Gavino Gabriel

Gavino Gabriel (Tempio Pausania, 1881 – Rome, 1980) was an Italian composer, ethnomusicologist scholar of Sardinian music, especially that of Gallura, and has written and published many essays on the subject.

In 1910 on the Rivista Musicale Italiana, with the presentation of Ildebrando Pizzetti, he published his first ethnomusicological work, Canti e cantadori della Gallura.

[1] In the years between 1922 and 1925 Gabriel in Milan carried out an intense activity of popularizing the new technologies of sound reproduction, he started with the recording for La voce del padrone of the collection of traditional Sardinian songs entitled I canti di Gallura, dell'Anglona, Marghine e della Barbagia.

[2] In 1928 he assumed the direction of the newborn Istituto centrale per i beni sonori ed audiovisivi ("Central Institute for Sound and Audiovisual Assets", or Discoteca di Stato), he composed an only opera La Jura; in 1934, following his initiative, a law was passed that extended the activity to "everything in the field of sounds that interests the scientific, artistic and literary culture" and, more particularly, to the collection of songs and dialects from all regions and colonies of Italy, as well as studies of glottology and history.

On this occasion he met Giuseppe Prezzolini who a year earlier had been nominated "professor emeritus" of Italian studies at Columbia University.