Italian Treasury: Liguria-Polyphony of Ceriana [Original recording remastered] Review

Even in 1954, when Alan Lomax made his enthnographic field recordings of Italian folk music from Liguria to Sicily, that music was on the brink of being swept away, extinguished by the same technology of electronic mass culture that made the recordings possible. Lomax himself realized that he had arrive not "a moment too soon."

This recording features the singing of the "Compagnia Sacco", a group of villagers from Ceriana (near the French border) and its agricultural environs who identified themselves by their characteristic lunch sack, carried over their shoulders when they worked in the fields (shown in the cover picture). Originally they had sung together in their communal work times in the fields. Although the members of the Compagnia self-consciously proclaim the millennial antiquity of their music, the Compagnia was formally organized in 1926, and some of the original members were still singing. The voices you will hear are plainly the voices of older people; the prime virtue of their singing, generously stated, is "rude vigor." The model for their Company is indeed ancient; the Compagnia Sacco is fundamentally a "confraternity", a fraternal order of the type that played a huge role in the society of Renaissance Europe, not only in Italy but also in the North. A confraternity was a voluntary association of men (and sometimes of women) dedicated to the maintenance of a cult of worship of a specific saint or saintly image in a specific chapel. Confraternities in urban communities typically cut across lines of family, guild, and even social class. Supervision of festivities associated with the cult was part of their 'mandate.' If you've ever visited an urban cathedral in Italy, you've seen that the high altar and the screened choir belongs to the tourists these days, while the side chapels are often closed to the public. In the Renaissance, the main altar belonged to the clergy, while the side chapels were the focus of popular devotion and community worship, including music. The confraternities were the providers of music for the people, and at least partly by the people.

The fourth track, Lauda da Madona da Vila, is a 1954 relic of confraternal music of the Renaissance. The structure is a kind of improvisatory polyphony, with a vocal drone to establish the mode. Yes, this music is vestigially modal! A traditional melody is the basis for improvised ornamentation, though obviously the ornamentation is also tradition-bound, not utterly new and free with each improvisation. Such "lauda" melodies form the 14th & 15th centuries have been preserved in the songbooks of two Tuscan confraternities, along with financial records that show several interesting facts. One, the melodies were often commissioned compositions from literate clerical musicians; in other words, this 'pop' music was written by elites. Two, professional singers and instrumentalists were often hired; the members of the confraternity no doubt participated in the singing but did not dominate it.

I mention all this because my chief interest in ethnographic recordings like Lomax's is not in the quality of the performance but in the insight to be gained about the evolution of music - in all its aspects - over the centuries of European history. A little knowledge of that history, in this case, illuminates the fact that folk music is not always as ancient, unchanging, and preliminary to 'composed music' as the ethnographers propose. In the case of Liguria, the flow of musical DNA seems to have been from the center to the isolated outskirts, from the elite to the folk.

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