Archivio Storico:- ex Dipartimento di Musica e Spettacolo - Universita' di Bologna
1. Introduction
Musics are not born traditional, insists Jean-François Bernardini of the group I Muvrini, they become traditional, with time (interview, 1995). Most of us, I fancy, have a box labelled traditional music into which we are happy to put some sorts of music but not others, and we would probably agree that contemporary or recently evolved styles and genres do not feature nearly so prominently as those of past generations. We would probably also recognize a certain irony in this, and we might from time to time ask ourselves what, out of the hurly-burly of musical expression characterizing our own day and age, might find itself occupying the traditional box two generations hence. This is a question that has inspired many an impassioned debate in Corsica in recent years, prompted in part by the development of the group phenomenon which, with its associated dialectics, is one of the central focuses of the present paper (1). |
2. Aspects of group
activity in Corsica
As in many other parts of the Mediterranean region,
traditional music in Corsica was subject to a process of
increasing decline during the middle decades of the 20th
century. (I use the term traditional here to
denote the kind of material that would, in the
not-so-distant past, have been considered worthy of the
attention of an ethnomusicologist or folksong collector
largely on account of its rural, pre-modernized and hence
supposedly uncontaminated status.) In particular, monodic
songs which were associated with specific occasions or
rituals and which were often extemporized in response to
the circumstances of the moment were heard less and less
as many of their erstwhile performers
embraced a more modern and quasi-urban lifestyle,
although polyphonic songs by contrast proved to be more
tenacious, both by dint of the greater independence of
their original performance contexts and through their
subsequent adaptability to new contexts in which they
were able to acquire new meanings (see Bithell,
forthcoming). A general process of modernization and urbanization such as one might find in many other parts of the world does not, however, account for the particular direction taken by musical developments in Corsica during the past 30 years. One of the most significant phenomena during this period has been the appearance of a remarkable number of formalised groups descended from the seminal group Canta u Populu Corsu which formed on the back of the autonomist movement and played a significant role in the cultural regeneration or riacquistu which it fuelled from the early 1970s (2). Almost thirty years on, there are now two generations of groups dedicated to varying degrees to the promotion of the cultural cause, with new groups constantly appearing on the scene, and over one hundred titles featuring groups who have become established since the 1970s can currently be found in Corsicas record shops and supermarkets (3). There are those who might, perhaps, be tempted to disregard the activities and output of such groups as merely revivalist and, as such, inauthentic or at least suspect. What has happened in Corsica, however - and one must remember that this is an island of only 240,000 or so people, with the population of some inland villages dwindling to twenty or less in the winter months - is that many of the sons of the chief village singers heard on field recordings made prior to 1975 - that is, the direct inheritors of quite specific village traditions - now sing in some of the most professional groups. Jean-François and Alain Bernardini of the group I Muvrini, for example, are the sons of Ghjuliu (Jules) Bernardini, one of the core traditional singers from the village of Tagliu who features prominently in the field recordings of Quilici, Laade and others made between 1948 and 1973 and who is still very much revered (posthumously) as one of the anchors of the tradition. The group Voce di Corsica includes a number of singers - Petru Guelfucci, Filippu Rocchi, Benedettu Sarocchi - who are members of the main families of singers from the villages of Sermanu and Rusiu which have also taken center stage in field recording collections (4). Indeed, some of these younger singers have themselves featured on field recordings in their teenage years, singing with their fathers and uncles.
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