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Concert of traditional Tyrolean songs – „Cantori da Vereméi” group (Italy)

Concert of traditional Tyrolean songs – „Cantori da Vereméi” group (Italy)
Start date 2013-10-05
Start time 19:00
Kategoria Koncert

Cantori da Verméi (Singers from Verméi)
Old Songs from the Alps

Project: Renato Morelli
Performing artists: Alberto Delpero, Danilo Bertolini, Ernesto Daldoss, Mirco Dezulian, Matteo Giovannini, Andrea Longhi, Marco Slanzi

Vermiglio is the last village in Val di Sole (the Valley of the Sun) towards Tonale Pass in west Trentino (north of Italy). This mountain province (located 1260 m above sea level) was the subject of Alberto Delpero’s research on traditional singing which he conducted in the years 1996-2000 with the assistance of young people who helped to rediscover traditional songs preserved in the oral tradition. They frequently met to sing in taverns and pubs, during regional festivals, funerals, wedding receptions, processions, and in Christmas time they went caroling (questua).

Traditional Alpine singing style is polyphonic and consists of three voices, i.e.the main melody, the melody transposed by a third, and burden. They are always rich, condensed and extremely intense.

In 2008 the group started working with Renato Morelli, a Trentino ethnomusicologist. He encouraged them to include in their repertoire songs he had studied in his research. Morelli’s idea inspired the group to start the project known as Cantori da Verméi (Singers from Verméi). The name Cantori da Verméi is a pun – it is the assonance of the village name in the local dialect (Verméi) and Llibre Vermell, a famous fourteenth-century music manuscript from the Monserrat Monastery near Barcelona. Morelli intended to conduct an experiment that would have two main goals:
- rediscovering the “forgotten” songs from traditional Alpine repertoires through performing them by a small group of singers;
- collecting examples of polyphony (from before the twentieth-century standardization of Alpine choral singing according to SAT model1) once very popular in the Alps region, but nearly forgotten today.

Cantori da Verméi perform old paraliturgical songs (Asiago Grande Rogazione litanies and the Primiero Valley Woodcutters’ Sung Rosary), Cecilian Requiem Mass, abandoned after the Second Vatican Council reform, canti di quesua – songs performed between Christmas and Epiphany Celebration, related to the tradition of caroling with a star, carnival and Trato marzo songs, as well as numerous local secular and festive songs (narrative songs, epic-lyric songs, miner and emigrant songs, canti “onti” – frivolous and bashful songs for students and recruits).

Cantori da Vermei present a well-selected array of traditional Alpine songs all over Europe: from Vienna (where they inaugurated their trip in 2008 at the invitation of the late Gerlinde Haid) through Castelsardo (Sardinia), Mustar (Switzerland), Premana (Lombardy) to Vilnius. At the same they meet on a weekly basis to sing in their native village.

Canti di questua natalizio-epifanici Christmas Caroling

In some Alpine villiges, in the period between Christmas and Epiphany Celebration, groups of singers, often disguised as Three Magi, visit local households and sing special songs in order to get some treats in return. One of the singers carries a crib or a star made of coulour paper, carton and wood. The collected treats can be donated to the Church, or shared between the singers.

The majority of songs can be traced back to the counterreformation repertoire, especially so-called lodi a travestimento spirituale (secular songs in a “spiritual disguise” whose modified lyrics give them a religious quality). They were written in Italian during the Trentino Council as a response to Lutheran Choral and Calvin Psalter.

Christmas caroling tradition was created by Jesuits, who, in order to strengthen the “roman” dimension of the Three Magi celebration (questioned by Luther) employed the tradition of the ancient new-year and carnival processions and added the masks of the Three Magi.

