This CD is not of ancient music or, at least, it is not according to the typical approach of philological research. The title recalls the musical ostinato, of course, but even the Italian “Stubborn”, so we could read the title both as “The Stubborn Plebeian” and “The Ostinato of Plebeian”. We want to present it as a game, or an experiment, associated with a particular issue: the relationship between popular music and cultured music, a relationship always well present in the history of Western music. As the interest that Athanasius Kircher, a 17th century German Jesuit, shows for the medicinal melodies adopted in Apulia as an antidote to tarantism, which he treated in Magnes sive de arte magnetica, Musurgia universalis and Phonurgia nova. The theme of the tarantella studied by Kircher himself and, later, by Don Francisco Xavier Cid (Tarantismo observado en España, 1787) is loved and elaborated by composers over the centuries (from Santiago de Murcia to Rossini and Stravinsky) and develops until today in a continuous exchange of melodic material. The Folia of Spain and the Canaria, two forms of dance famous in the European courts between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, also have a traditional remote matrix in the Iberian peninsula. They codify themselves later with precise melodic and choreographic formulas, known through the works of the greatest masters and collections of dances of the Renaissance and Baroque (such as the publications of Cesare Negri and Michael Praetorius). Numerous tunes and dances of popular origin, therefore, meet the appreciation and interest of musicians, becoming the source for compositions and virtuosistic improvisations. It is the case of the Bergamasca, Ciaccona and the already mentioned Folia, elaborated by Tarquinio Merula, Marco Uccellini, Andrea Falconieri and many other composers of the early seventeenth century. But also many other melodies, loved by the public as modern standards and played by virtuosos and amateurs, as in the case of Paul’s Steeple, a typical English tune transcribed in The Division Flute (Walsh, About 1706) and already contained, with the title The Duke of Norfolk, in the collection The division Violin (1684) by John Playford. The cultured environment seems to be in some way interested in popular cultures, rarely allowing an early, almost ethnological interest to emerge; more often, it is enchanted by the different, archaic and exotic taste of a different culture, stylizing its contents and establishing clichés, most often patently invented. In the France of Louis XIV, the musette de cour, a sweet-sounding bagpipe with a bellows (as an alternative to the penetrating sound and the “rough”
insufflation system typical of bagpipes) was fashionable at court, that was well suited to embody the topoi of a bucolic and pastoral imaginary so loved by gentlemen of the time. Even the lower class come into contact with the typical elements of the ruling class, so the musical material of hegemonic culture is received into different social levels which, passively, admit some aspects and sometimes reinvent characters, forms and contents.
It is necessary to quote Charles Burney (1726 – 1814) who, during his musical journey in Italy, during his stay in Naples wrote: “This evening in the streets there were two people singing alternately; one of these Neapolitan Canzoni was accompanied by a violin and calascione. The singing is noisy and vulgar, but the accompaniments are admirable, and well performed. The violin and calascione parts were incessantly at work during the song, as well as the ritornellos. The modulation surprised me very much: from the key of A natural, to that of C and F, was not difficult or new; but from that of A, with a sharp third, to E flat, was astonishing; and the more so, as the return to the original key was always so insensibly managed, as neither to shock the ear, nor to be easily discovered by what road or relations it was brought about.” (The Present State of Music in France and Italy, 1773). In modern traditional Irish music, typical instruments are often an evolution of those already used in the classical tradition (as in the case of fiddle and conical flute) and the uillean pipe preserves a bellows analogous to the musettes of the French courts. In the same way the “battente” guitar, probably of cultured and seventeenth-century origin, survives, sometimes with substantial differences, in the traditional contexts of southern Italy. Same happens with music, in dynamic and continuous osmosis. The topic of the Cd rotates around a question: was there, a few centuries before us, a fruition of musical material outside its context of reference? The answer we give is: surely. What characteristics we could not say with certainty, but this lack translates into a great form of freedom, allowing new musical solutions and experimenting. Imagine a piece by Falconieri played by musicians of oral tradition, perhaps not educated in the practice of basso continuo and reinterpreting the music of the court, far from the rules of nobles and gentlemen and re-proposed with the energy, the vitality, the freedom that distinguishes so many popular music of today and, perhaps, at the time.
(Album notes by Alessandro de Carolis)
Translation by Theresa Williams