Engaging creatively with a traditional soundscape: goat bells—from landscape to performance

ABSTRACT

This article offers an insight into a creative process that relies on ways of engaging creatively with a folk approach to sound. It discusses the adoption of elements of the Calabrian use of bells for herd animals in a composition titled All’Erva Radicchia. Positioned at the intersection between ethnographic and artistic practice in the wake of Steven Feld’s ‘mixed genre’, the piece complements the author’s research into Calabrian animal bells. The piece draws on the network of relationships that animal bells initiate between various agents in Calabria and reproduces in performance the sound of a goat flock. The article discusses the adoption of structural elements of a sound tradition and the exploration of new composition and performance practice to generate music that is able to communicate knowledge about folk phenomena that would unlikely be communicated otherwise.

KEYWORDS:

• Animal bells
• composition
• soundscapes
• mixed genres

Acknowledgements

Part of this work has been funded by the European Union under the Marie Skłodowska Curie Action Post-doctoral Fellowship for the research project Local Sound for a New Musicality—Enhancing Musical Participation through a Local Sonic Practice (LoMus). The implications of writing music for and with non-musicians as emerged in All’Erva Radicchia eventually led to the formulation of LoMus, which is currently developed at Università della Calabria in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a historical account of the crossings between folk and Western classical music, see Peter van der Merwe (2004) and Matthew Gelbart (2007). More recent examples may include forefather of ethnomusicology Béla Bartók, Harry Partch (Granade 2014), Lou Harrison (Griffiths 2010), Walter Zimmermann (Gottschalk 2016), Anthony Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music (Haring 2012), Tan Dun (Rochester 2016) and Chen Yi (Shaw 2015).

2 Francesco Marano (2013) traces the history of the intersections between artistic and ethnographic practice and depicts how artists and anthropologists have increasingly adopted common methods of representation and analytical tools. Similarly, Schneider and Wright explore ‘the border zones between art and anthropology practices’ (Schneider and Wright 2021: 1). Nicola Scaldaferri (2016) describes the intersections between artistic and ethnographic practice in multimedia artist and composer Yuval Avital’s opera Samaritans, and in Steven Feld’s approach to the soundscape composition published in I suoni dell’albero. Il Maggio di San Giuliano ad Accettura (Scaldaferri and Feld 2012).

3 A few examples are Voices in the Rainforest (Feld 1991), The Time of Bells (Feld 2004a, 2004b, 2005, 2007, 2012a, 2012b) and I suoni dell’albero (Scaldaferri and Feld 2012).

4 Placed between Basilicata and Sicily, Calabria is one of the southernmost Italian regions; it is among the richest in traditional music and instruments (Scaldaferri 1994) and still maintains a diversified and lively oral culture that has been an object of study for decades. For a quick overview of the variety of the instruments and practices found in Calabria, see (Ricci and Tucci 1988, 2004; La Vena 1986, 1996; Lomax 1999).

5 A quick internet search gives an idea of the forum discussions and web articles that followed the withdrawal of the start-up chime.

6 Examples include Misha Mengelberg’s situationist piece Le Musiche della Città presented at the Italian theatre festival Santarcangelo dei Teatri in 1978, and Iannis Xenakis’s the situated performance Polytope de Mycenae (Schiffer 1978).

7 Cultural appropriation, especially in relationship to art, thrives on notions of the ‘extra-historicity of art and the Eurocentric bias of our thinking on culture’ (Coutts-Smith 2002). It consists of the ‘imitation of foreign languages, customs, and feelings, that is, in the absolute loss of the national idiosyncrasy’ (Ferro Gay 1974).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Executive Agency (REA) under Grant 101060695.

Notes on contributors

Christian Ferlaino

Christian Ferlaino is an Italian-born saxophonist, improviser, composer and ethnomusicologist. He is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at Università della Calabria with a research that couples ethnomusicology, contemporary music studies and community music to enhance the participation of non-trained individuals in music-making. As an ethnomusicologist, his research focus resides in the music and sound of Calabria, in southern Italy, about which he has published various articles and a monograph. As a musician, his artistic practice incorporates the sonic and musical realm of Calabria in the composition of contemporary music. His work also explores the expressive potential of improvised music and the relationships between composition and improvisation.