Carnival Songs – Trato Marzo

The festival is known under different names: Scheibenschlagen in Tyrol, Las Cidulas in Friuli, a region in northeastern Italy, Cialandamarz in the Swiss canton of Grisons situated between Italy, Austria and Liechtenstein, and Trato Marzo in Trentino. Its origins go back to a pre-Christian custom that related to the spring awakening of nature and human erotic love, drawing heavily on irony and metaphoric allusions to the sex act. The festival is held in some Trentino towns and villages at the end of February and the beginning of March (often during the Carnival). Local youth go up to the hills, where they make huge bonfires and shout out loud the Trato Marzo, announcing matching of both unlikely, provocative and real couples. Considered immoral practice, the custom was regularly banned starting 1500, first by diocesan synods and prince-bishops and later by various church and lay authorities, which nearly led to its complete eradication. Cantori da Verméi present some singing variants of Trato Marzo.

Carnival Songs

Trentino is characterized by a particular accumulation of carnival customs, a peculiar typological synthesis of ritual elements found over a vast area covering northern Italy, Venice, the whole Alpine Arch and Central Europe. Among others, these elements include the Trial and Indictment of Carnival (Tresino), wooden masks (Valfloriana, Val di Fassa), the Death of Carnival (Val dei Mòcheni) or itinerant initiation groups of dancers (Ponte Caffaro, Valfloriana, Val di Non). Music (occasional songs) and dances play the key role here. It is a significant ethnographic fact that the seemingly different customs have one thing in common – coscritti, which in the local dialect means youth who are to become part of the adult community in the coming year. Today the word coscritto (recruit in Italian) refers to conscription (this meaning appeared in the 18th century at the earliest, with the introduction of obligatory military service). However, one cannot exclude that ancient rituals, such as rites of passage into adulthood with their trials of strength and courage coinciding with the changing of seasons, were absorbed by the traditions that followed.

Cantori da Vermé perform examples of “recruit” songs on various subjects: conscription, erotica, the transgressive and indecent.

Litanies for Grande Rogazione di Asiago

Asiago is situated in the province of Vicenza, on the Altopiano dei Sette Comuni (Plateau of the Seven Communities), a German-speaking pocket in the mountains of the Veneto region.

Every year on Ascension Eve, the town holds Grande Rogazione (Great Rogation), also known as Giro del Mondo (Walk around the World), a huge procession all community members take part in. The procession starts at dawn and ends at dusk, after walking 33 kilometers around the whole inhabited area of Asiago. It is said that the custom was initiated in 1631 as a votive offering in the aftermath of a ravaging bubonic plague that had decimated the populations of Asiago, Roana and Gallio.

Processional songs (litanies in Latin) are performed in a particularly interesting polyphonic manner. They are sung uninterruptedly in a very loud voice (on the verge of screaming) by successive singing groups for the whole duration of the Rogation. The procession finishes with an “outburst” of choral singing inside Asiago Cathedral.

Il Rosario Cantato – a rosary sung by woodcutters from the Primiero Valley

Mezzano is a small mountain town situated in the Primiero Valley in the province of Trentino. The place is known for a particular singing tradition connected with woodcutters. Following a hard and exhausting day at work, woodcutters returned to their mountain camp where they would sit down to an evening meal together. After supper, the oldest in the company would call everyone in to pray a rosary that was not said, but sung. Two opposing choirs would sing subsequent verses in a responsorial manner. Their loud, almost screaming voices were so strong that the rosary could sometimes be sung by two groups located at a very long distance from each other, for example on the opposite hillsides.

Funeral and Memorial Mass

In 1903 Pope Pius X issued the Motu Proprio “Inter Sollicitudines”, a manifesto of the Italian Cecilian Movement. The document strongly condemned the presence of secular, liturgy-irrelevant music in Church. The movement advocated a return to the old Church traditions by reintroducing the Gregorian chant, polyphonic practice and Palestrina-inspired ideas (Palestrina’s polyphony is the so-called "old style”).

The Trento diocese was of crucial importance to the process for two reasons: its vicinity to Bavaria (the region played a decisive role in the spread of the Cecilian Movement from Germany to Italy) and the presence of priests-musicians affiliated with the Regensburg School, who fostered founding “reformed” choirs even in the smallest mountain settlements. The tradition is still observed on some occasions, particularly at funerals and memorial masses.

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