Colto, popolare o Bach

Abstract

Why at the end of the Goldberg Variations, Bach does write a Quodlibet in which he quotes two popular german songs of the XVIIIth century ? Arthur Rimbaud has written: “Man is soul and body”. The fundamental value of this issue is in the conjunction and: “A soul and a body”. What is it music if not the unity of our double nature? With the Quodlibet the phisycal aspect of music pours into the architecture of the Goldberg. Popular music has often poured in art music, both in secular and sacred music. What are looking for Schubert, Mendelssohn, Rossini, Liszt and many other european composers when they write Tarantellas? They are looking for that conjunction (and), and they look for it in south of Italy, in a dance like Tarantella because in those times south of Italy was the southern part of known world. Nowadays, the rhythmic vitality of Pizzica, where we can find ancestral musical echoes from the southern and eastern Mediterranean area, offers many hints to contemporary music. The most precious feature of popular music is its power to refer to something which is inside us, but in the meantime far away from us, something that makes you think you are at home even when you are elsewhere, in a place and in a time far away. In Luigi Chiriatti’s book Morso d’amore – Viaggio nel tarantismo salentino (1997), don Pietro, a priest from Galatina, says: “Tarantism today can be an alienation, but how many alienations do we have nowadays? The reasons at the origin of that kind of manifestations don’t exist any more. We have had a ultural transition and have appeared new different manifestations that have substituted the ancient ones”. Human being is always rooted in a certain time, in a certain history, but he remains a wayfarer looking for a place where his soul and his body feel good. La Notte della taranta has given an answer to this essential need that goes towards archaic domains, today removed but always necessary. Is the Festival fully aware of this or is it interested only in the immediate success and comsumption?