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Music and Gender: Perspectives from the Mediterranean
By Tullia Magrini University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2003 Tullia Magrini
All right reserved. ISBN: 0226501663
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A Man's Game? Engendered Song and the Changing Dynamics of Musical Activity in Corsica Caroline Bithell
In the words of the Corsican singer Patrizia Gattaceca, "to sing polyphony is to affirm oneself as a Corsican; it is to say 'I exist.' " Certainly the human voice has traditionally served as the privileged instrument of musical expression on the island, with the traditional polyphonic singing styles occupying pride of place. Only in recent years, however, have women been free to affirm themselves in this way. In former times, to sing in public and certainly to sing polyphony was--with rare exceptions-- strictly a male prerogative. In this chapter, I aim to offer an insight into the way in which questions of gender have articulated both with song traditions and with singing activity, and to explore aspects of the changing dynamics between the sexes in relation to singing. I begin with a brief discussion of the traditional "gendering of the field" before going on to consider the different ways in which male and female forms of musical expression were affected during the period of social change and cultural decline that the island entered into in the early decades of the twentieth century. I then move on to a moredetailed exploration of the musical revival that has been gathering pace since the 1970s, focusing in particular on the new possibilities and identities that have most recently presented themselves to women singers.
Music and Gender in Traditional Corsican Society In traditional Corsican society as it existed at least up until the time of the First World War and to some extent through into the second half of the twentieth century, male and female singing practices were clearly differentiated with respect to genre, social context, function, and motivation. As far as the range of genres customarily sung by the different sexes is concerned, a glance at table 1 will immediately show that the vocal field has traditionally been heavily weighted in favor of men. While women's repertory has consisted mainly of laments and lullabies, men's repertory has featured polyphonic songs (
paghjelle,
terzetti, and
madrigali), improvised debate (
chjam' e rispondi), improvised "songs of circumstance" (
currente), threshing songs (
tribbiere), muleteers' songs, balladlike bandits' laments, laments for animals, serenades, and more recently, soldiers' songs and election songs (although the latter might also be composed and sung by women). Polyvocal settings of the Latin mass and other liturgical and paraliturgical material (particularly in connection with Holy Week) are also sung by all-male equipes.
Most striking is the fact that polyphonic singing has traditionally been absent from women's musical practices, although in the case of paghjella singing there have been notable, if rare, exceptions. Felix Quilici's extensive collection of field recordings, for example, includes a recording of paghjella singing made in the village of Pie D'Orezza in the Castagniccia in the early 1960s that features the voice of the wife of one of the male singers. In another case that was brought to my attention, three sisters living in a village in the Giussani had been taught to sing "in polyphony" by their father, who had no sons to whom he could pass on his repertory. Such cases of women actually singing polyphony should, however, be seen to represent circumstantial rather than customary practice. (Men, when asked why women do not sing polyphony, might assert that it is simply "too difficult" for them, an explanation I have also encountered in neighboring Sardinia; otherwise the explanation given is simply that "it is not part of our tradition").
The opposition monody/polyphony, together with other aspects of the contrasting singing styles of women and men, for example, timbre and tessitura, can be seen to reflect to some extent other familiar oppositions such as indoor/outdoor or private/public. In general terms, men's songs have traditionally belonged to, and have been organized in accordance with, a more outdoor, communal lifestyle, while women's musical activity was historically, as in many other parts of the Mediterranean, largely centered on the more intimate world of home and family, where it was also closely linked to women's role as guardians of rites of passage, most notably birth and death. This is not to suggest, however, that past generations of women did not enjoy any kind of collective activity, musical or otherwise. As Salini (1996, 65) has remarked, it is difficult to imagine that, in a society that drew all of its resources from the earth, women would have been excluded from any kind of work outside the home--even if Carrington does speak of some women, especially in the south, as being "virtual prisoners in their homes," being allowed out only in order to attend funerals (1984, 43). The abbe Galletti (1863) reports that women would practice lament singing during the hours spent on communal tasks such as picking olives or chestnuts. They might also sing when gathered together at the village washhouse. Nor is it the case that monodic songs were heard only in the home. They were also sung in company, for example, at
veillees or
veghje (informal social gatherings of friends and neighbors, featuring singing and storytelling) or at the fairs (although in the latter case they would almost invariably be sung by men, female singers in such public places again being the exception). The point to be made about the contrast between collective and individual, communal and domestic, polyphony and monody, male and female is perhaps a more subtle one and concerns the circumstances and assumptions that generate the songs and determine the form they take. Essentially, the prototypical male genres, namely, the paghjella and the chjam'e rispondi, to which I will return below, have an inbuilt need for other singers: they cannot simply be sung solo.
