Francesco Balilla Pratella

Italian composer and theorist Francesco Balilla Pratella grew up listening to Romagnese folk tunes, and he spent his latter years collecting and cataloging them (and also tunes from elsewhere around Italy). This musicological work should rightly be considered Pratella's best and most important legacy, but a brief stint with the Italian Futurist movement around the time of World War I tends to dominate biographical accounts. Pratella was born in Lugo di Romagna on the first day of February in 1880; he studied music at the Liceo Rossini in Pesaro, and then, after teaching for t...