Entertaining Children

The Participation of Youth in the Entertainment Industry

G. Arrighi, V. Emeljanow, G. Arrighi, V. Emeljanow

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137305466
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Children have been exploited as performers and wooed energetically as consumers throughout history. These essays offer scholarly investigations into the employment and participation of children in the entertainment industry with examples drawn from historical and contemporary contexts.

Part I Terms of Engagement

1. Musical Education and the Job Market: The Employment of Children and Young People in the Neapolitan Music Industry with Particular Reference to the Period 1650–1806

Rossella Del Prete

INTRODUCTION

From the second half of the eighteenth century, Southern Italy began to show a sensitivity toward the role of human resources as a key contribution toward economic development, a theory that issued from the Enlightenment period. With the double objective of the exploitation by the State of a cheap workforce and of the reduction of poverty and criminality rates, the destitute became the new focus of vocational training and the Kingdom of Naples implemented a public education scheme in the areas of welfare and literacy. Part of this implementation saw the four existing Neapolitan Conservatories transformed from welfare institutes for poor and neglected children into training academies for musicians. A significant rise in demand for Kapellmeisters, singers, instrumentalists, music teachers, and copyists came from both religious (churches, monasteries, and oratories), and secular institutions (theaters, music-copying houses), and saw civic institutions contribute to this development. The object of this chapter is to show the interaction between economic and cultural pressures upon the vocational training of this workforce.

The social characteristics of Neapolitan musicians underwent a profound transformation during the seventeenth century, when musicians of noble descent were replaced by a plethora of new composers belonging to the far less wealthy working and middle classes. One explanation, and the most useful for our purposes, can be found in the process of consolidation of special educational facilities. The four Neapolitan music conservatories, which I list at a later point, were soon able to produce “skilled labor,” which up to then had been the prerogative of chapels and musical institutions that had flourished from the fifteenth century onwards. The demand for music increasingly turned to profane practices (musical theater and concerts) and the phenomenon also influenced the chapels—they began to receive performers (singers and instrumentalists) no longer trained within the religious context, but in the new “schools of music.”

The transformation of the four Neapolitan conservatories (male charity institutes for poor and abandoned children) into vocational training centers for musicians has proven to be a unique case in Italy and can therefore be considered of great interest. This transformation was governed primarily by economic principles and it thus marked the advent of a music market together with the birth of the Scuola Musicale Napoletana.¹ The origins of the Neapolitan conservatories coincided with the need to face an ever increasing request for musical services, both religious and lay, on the part of various local institutions (oratories, congregations, private academies, and, at a later date, opera theaters), and to find sources of income to cover the huge costs of management and assistance.

Although factories, prisons, and vocational schools present throughout the whole Kingdom of Naples attempted to provide training, the absence of a clearly defined policy by the ruling Bourbon dynasty and the rather haphazard State management did not fulfill the objective of economic efficiency advocated by the Neapolitan Enlightenment. The high costs of management and the difficulty in training an inherently unindustrious workforce, more interested in the fulfillment of their primary needs, contributed to make the training in the various charitable establishments even more complicated. However, in the long run, the outcome was positive and progressively overcame the ingrained resistance against the training of children, with the implementation of specialized laboratories and the construction of a special model of music education. The demands imposed upon children by parents, religious institutions, and theater managers in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gradually underwent considerable changes.

A new cultural model, widespread during the eighteenth century, contributed to the social transformation of the family and consequently modified the handling of family relationships. The “job” as a musician was often handed down from father to son. Musicians acquired their initial technical training mostly in the family (if someone was already involved in the musical profession) or from the choirmaster of the cathedral on the principle of the transmission of local artisan craft from master to pupil. Music, therefore, was seen as a family bond, as self-celebration or praise, as a diversion, and also as a tool for salvation and redemption, for the recovery of legality and social relations and as a professional opportunity for the children of the Southern Italian proletariat and middle class.²

THE ECONOMIC, SOCIAL, AND MORAL BENEFITS OF APPRENTICESHIP

Over the course of half a century the four Neapolitan conservatories came into being: Santa Maria di Loreto (1537), Sant’Onofrio a Capuana (1578), Pietà dei Turchini (1583), and Poveri di Gesù Cristo (1589).³ Originally intended as orphanages, they rapidly evolved as social, charitable, and educational functions with music as their core interest.

In the middle of the sixteenth century the city of Naples, emerging out of a long period of political instability, underwent an extraordinary increase in population, which caused social disparities and serious conditions of extreme poverty. Due to the lack of a public assistance policy, it became necessary to deal with the problem of rampant poverty through a recourse to private assistance and charity that materialized in the opening of boarding schools, orphanages, hospitals, and other institutions. Generally these were in the hands of lay or religious congregations and, more often than not, resulted from the initiative of single benefactors.⁴

For the orphaned or abandoned children of these conservatories, the European principle of renfermement, or “locked-up isolation,” recommended reeducational strategies founded on work, a fundamental tool for social control: through work, the poor were socially and morally recuperated, especially if they were young, and were incentivized to self-subsistence. To this end, allowing young children living in the conservatories to work in craft shops as apprentices had a double significance. On the one hand, it directed them toward a trade and granted them a social status to put to use when adults; as well, it replaced an absent family for abandoned orphans. The artisan and his family became the adoptive family of the young apprentices hosted in the shop, which often doubled as the artisan’s home.⁵ This family custody procedure undoubtedly had a very high educational and symbolic value inasmuch as it solved a series of problems (the provision of resources to maintain the child, hosting in a family setting, training for a craft to reuse as an adult), as well as raising funds for those conservatories that undertook to guarantee assistance to the highest number of orphaned or abandoned children.

Children from the four conservatories were directed to different handcraft and manufacturing activities. In a first phase children aged between 7 and 13 were almost exclusively directed toward trades (lace worker, silk weaver, cap maker). Music was used only as an accompaniment to catechesis and a necessary complement of liturgical functions. The institute governors entered into an agreement with the artisans who hosted the little orphans. The istromento⁶ provided for a specific commitment by the master artisan: to teach the figliolo⁷ the trade, to offer him “board and clothing and to treat him well for at least six consecutive years,” to give him also “a new garment made of Naples fabric,” then hand the boy over to the conservatory governors and pay 10 ducats to the conservatory for services rendered. Delays in the hand over or payment resulted in a fine for the artisan of six ducats per month for the length of the delay. In this way, the master artisan was bound to respect the agreement, and expenses for the maintenance of the child were guaranteed. Moreover, an already productive workforce returned to become part of the institute and thus contribute to its revenues.

Some figlioli were gathered by the governors who periodically roamed the city streets looking for orphans or “ill-guided” children, others were pointed out by people who took charge of them and guaranteed the payment of their boarding costs. From the records that register the vicissitudes of the figlioli we can trace a long list of admissions that offer a set of interesting data: name, geographical origin, age, length of stay, plegio or recommendatory person, the admission and exit procedures, and, for the years following 1650, the course of musical studies the figlioli embarked upon. Information also sheds some light on the dynamics of Neapolitan poverty, hinting at the typology of the artisans of that time and the social lineage of those who were to become pupils of the musical conservatories.

For children admitted to the Nautical Art School connected to the Santa Maria di Loreto conservatory there was a further vocational path—that of becoming hands on board a ship.⁸ Nautical studies we...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Setting the Scene: An Introduction
• Part I   Terms of Engagement
• Part II   By Children/for Children
• Part III   Global Perspectives
• Notes on Contributors
• Index