The scope of this chapter does not allow for a discussion of all song genres or for a detailed musical analysis of individual genres. In the following sections, I take as my focus the paghjella and the chjam'e rispondi as the most representative examples of male genres--both of which have survived in the living tradition into the present day--and the lament, or voceru, as the representative female genre (with brief reference also to the lullaby). In association with these selected singing traditions, a number of observations can usefully be made with the aim of contributing to a deeper understanding of male and female singing practices and drawing attention to the sometimes surprising insights that they can offer into the question of gender identity and the balance of power between the sexes in traditional Corsican society.
Men's Songs: The Paghjella and the Chjam' e Rispondi The
paghjella (pl.
paghjelle) is sung by three voices, secunda, bassu, and terza, and can be defined as a musical rendition of a series of octosyllabic couplets in a characteristic polyphonic arrangement, three of these couplets, each sung to the "same" musical
versu (pl.
versi), making one complete stanza, and each village typically having its own versu or variant of a basic musical prototype. The style might best be described as "drawn-out," with overlapping melismatic meanderings in the two upper voices alternating with long sustained notes. While each of the three voices has its own specific timbre and role within the overall structure of the piece, making a vital and individual contribution to the multidimensional polyphonic texture, the interaction is essentially democratic, with the individuality of each singer being subsumed in the service of the collective endeavor. Laade (1990) notes that the paghjella was in former times the favorite musical form of the shepherds, sung on occasions when they met and spent a night together in the mountains. It belongs to the realm of conviviality, hospitality, and relaxation: meals and family gatherings, evenings around the fire or at the bar, village patron saints' day celebrations, sheep-shearing parties, transhumance, hunting parties, and the mountain fairs.
Some stanzas that appear as paghjelle are in fact extracts from longer well-known monodic songs such as laments, lullabies, and serenades: essentially, any text in the traditional form of the octosyllabic six-line stanza can be resung "in paghjella." In this way, texts pass from one singing context to another--and significantly from women's repertory to men's repertory--and many stanzas from monodic songs that are no longer heard in the living tradition have been preserved in the paghjella repertory. An interesting parallel can be drawn here with the process described by Magrini (see the introduction to this volume and Magrini 1995) with respect to the ballad tradition in northern Italy, whereby female ballad singing with its educative and moral function has died out as women's lives and identities have changed, while polyphonic arrangements of the ballads as sung by men (often in a fragmentary form) have exhibited a greater tenacity, which can be explained by the fact that the context in which they are sung and the function they serve still have a relevant part to play in men's lives. In this connection it is also interesting to note that the secunda line of many paghjella versi is remarkably similar to the monostrophic melody type of what appears to be the oldest layer of women's laments, a curiosity that has been remarked upon in the literature but not as yet satisfactorily explained.
While in the past a paghjella might have consisted of several stanzas, so retaining the original narrative structure of the text, it is sometimes only a single stanza that "becomes" a paghjella. This stanza then assumes a microcosmic quality, serving as a type of "sound bite" in the form of a self-contained statement, often of a proverbial or formulaic nature. As one singer of my own acquaintance commented, "All one needs for a paghjella is thirty seconds of good poetry out of several hours of improvisation." At one level, any stanza will serve the purpose as long as the text "fits well in the mouth" or "is easily singable." At times it would appear that the words are appreciated more as sound units than as lexical units, to the extent that the text can be seen almost as a pretext--an impression that is certainly reinforced by the way in which the text is treated in performance, with breaths being taken in the middle of words, voice entries occurring in the middle of words, words being broken across the caesura, and the bassu on occasion intoning the vowel sounds alone, resulting in an almost calculated obfuscation of the lexical sense. This circumstance would again appear consonant with Magrini's observations concerning the way in which in men's polyphonic ballad renditions the emphasis is on sonic interaction and the "affirmation of the members' ability to merge into a collective action," rather than on transmitting any message explicitly embodied in the text.
Paghjella singers typically adopt a stance similar to that found among singers of polyphony in other parts of the Mediterranean, forming a tight horseshoelike cluster and raising one hand to the ear, while often leaning casually on one another's shoulders. The secunda singer (who launches the song) might appear to withdraw into his own interior world, his eyes closed or glazed over, while the bassu and terza singers focus intensely on his face, following his every movement. Essential to the spirit of the paghjella is an element of spontaneity: the song is born of an inner impulse and is created anew at each performance as the singers interweave their voices, adapting one to another as their musical lines unfold. Equally vital is a sense of complicity: musical harmony can only be successfully achieved if the singers are in a state of spiritual harmony. Polyphonic singing is often described by singers within the culture as
un etat (a state), and indeed the intensity of the experience appears to have an almost mesmerizing effect on the participants. The overall impression is that the singers are singing into one another, penetrating one another's song, creating a sense of intimacy and spiritual bonding, which is often further intensified by the effects of alcohol. Even when the singing is at its most animated and vigorous, there is no sense of competition between the singers within the equipe: any imbalance would be contrary to the spirit of the paghjella and would threaten its successful execution.
