [email protected]
__________
12. Sounding Together as a restorative act; the making of Carceral Scrivings
Maureen
Wolloshin [Independent artistic researcher]
ABSTRACT: I examine the making of Carceral Scrivings,
a short film which emerged from my participation in group sonic free
improvisations in The Red Prison, Sulaymaniah, Iraq in
September 2022. My journey through the making of the film into a deepening
understanding of the purpose of my free improvising is explored. At the heart
of this are interpersonal connections, strengthened and deepened with my fellow
performers by the soundings we undertook together in
and with the space.
The
emotional devastation the film conjures is seen to be a vestige of and homage
to the experience of women who had been imprisoned there. Their echo and breath
were palpable. This had agency in the sounds we made and in the character of the piece I produced.
I
explain the journey I travelled towards the improvisations and on to the film
making. Ideas about instruments, technique and feminism were fellow travellers
and their contribution and development are discussed.
The
film making process and its use of images and improvisations from inside The
Red Prison are presented as a coming to terms with the anger and despair the
space and its ghosts initially conjured in me. In the face of carceral human acts of horror, renewed peace and hope were
evoked, and emotional equilibrium restored for me when we took the time to
listen and sound together.
CV:
Maureen Wolloshin is an oboist, improviser and feministing academic. Her work is a co-creating with others,
objects and locations. This includes the development of a unique instrument to
extend her sonic scope. Ensemble memberships include Free Range Orchestra and
Noisy Women Present.� Small formations include duos with Khabat Abas and Stevie Wishart.
Recent commissions have come
from Bl!ndman and Wandelweiser Collective. Residencies awarded in 2024
include Cove Park and Sound Arguments at Orpheus Instituut.
Maureen has presented her research at institutions across the UK and Europe.
She is published in Echo
Journal. Her PhD examining the agency of gender and instrument in her free
improvising was awarded in 2025.
E-mail: [email protected]
__________
Last updated: 17.vi.2026
Universitas adversitatis
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