Arbanese music festival Xinarca : concert

"My sources are sacred chants and mountain songs (Cantu Sacru and Cantu Nustrale) and, upstream from the sources, sounds, calls, silences, stations, contemplations, animal cries, the way man carries his voice in the mountains like the ancient shepherds. It's hardly the "mare è sole" chant of the 50s and 60s that guides me, but rather the invocation of raw nature in all its majesty and man's religious interiority at the heart of the mystery of Creation. A search for the archaic and the sacred through deep song and compositions that tend not to be faithful to Tradition in its form, but in its source, its energy, its primitive mystery and its magical, incantatory power. The "religere" of man to man and nature. "The instrument - a 16-string Corsican cistre - was very popular until the middle of the 19th century. It accompanied singing and fiddling at wakes. Essentially an oral tradition, it had virtually disappeared from Corsica's collective memory until the 1980s, when a growing awareness of its cultural specificity led to its reaquistu. According to current research, the last man to play it was a blacksmith. He died in 1934: Luiggi Succi. The tradition died with him. Very few period instruments remain today. The one I play is known as the Cetera d'Oletta. It's 200 years old and the only period cetera currently played (another period cetera in playable condition can be seen at the Musée des Arts et Traditions populaires in Corte)."