Sardinian Chronicles

by Bernard Lortat-Jacob, Teresa Lavender Fagan (Translator)

In Sardinian Chronicles Bernard Lortat-Jacob poetically evokes Sardinian music through a series of encounters with individual musicians and their families. Refusing to separate the music from the world in which it arises, Lortat-Jacob offers twelve vignettes focused on individuals such as Cocco, a chicken farmer who deciphers the shapes of his fowl and the layout of his henhouses in the constellations of a summer sky, and Pietro, a sleep-walking postman who divides his time between mail deliveries and impromptu serenades. These vignettes bring to life an art still very much the music of villages with an oral tradition, sung or played in the company of others.

Through his sensitive portraits of music makers and their families, Lortat-Jacob overcomes some of the epistemological and methodological dilemmas facing his field today, while also giving the general reader a sense of the multiple and idiosyncratic ways that music is involved in everyday life. With a foreword by Michel Leiris and a compact disc containing samples of the music being discussed, this book constitutes a breakthrough in ethnomusicology that will also interest many in Mediterranean studies and European anthropology.

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

Reviews

[Devon Leger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lortat-Jacob is a renowned ethnomusicologist and Sardinian Chronicles is a virtuosic and brilliant ethnography of traditional music and culture on the Italian island of Sardinia. It’s not an academic treatise; Lortat-Jacob happily indulges in informal stories, speculations, and anecdotes throughout. He probes deep into the lives of some of these artists and uncovers beautifully human motivations behind their music making. He ties it all in to a complex and unstated system of hospitality and religious celebration, uncovering the gears and cultural machines that drive traditional life in Sardinia. The only downside is that he’s unable to shake a strong detachment from these artists. There are many elements of that typically French character of condescension towards another culture. It’s used in service to telling a more dramatic tale but it does begin to grate. But the flashes of amazing brilliance in his writing and his ability to show the life behind the music in new ways makes this book well worth it.

[Gregory · Rating 4 out of 5]

Colorful stories of the amazing and unique musical culture in Sardinia. The CD that is included has fantastic documents of polyphony.