Sessions of paghjella singing, once under way, can continue for hours into the night. Once men are seduced by the spirit of the song, it is as if they enter a time-warp, which leaves them oblivious to the rest of the world and in particular uncomprehending of the need to return to the demands of an orderly domestic routine that might ever more urgently beckon any wives present. For the latter, paghjella singing counts as part of "men's business" and, for some at least, as a manifestation of typically incorrigible male behavior. Indeed, the risk of female disapproval might be one of the reasons why men sometimes appear to be inhibited about singing paghjelle in mixed company, preferring to wait until the women have gone home or are preoccupied with domestic tasks. (I am reminded here of an occasion in Malta when I met a singer who was overjoyed to learn that I, like himself, had been at the Imnarja festival--an annual event attracting singers from all over the island-- the previous evening. In response to my prompt "And did you sing?" he surprised me by replying, "Me? Sing? But I was with my wife! I had to behave!")
Such singing can, then, be seen primarily as a celebration of male togetherness, the sense of intimacy that is both cause and effect being underlined by the body language. It would be possible to see here aspects of the "homoerotic" undertones that can be read into certain aspects of Mediterranean gender relations and are addressed in some of the contributions to
Honor and Shame and the Unity of the Mediterranean (Gilmore 1987, 10), albeit with respect in this case to male rivalry as opposed to male bonding. One of my Corsican informants did in fact comment, somewhat mischievously, that singing paghjelle was the only time in Corsica when men made love together; another similarly remarked that it was the only time when men danced together. This sense of intimacy would again explain in part why men are sometimes reluctant to "perform" in public, often preferring, even at fairs and festivals, to wait until late in the evening when the crowds have gone home and they can create their own more private and intimate space. It is also one of the reasons why some of the present generation of men feel uncomfortable about singing paghjelle on stage. I hasten to stress, however, that despite this aura of liminality surrounding paghjella singers, which might be seen to equate to the "gender-identity ambivalence" discussed by Gilmore (1987, 12)--although again Gilmore uses the notion in a rather different context, that of an often "vehement abhorrence" and repudiation of feminine traits--it would, of course, be incorrect, and, as Gilmore points out, impertinent and offensive, to gloss "homoerotic" as latently homosexual, just as it would be culturally naive and shortsighted to interpret the interaction of male singers in terms of "feminine" behavior. Giacomo-Marcellesi, with specific reference to the Corsican paghjella, speaks rather of "an erotico-musical function connected with the pleasure of singing, of singing with others, of singing in harmony with nature" (1982, 27). It is nonetheless noteworthy that much of the imagery encountered in connection with paghjella singing takes a feminine form. The circle or horseshoe formed by the singers--popularly known as a conca (conch [shell])--is, for example, often referred to as being womblike: the circle gives birth to the song.
Despite my earlier observations regarding the way in which the text often appears to serve only as a pretext in paghjella singing, it does nevertheless appear to be significant that the greater proportion of texts sung as paghjelle are in the voice of the first person. There is a high incidence of texts that take the form of a message or letter to a loved one: the speaker might be a shepherd away with his flocks, a conscript, or a prisoner in foreign lands. The texts themselves often begin with a reminder that the poet is illiterate, as in the line "S'eiu sapissi leghje e scrive" [If I knew how to read and write], or with a reference to a letter that the speaker would like to send. Songs of frustrated love can also be addressed directly to the loved one, for example: "Se tu sapissi u male / Che tu faci a u mo core" [If only you knew the harm / That you are doing to my heart]. Such texts, with their roots in the world of orality and improvisation, are closer to spontaneous personal utterances than to formally constructed poetry. At the same time, the speaker's situation or dilemma is immortalized as his verse passes into the common repertory where the emotions expressed appeal to a sense of shared experience or sympathetic identification. The fact that these songs are often sung away from the company of women (in the village bar or up on the mountain) would seem to be significant. Sentiments that cannot, perhaps, for reasons of distance or decorum be addressed directly to their object are instead expressed in the company of other men who offer harmonic as well as moral support.
Continues...
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