Ma l’è dure la sentenze no savé dù là si va…”

(…Little girls, if you knew what the sighs of love are!

You can die, go underground, and still you can feel pain.

And dying, dying, never mind, we came into this world not to stay forever,

But the sentence is hard, because we don’t know where we go...)

This is a philosophical text, which can be found among literary works or rural culture  of oral tradition.

It is known and assured that many young people are interested in the oral tradition. The decade of ‘60s was the poorest for the study of this material, as in Italy the economic growth was taking place and everyone could finally enjoy consumer goods; but I don’t dare to complain about that. But I noticed that from 1980 until today the number of scholars of ethnomusicology has grown up thanks to many new courses at universities born around this discipline. Then, there are more and more people interested in this subject: the “ battenti” from Verbicario ( Calabria) were five, but after very thriving times, they are almost twenty. That is the same for every other form of “active” pilgrimage, like the one of Vallo from Lucania and others.

The study of oral tradition is also an excellent preparation and musical training as the principles of harmony are discussed in every form: the descant, the organum and the ochetus, which were known as “ first forms of polyphony” in history and music books. Someone supposed they were lost, but now some new researches found many of them in the  descants from Umbria, Latium and Marche and the entire Apennines.

It is very important for this Archive to be constantly updated and enriched. Music has a volatile and precarious character, which sometimes we regret, imagining that what we feel today will never be approachable to what it was before the advent of mass medias and it is true. But it is very important to register again all the material to observe the mutations. For example: in the song of the Southern oral tradition there was always a rich ornamentation, acrobatic Melisma ( group of notes for one syllable), slip games from a note to the other, approaches to the first sound, which now tend to disappear, because of the work of singers, who before took delight in these skills. By observing this phenomenon, I started to inquire into the singers to understand the reason for this stylistic choice. The singers themselves did not realize the change in their singing. After listening to their songs made twenty or thirty years ago, they exclaimed: “ Oh! But now there is no more time for so many trills!”. That is true, today the time is too short. Even the farmers have a faster style of life, because of the work with machines and more precise times. The term “ sun to sun”, which once meant from sunrise to sunset, as working time, now has been translated into figures, and the farmer has to deliver his work within a certain time to get the pay. Then, the song was overshadowed and was influenced by the time like any other time of the day.

So, recording and archiving is always very useful.

In my opinion, we have to give this music the right respect. For example, the researcher must respect the music proposed by the singers, as the singers must respect the researcher’s need to save, study and understanding. The singers often, especially when organized into various groups or brotherhoods, don’t accept that the researcher sings their tracks. I often got scoldings from brotherhoods because I had taught to my students a song of their. Talking to them was very important: I tried to let them understand that this kind of music, proposed by them, so unique, authentic and still spontaneous, is for us- coming from another musical culture- a single source of study to understand the principles of harmony, the relativity of the diatonic scale, the difference between tempered and not tempered system. The singers understood but did not want I cut discs with their material and this is right and obvious today, because since the advent of World Music has begun for popular singers a very important market. From our side, we look for this material but we have not it. Anyway, we do not try to imitate the peasant way of singing, because the imitation would result reductive. On the contrary, we try to understand the structure of the tracks and the function of its micro-variations, besides the precious little spaces taken by the singer on Melisma during his improvisation. It is a very accurate study to do and it takes very long time. It is like going out from a tempered box and enter into a world of small fractions of sounds: that is very tiring and difficult for people being more than 10 years old and without more an important side of instinctive hearing. It takes time, long time.

“...e a murì murì, pazienze, za in chest mund no vimm di stà” ( …and dying, dying, never mind, we came into this world not to stay forever).