* 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, Izmir, 1-4
June 2026. Together with other collected materials.
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
Italy’s Southern Question in 1970s recordings
Luca
Battioni [Brown University] [Abstract]
[PDF of
paper]
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 Western Algeria
Jonathan Glasser [William
and Mary College] [Abstract]
[PDF of paper]
7. Prison for the brave:
Informality, incarceration, and politics of the unspeakable in mahraganat music prison songs
Dalia Ibraheem
[Rutgers University] [Abstract]
[PDF of paper]
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
[University of Cambridge] [Abstract] [PDF of paper]
10. “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, London] [Abstract] [PDF of paper]
11.
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] FINALISED
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 Yedi Kule
fortress. As a site of detention spanning Ottoman and post-Ottoman transitions,
Yedi Kule 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. Prison songs and Italy’s Southern Question in 1970s recordings
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]
__________
3. 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]
__________
4. Feelings and
fears of an outstanding fifteenth-century Northern Italian prisoner
Gioia Filocamo
[Conservatorio di musica “Giulio Briccialdi” di Terni – Università di Parma] FINALISED
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 (c.1434–1469). 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, and some
thoughts on their moralising content are 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, and it was the first of its kind.
The principal aim of the Bolognese brethren of Santa Maria della
Morte was the 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 Oxford, UK (Lady Margaret Hall), Bologna, Italy (University), Chicago, USA
(Newberry Library), Wolfenbüttel, Germany (Herzog
August Bibliothek), Cambridge, UK (St John’s
College), Uppsala, Sweden (Swedish Collegium for
Advanced Study), Gotha,
Germany (Forschungsbibliothek). She has extensively
published on various aspects of musical life in today’s Italy.
E-mail: [email protected]
__________
5. Singing the last: personal biography and social protest in Rosa Balistreri’s "Noi siamo nell’inferno carcerati”
Simona Gatto [Universitat de Valencia] [FINALISED]
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
an MA in Foreign Languages and Literatures from the Università
della Calabria
(Italy), I earned an MA in Renaissance and Baroque Singing from the Venice
Conservatory in 2026. I am currently completing a PhD at the Universitat de València (Spain),
with a research focus on the solo performance practice of polyphonic madrigals
in Adrian Willaert’s Musica
nova (Venice, 1559).
My research interests
include biographical research on female performers, gender and performance
practice in Renaissance music, and the interactions between popular and
cultivated repertoires. I am also a singer and percussionist, specializing in
Southern Italian folk traditions and early music repertoire.
E-mail: [email protected]
__________
6. 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 qṣida 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]
__________
7. Prison for the brave: Informality, incarceration, and the politics of the unspeakable in mahraganat music prison songs
Dalia Ibraheem [Rutgers University]
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 analysing 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]
__________
8.
"La Morte di Caserio": the origins, reappearance trajectory and
historical misunderstanding of an iconic anarchist ballad
Riccardo La Spina
[Independent researcher]
ABSTRACT:
Considered no less infamous than the crime it punished – i.e. of assassinating
French president Carnot, anarchist Sante Caserio’s swift 1894
imprisonment/execution moved Pietro Gori to publish a collection of elegiac poems
eulogising the 20-year-old baker. Set to music as a stornello,
Gori’s 1894 poem Caserio, was adopted
as an anthem by Italy’s anarchists, while another tribute by the obscure Pietro Cini, Le
Ultime Ore e la Decapitazione di Caserio deviates in purpose and trajectory. Eventually
recorded after WWI as La Morte di
Caserio, it varies from the original composition
of the Italian broadsides, significantly transformed across different versions
by Raoul Romito for
Columbia in New York (1919, c.1920, 1925), from folk-ballad to elegy. Their
unknown rationale suggests the tenor’s involvement: the text is carefully
selected from the poem’s verses to draw the public/listener to empathy with Caserio – guilt notwithstanding – depicting his French
prosecutors as persecutors (“heartless”, “tyrannical”), ultimately
doubling as a task of the music itself. These early US discs represent the
ballad’s first recorded versions, given the Italian prohibition of such
songs and lyrics, eventually causing confusion and their spurious attribution
to different sources. Disambiguating this muddle of interpretations, this paper
explores the Romito recordings’ propagandistic
and heroising power.
CV: Riccardo
researches nineteenth-century music (opera, vocality,
early recordings of Spain, Mexico, and Hawaii), belongs to international study
groups and scholarly societies, presenting at numerous conferences. Research
awards (UK, US: AMS’ 2014 Hampson Song Research Prize
[A.Barili]); visiting scholarships (Mexico, Spain,
Italy). Published contributions: Grove Music, RILM, Diagonal,
PMM, Studies in Musical Theatre), with projects in press. Riccardo concertises
(tenor-soloist), teaches/coaches voice privately, performs ethnic folksong
self-accompanied on accordion and Georgian panduri)
and composes. He earned his doctorate (Humanities/Musicology) from the Universidad de La Rioja in residency at the Center for Iberian and Latin American Music, University of California,
Riverside (2024).
E-mail: [email protected]
__________
9. 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 raises
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]
__________
10. “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, London]
ABSTRACT:
This paper will focus on two canti del carcere (prison songs)
compiled in Apulia. More specifically, it will interrogate the symbolic role of
water in articulating the precariousness, anguish and hardship of imprisonment.
The case studies chosen are two chants recorded respectively in northern and
southern Apulia in 1977 and 1971, as part of research projects conducted by
Giovanni Rinaldi and Roberto Leydi:
U lunodì trallallà (loosely translates as “On Monday”) and Tu Caterina mia,
Caterina cara (“You, my
dear Caterina”). In addition to foregrounding the
importance of water in mediating the carceral
experience, this paper will highlight similarities with the lyric tropes
deployed by Southern Italian songs narrating permanent separations and
departures, which customarily refer to emigration. To do so, the methodological
approach will hinge on lyric analysis and draw from De Martino's (2019 [1977])
definition of metastoria. The latter is a cultural
landscape that encompasses those mythical, symbolic and ritual forms that perdure throughout the course of history. When remembered
and remediated, these practices can provide guidance
and stability in moments of uncertainty. By turning to this framework, it will be
possible to interpret the wider symbolic meaning and alternative usage of lyric
tropes mobilised by Apulian prison songs, with a
specific focus on watery semiotics. Importantly, thinking with metastoria will delineate the presence of a codified
symbolic horizon dedicated to the mediation of difficult memories related to
distance, uncertainty, (permanent) separation, and experiences of being cast
'inside'
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]
__________
11. 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: 5.vii.2026
Universitas adversitatis
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