In the Cilento Folklore and Traditions: Cilentana Popular Music
The singing and the musics have always represented
for the people the tool to express joys and
sorrows and to give greater emotional power
to rite any occasion.
In the past the bards,
gathered on the occasion
of marriages, festivities,
lunches, they
put to the test in
verses, a who knew
to
improvise nicer and
touching, satirical
or
compassionate, acclaim
or contempt, if the
theme of love was
always the first,
but it
often gave the place
at comical beats
of
personalities or
situations that formed
the
little chronicle
of the country microcosm.
The folk song, while still practise, has
gained a form almost defined, exactly because
it came to a lacking of the imagination and
the versatility of the past bards and the
texts come accepted passively, taking care
to obey some rules; how, for example, to
remember the verse listened of the grandfather
or to reproduce the fair assonances claiming
a type of theme typical to a resort, that
it distinguishes itself from that neighbouring
areas and a few cases differ from country to country.
The topics are, the cilentani songs repropose
the themes common at the popular tradition
of southern Italy: from those of love - more
numerous - (serenades, distance, passion,
contempt) to those political and social;
from those tied at the cycle of human life
(lullabies, little verse funny for the children,
imenei, funeral laments) to those of fate.
The songs went accompaned,
of rudimentary
by instrumenteg,
bagpipe, the ciaramella,
the whistle, the
guitar battente,
the pandolino,
the violin, and the
drum, that they didn't
give the motif, but
served only to give
the
time and to play
a base tune.
Besides the bagpipe and ciaramella, they
use still in the inland, the other instruments
have disappeared, leaving the place at the
barrel organ, importation to calabro-lucana,
it played to the last poets that still manage
to modulate the notes from the ancient cilentana
songs; rarer players of guitar battente and
flageolet, the last used in the last tradition
only during Christmas.
These instruments are played together, in a
kind of little concert, called li suoni,
only in some occasions, a marriege or a fête.
In the serenades the violin accompanied by
the guitar battente; the flageolet and the
drum tell the rhythm and the melodies in
the singsongs of the threshing; while the
bagpipe, and the ciaramelle, and today barrel
organ or accordion, accompanied the singsongs
of the pilgrimage to the Sacred Mountain.
Tratto da: AMEDEO LA GRECA, "Premessa", in
ENRICO RENNA, SANTINO SCARPA, Carmina Cilenti.
Il canto popolare
cilentano nella tradizione
orale: una proposta
di studio etno-musicale,
opuscolo con musicassetta,
Centro di Promozione
Culturale per il
Cilento, Acciaroli,
1995,
pp. 5-9.