Mediterranean Intangible Heritage Soundscape

The Cantu in paghjella is a living singing tradition of the Mediterranean island of Corsica, and it is based on three parts vocal registers. It is performed a cappella and it begins with the so called segonda, that gives the pitch and carries the main melody, followed by the accompaniment and support of the bassu, while the highest voice, called terza enriches the song with its melismatic ornament...

Kudsi Erguner has devoted his life to promoting the rich heritage of Ottoman musical history on the international stage, a legacy also shaped by the contributions of Turkish, European, and Arab musicians. At the heart of his musical formation stands the ney, the reed flute elevated by the great mystical poet Mevlana (Jalal al-Din Rumi) to a spiritual symbol representing the inner voice of the soul...

In this episode we will travel right into the heart of Turkey with Jérôme Cler, lecturer in ethnomusicology at Paris-Sorbonne University.  Despite the variety of his cultural experiences, Cler’s interest has remained constantly focused on Asia Minor, first through his studies dedicated to the civilisation and language of ancient Greece and later through his field research on the oral music traditi...

Fado , the urban song of Lisbon, was inscribed in 2011 on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Fado’s history partially mirrors that of 20th-century Portugal.   Its ill-famed origins linked to the alleys and taverns of the Alfama and Mouraria neighborhoods, contributed to creating a sort of mythology that fueled his poetics, and the best definitions of this musi...

As the title of Adnan Haydar’s new book announces, New Words to Old Tunes , in this episode we are brought into the fascinating world of recited and sung verbal duels, rooted in Lebanon’s oral poetry tradition. Zajal is a creative game filled with rhetoric, metaphors, mockery, and clever wordplay, touching on both frivolous and serious themes—daily life, emotions, history, politics, famous figures...

The convivial meetings perfectly encapsulate the social dimension of the Cretan traditional music. Within these gatherings, the sound heritage of the Greek island is nurtured and passed on, as explored with Ioannis Papadatos in the previous episode “ The social role of parea in the musical tradition of Crete ”. As a natural continuation, this episode presents the testimonies of four distinguished...

Ioannis Papadatos has been a long‐term participant‐observer during a fieldwork in the island of Crete to prepare his dissertation about the local performances of Cretan traditional music for the University of Kent’s degree of Doctor of Philosophy. He participated and enjoyed the convivial atmosphere of social gatherings called parees in which music plays a pivotal role, mostly in Heraklion where h...

The multipart singing of the rural Southern region of Portugal, called  cante alentejano , is proudly performed by amateur choral groups that intone two short simple poems, first the cantiga and then the moda , standing side by side and slightly undulating. Their chanting is a means to reinvigorate the sense of belonging to their land and a way to bound social ties among communities of Alentejo. ...

When a musical culture is endangered and can nearly die out, it may happen that a single person can help to draw attention on it and stimulate the creation of a virtuous circle to induce a revival, even in a society which is so unstable and fragile as the Yemenite one. This is the case of Jean Lambert, ethnomusicologist and musician, who fell in love with the country from the first time he visited...

When we think about what has been called “classical music” of Maghreb, oral by tradition and linked to a past medieval artistic splendour, we immediately think of Morocco and Algeria, then of Tunisia, but much less of Libya. In Libya sufi brotherhoods played an important role in preservation and transmission of the nawabat (suites) common heritage for all the North Africa of Andalusian-Maghrebi ar...

Who are the Moroccan professional female singer-dancers (shikhat) from the rural Atlantic plateau? And what the Moroccan migrants in Italy, in particular the community of workers in Umbria, listen to? These and many other questions arise from the fieldwork experiences of Alessandra Ciucci in Morocco and Central Italy on the waves of the harsh sound of the ‘aita and the ‘abidat r-rma musical tradit...

This episode will let us travel in the Balkan Area and beyond, following minorities and migration flows. The definition of the so-called "applied ethnomusicology" intersects with various activities that include study and research in a dimension where theory and practice are not separated but converge in the realization of different kind of projects.   Doing field research and work in contexts of t...

In the beginning it was plainchant with its different forms, many of which were replaced by the Gregorian chant where the Gallican and Roman traditions merged. It is to all this variety of dialects of the Christian liturgical chant - from Ambrosian to Mozarabic - that Marcel Pérès has dedicated his life as a singer and researcher. With his Ensemble Organum , created in 1982, Pérès has explored the...

In the beginning it was plainchant with its different forms, many of which were replaced by the Gregorian chant where the Gallican and Roman traditions merged. It is to all this variety of dialects of the Christian liturgical chant - from Ambrosian to Mozarabic - that Marcel Pérès has dedicated his life as a singer and researcher. With his Ensemble Organum , created in 1982, Pérès has explored the...

La langue musicale du MAQÂM et ses éléments clés is the third episode of  Mediterranean Intangible Heritage Soundscape , and is in French. At the source of the different musical cultures flowing into the Mediterranean world is what Nidaa Abou Mrad calls a modal monodic "language", with its different "dialects". In the Mashreq, the musical system defined by the term maqâm , represents a great trans...

This episode will let us travel in the Bosnian musical tradition, and in particular in the city of Sarajevo. Unrequited love is the fuel of the melancholic fire that burns in the heart of the Bosnian urban song of Sarajevo. Longing, desire, jealousy are the main subjects of the lyrics of the sevdah that has its roots in the Ottoman era and more generally in the Near East musical sensibility. Damir...

This episode will let us travel in the Syrian musical tradition, and in particular in Aleppo's ones. Jonathan Holt Shannon, interviewed for this episode, traces an historical excursus in the traditional music ending up in the contemporary Syrian scenario affected by the war and consequent migrations. When Shannon's book Among the Jasmine Trees: Music and Modernity in Contemporary Syria was publish...