仲間と歌おう

Cantà in cumpagnia

It is in the 1584 manuscript of the Italian cornettist Girolamo Dalla Casa: “Il vero modo di diminuir con tutte le sorti di stromenti di fiato, corda, e di voce humana”, that the expression “Cantar in compagnia” appears, describing a musical practice in which singers and instrumentalists gathered as an ensemble to perform sacred and secular compositions.

Made of four singers and four winds, this ensemble takes the form of a double choir, reminiscent of the large ensembles of pifferari and singers depicted in the paintings of the Basilica San Marco in Venice but on the scale one might imagine in a small village church.

In the mountains of Corsica, recording in the church of Santa Maria Assunta in Mandriale, these eight voices gathered and brought to life the musical and spiritual landscape of vernacular polyphony. From Corsican to Umbrian, by way of Old Tuscan, the programme bears witness to the extraordinary dialectal richness and the communal particularism that lay at the heart of the Renaissance. The polyphony and its ornamentation are woven into the rich contrapuntal fabric of the sixteenth-century madrigal and motet, while at times loosening its threads to recover the modal simplicity of the thirteenth-century Franciscan lauda and the earliest two-voice experiments of the “madrigale del Trecento”, reflecting a world in which the boundaries between traditional and classical culture were far more permeable than nineteenth and twentieth-century narratives have often suggested.

«...the tales of Ariosto, Tasso or Fulvio Testi find their way into the rugged language of shepherds from the highlands. Thus cultures are born, emerging from shadowed scriptoria to irrigate the ever-awake consciousness of ordinary people: labourers, anonymous men and women, those dismissed as uncultured, yet within whom slumbers that higher spark, that elusive virtuosity we call popular genius. The reverse journey is equally possible: a simple tune sung along the furrows of the fields, or during the threshing, may become a work of poetry, transformed into a treasure of all humanity through the magic of the one who recognised its splendour and immortalised it within the refined scales of learned music...»
Roman national, by Marc Biancarelli, Actes Sud, 2026.

Inspired by the fertile diversity of that era, this recording is built around multiple encounters. Among them is that of Renaissance practices of vocal diminution which intertwines with the art of melodic variations in traditional Corsican singing. It was through this research that the Camerata Figarella invited traditional singers to perform a sophisticated repertoire from the Italian Renaissance, drawing on their oral tradition and striving to preserve in their interpretations their own conception of a “natural voice”, the natural temperament, and improvised vocal diminution.

Jean-Charles Adami defines traditional singing as «the sonic expression of a way of inhabiting the world, which carries within it a memory, a language, a landscape; polyphony constitutes its sung projection. In rural societies, song first arises from an intimate relationship with the land. It accompanies agricultural work, festivals, mourning, pilgrimages, and moments of sharing. This dimension is particularly strong in regions where oral transmission has long been the primary vehicle of culture. Voices are forged in a specific environment: they bear the imprint of the topography, the climate, the acoustics of the valleys, churches, and village squares. Thus, polyphony becomes a reflection of a landscape that is as much human as it is natural.»

It is this landscape that Camerata Figarella wishes to bring to life here. Following, as a guiding thread, the Renaissance in its original sense, the fruit of perpetual renewal, with its ancestral roots, like a fragile Anthemis flower slipping between the old flagstones, witnesses to too many wounds that spring will have to heal. – Ange Sierakowski

2025年8月1～3日に録音

場所：コルシカ島マンドリアーレ教会
バランスエンジニア＆レコーディングプロデューサー：Jonas Niederstadt
アートディレクション：Ange Sierakowski, Lauriane Maudry
ジャケット写真：Raphaël Poletti
ブックレット写真：Lauriane Maudry（3ページ）、Jonas Niederstadt（その他すべて）
コルシカ語翻訳：Stella Retali Medori
コーポレートデザイン：Tim+Tim, timandtim.com

プロデュース：Jonas Niederstadt

© 2026 Carpe Diem Records