2024 Theses Doctoral

Songwriting Oral History Interviews: Archival Songs as Critical-Creative Pedagogy in Dialogue with Women of the Italian Resistance

Montanari, Laura

This arts-based dissertation explores the pedagogical implications offered by the creation of archival songs in dialogue with oral history interviews with women of the Italian Resistance uncovered at the Circolo Gianni Bosio sound and oral history archive (Rome, Italy). The purpose of this study is to create multimedia experiences that can help uncover non-hegemonic stories that reflect the lived experiences of Italian female partisans and to generate musical counter-storytelling with the ultimate intent of assessing their implications for present times.

This study also aims to engage in critical-creative pedagogy by creating multimedia artifacts that can foster listening - for social justice experiences and reposition narratives and counter-narratives through songwriting, thus reconstructing a more complete and diverse picture of the meaning and impact of WWII in the lives of non-hegemonic communities on the Italian peninsula.

Audios of the interviews were imported in Logic Pro X to proceed to coding and thematic analysis with the editing tools offered by a DAW. This process informed the storytelling assembled with the sound collage technique and rendered in the final form of archival songs. In collaboration with the Circolo Gianni Bosio and Casa della Memoria e della Storia, I organized a free guided concert/workshop where visitors of the archive were guided in listening to these interviews through my archival song re-renderings.

Visitors were asked to participate in the study by anonymously answering open-ended questions about their experience. Audios of these commentaries were also imported in Logic Pro X and the materials collected went through a similar coding and thematic analysis. The original lyrics of the research songs were woven with personal observations and audience input, and the research questions were addressed through the production of a music album. These collective reflections informed my original lyric writing and the understanding of the pedagogical implications offered by these newly constructed stories and songs, thus providing my final compositions with increased trustworthiness.

Constructing archival songs and presenting them to a community of memory-making participants elicited personal memories (or previous knowledge in strictly curricular terms), activated feelings of empathy, and illuminated historical understandings. Importantly, however, it also modeled an approach to a critical-creative pedagogy that aims to center oral histories as a megaphone for non-hegemonic voices and historical discourses, thus amplifying the contribution of hidden (yet essential) figures who modeled democratic participation, activism, and ways to name and reimagine the world.

It follows that oral history and sound archives can be inhabited as new classroom spaces and attentive custodians of primary sources that can enrich historical research with non-dominant discourses through a polyphony of voices and languages while also offering democratic and equal participation in our music and social studies curricula.