Sardinian Chronicles

by Bernard Lortat-Jacob

Book Overview

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 alive: 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226493415
• ISBN13: 9780226493411
• Release Date: March 1995
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.44 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Interesting introduction

This book is a well-written series of suggestive, diary-like vignettes. If you pay attention and read between the lines, you can come away feeling satisfied you know a fair bit more about Sardinians, the forces that affect their communities, and, by extension, their music. Some musical examples in notation would have been helpful. The CD of field recordings is superb.