Exploring micro-worlds of music meanings

A musical practice may have exclusive meanings shared only by some groups of people within a society. In fact, music has the capacity to create spaces for reserved communication between groups of individuals. Within these ambits, performance activity accompanies more or less articulated forms of thinking of the same performers and parts of competent listeners, since, if nothing else, each musical event is imagined previously and discussed afterwards. This shared knowledge impregnates the concreteness of musical expression, often explaining the variability which is perceptible when listening from outside the group. To investigate this kind of ambit of construction of meanings, it is necessary to try to get as close as possible to the cognitions shared by those who belong to it. To this end, a very significant contribution can come from heuristic approaches based on the strategies of dialogue, above all, negotiated dialogues (and not simple juxtapositions of different opinions) where, on the basis of deep mutual trust, through the intertwining and interaction of different points of view, elements of interpretation emerge for the scholar. This text aims to deal with this, based on a concrete methodological experience

Current creativities in multipart singing practice

The pervasive diffusion of instruments for sound recording and reproduction has radically changed (and is still continuously changing) our concept of music inducing us to think of music as a thing. It afflicts all the making music scenarios all over the world with different impacts and consequences. Within what we still call “oral music” - but it would be better to use the Walter Ong's concept of “secondary orality” since a real “pure orality” is only a theoretical abstraction – a very wide range of deep “in becoming” transformations concerns both the music performances and its conversational representations. It is particularly manifest within multipart music oral practices that, as coordinate collective actions, show symbolically elaborated formulations of music creativities consciously shared by the performers. This is what the paper deals with on the basis of a lengthy dialogical research experience on a multipart singing practice in a Sardinian village, Santu Lussurgiu.La difusión generalizada de instrumentos para la grabación de sonido ha cambiado y sigue cambiando radicalmente nuestro concepto de música induciéndonos a pensar en ella como un objeto. Afecta a todas las formas de hacer música en el mundo con diferentes consecuencias e impacto. Dentro de lo que todavía llamamos "música oral" (aunque sería mejor utilizar el concepto de Walter Ong de "oralidad secundaria", ya que una "oralidad pura" ya es sólo una abstracción teórica), un amplio rango de profundas transformaciones continuas implica tanto a las actuaciones musicales como a sus representaciones. Esto se aprecia particularmente en músicas orales a varias voces que, al coordinar acciones colectivas, muestran simbólicas y elaboradas formulaciones de creatividad musical conscientemente compartidas por los músicos. Este artículo aborda esta problemática a partir de una larga experiencia de investigación dialógica sobre una práctica de canto a varias voces en Santu Lussurgiu, un pueblo de Cerdeña

Una tenda araba in Casteddu. Identità e geografie musicali ante litteram

Strumenti di comunicazione delle élite socio-economiche, i quotidiani italiani dell’Ottocento dedicano ben poco interesse alle espressioni musicali del ‘popolo’ e di altre culture. Su tali espressioni, tutt’al più, si trovano brevi osservazioni e commenti all’interno di cronache locali, oppure sporadici articoli, sovente con tono di divertissement. Si tratta comunque di materiali che criticamente verificati, alla luce anche delle conoscenze di altre fonti letterarie ed iconografiche coeve (diari di viaggiatori, testi etnografici ante litteram eccetera), possono offrire indicazioni sul paesaggio sonoro dell’epoca e sulle narrazioni connesse con l’attività musicale. Su questa base, il saggio focalizza un piccolo corpus di materiali schedati nella banca dati Artmus e ricavati da giornali della Sardegna. Al di là dei contenuti, tali materiali presentano tracce significative sul sorgere della questione dell’identità culturale dell’isola, e sull’immaginario esotico condiviso dagli uomini colti e delle classi sociali agiate del tempo

Le faux-bourdon entre oralité et écriture

Il saggio ripercorre i tratti essenziali dello sviluppo storico del falsobordone – ossia la tecnica di armonizzazione di brevi frammenti melodici realizzata mediante triadi complete in posizione fondamentale e caratterizzata da due fasi, la prima costruita su un solo accordo ribattuto, la seconda costituita da una più o meno elaborata cadenza – proponendo nuovi materiali e spunti di riflessione rispetto alla monografia sull’argomento realizzata dall’autore nel 1995. Nella seconda parte, sulla base della dimostrata secolare continuità di pratiche esecutive imperniate sul falsobordone, il saggio inquadra la questione nell’ambito generale del rapporto oralità scrittura, muovendo da una fondamentale distinzione (mutuata dai cultural studies ) fra grande tradizione e piccola tradizione della musica, collocando il fenomeno falsobordone in un peculiare ambito intermedio di incontro fra il richiamo alla grande tradizione - suggerito dal ricorso alla scrittura (benché in forme assai rudimentali) e dalla non quotidianità dei contesti esecutivi - e l’appartenenza alla piccola tradizione della maggior parte dei performer, poco avvezzi all’uso della scrittura come strumento di trasmissione dei saperi, e con esperienze culturali imperniata sui tratti dell’oralità primaria

Hierachies called into question: Leader and Accompanyng Roles in Multipart Music

Within the sphere of multipart music, not all the performance roles can be considered as being of equal importance. There are essential or main roles, second leads or complementary roles, unessential or subordinate ones, and so on. This different relevance of the roles can be interpreted as an iconic representation of the general conceptual framework of the society expressing them; it can be considered symbolically representative of aspects of shared cognitive models inherent to the social life of the population in question, which are experienced and lived in each performance. The article examines the theme by means of a case study from Sardinia that concerns the mutual coordination of four singing roles involved in a tenore singing. This music practice pivots on one main/leading voice accompanied by three vocal parts arranged as syllabic formulas: thus, it implies an idea of music behaviour based on a hierarchical relationship. In fact, each voice has a specific range of performance choices and, through melodic, rhythmic and timbral nuances, singers experience, negotiate and even call into question these basic senses of hierarchy. Beyond these nuances, Sardinia’s a tenore singing mechanism demonstrates the overall special relevance of singing/playing in four parts in cases in which each constitutive and distinctive sound action is performed by one singer (or instrument). Making music in four parts/with four people ensures gratification in terms of the musical outcomes as well as the inter-individual relationships that is proportional to the engagement of the participants. It can be considered a metaphorical representation of an ideal working group with a perfect balance of task distribution ensuring common engagement to achieve the best result