Coi nostri strumenti: la tradizione delle Quattro Province dall'artigianato alla festa

摘要

Based on both original accounts and published documents, this work describes the musical tradition still flourishing in the Four Provinces Apennines, the mountain region between Genua and Oltrepò. Among its peculiar features are the piffero, a folk oboe constructed and played on the ground, the musa, a bagpipe that accompanied it in the past, and the accordion, that replaced the musa in the first half of the 20th Century. The origins of instruments and customs have to be related to materials used by rural culture and to commercial contacts conveyed by mule caravans, which traversed these mountains and connected them, especially since the Late Middle Ages, to Genua harbour and the Orient on one side and to French and Flemish fairs on the other side. For the last centuries we know about a school of piffero masters who have trasmitted their art orally until contemporary players. They still lead the village feasts in the high valleys, which express a sound sociality as well as the traditional practice of old songs - bujascas, stranots... - and dances - piana, alessandrina, monferrina, giga a due, giga a quattro, povera donna, perigordino, skipping polka, mazurka, waltz... The unexpected richness of such cultural and human heritage leads both to carry it out and to wonder about its roles in our globalized world looking for new identities.