| 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 Corsica’s 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.
| This circumstance has two
important implications. Firstly, these singers
can legitimately claim to have grown up in the
bosom of the tradition and to be among its most
authentic exponents (even if some of their fellow
group members are more recent converts).
Secondly, if we were to excommunicate these
groups for the purposes of our assessment of the
present state of the island’s musical life,
we would be hard pressed to find many young
singers operating purely in what we might think
of as the traditional mould and our conclusion
would have to be that the ‘tradition’
is to all intents and purposes dying out with the
older generation. It should also be noted that,
while for the most professional of these groups
concert tours and the preparation of the next CD
may well have become a way of life, others manage
to operate in the dual worlds of global market
and local community in a way that makes it
impractical to attempt to dissociate the
‘living’ or grassroots tradition from
the activities of the groups. |
|
The group Voce di
Corsica rehearsing for their appearance on
a television programme being recorded live in the
grounds of the citadel at Corte, home to the
Musée de la Corse (June 1995).
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|
Many of the groups include in
their repertoire a combination (in varying
proportions) of material from the island’s
oral tradition and original compositions, and
here another blurring of the boundaries occurs.
From the perspective of non-Corsican audiences
(whether it be of live performances or of CDs),
it is often either impractical or irrelevant to
discriminate between arrangements of traditional
pieces and newly composed pieces, particularly
when the latter are in an idiom not far removed
from the traditional musical language. In many
cases, therefore, the repertoire as a whole is
identified as the Corsican ‘sound’ or
style (5). I have
elaborated elsewhere (Bithell, 1996) on the way
in which traditional material has evolved in the
hands of the groups.In the present paper my
intention is to examine the way in which
representatives of some of the most prominent
groups formulate and articulate their sense of
continuity with ‘the tradition’ with
respect to their own compositions. |
| Paghjella
singing on the Feast of the Assumption outside
the village bar at Rusiu, including members of
the group Voce di Corsica (August 1994) |
|