VIGGIANO – The town of Harp and Music

A cultural Unesco heritage. A unique and special music culture 

The best way to interpret the complex phenomenology that characterized the music tradition of Viggiano, in the province of Potenza (Basilicata), is presenting the metaphor of uniqueness and evoking images that are absolutely and extraordinarily unrepeatable. In the world there is no human and ethnic community living without sound and music. There is no community, however, that has such a strong tradition, made of an absolutely surprising alliance between popular music and classical music, street music and orchestra players, artisans and refined artists, improvisators and excellent composers. An unexpected and new music world originated between XVIII and XX centuries in Viggiano. A music culture started from Apennines and arrived to Bourbon regions, Napoleonic lands, etc. It destroyed the image the world had about Southern Italy: an archaic and barbarian territory made of wild and anachronistic regions. This music tradition created a link among European towns and Southern mountains, thus creating a relation that was intense and lasted uninterrupted until 1800.

          ...mythic and cosmopolitan

Fortunately, there are a lot of precious documents in archives, literature, iconography, museums, laws, about music tradition. Otherwise, music culture in Viggiano would risk to be seen only as an obscure and not certain experience, part of an indefinite and ineffable world.

Many families of Viaggiano between 1700 and 1900, in different ways, were interested and involved by the phenomenon of street musicians: this phenomenon existed also in other regions, for example Liguria, in the provinces of Parma and Piacenza, in Ciociaria. Musicians from Viggiano played in the streets and in the squares, like other street musicians, they emigrated and underwent very long journeys; but they used different instruments. They did not use mechanical instruments, preferred by the others (these kinds of instruments did not need any talent). They preferred to use violins, flutes, and harps. The choice of the harp was very uncommon in national and international music world. The musicians built a small diatonic harp with less than twenty strings.

The activity of the musicians was extemporary and not regular. During late 1700, their activity became stronger in Europe and in the Mediterranean area thanks to the role played by Naples, an important capital, whose Christmas novena was a sort of protected period during which mountain musicians arrived in town and sold what the town needed: sacred music for cribs and votive shrines.

Between 1800 and 1900, street musicians arrived to the squares of the most important towns of Europe and United States. Thanks to the requests for passports and the reports by Italian ambassadors, we can see that musicians from Viggiano travelled to Russia, Cuba, Turkey, India, etc. Several photos sent from United Stated, from London, Melbourne show that music from Viggiano arrived almost everywhere. In the first decades of 1900, almost like a magic process, the popular tradition became professional. Many families of musicians sent their children to the Conservatories: San Pietro a Majella in Naples and Santa Cecilia in Rome. From these important academies, musicians from Viggiano became famous at international level: Leonardo and Giuseppe De Lorenzo, Albert and Victor Salvi, De Stefano, Francesco Miglionico, Nigro, Francesco Pizzo, etc., performed in the most important orchestras and theatres of the world, for example the Metropolitan in New York.

          …Unacknowledged and indecipherable

Musicians or beggars? Were they tricksters and beggars or generous and valid artists? Were they idle and unscrupulous beggars or innocent travellers? Subversive vagabonds and criminals or good artisans and artists?
Street musician was an ambiguous character, positioned between "fascinans" and "tremendum", between legality and illegality, eccentricity and normality. The street musician was a border character united and at the same time divided the normal everyday life with feast and the marvellous. Each observer, each age, each town could mirror itself in this character seeing what they wanted to see: devilish cunning or the shy look of fortunetellers or illusionists that claimed their right to live and exist, forever.
Because of their polysemous status, the musicians from Viggiano were considered in different and sometimes contradictory ways: during Romantic period, 1800, they were exalted and accepted; at the end of 1800, instead, they were criminalised, especially because they brought children with them.

          …precious and refined

During 1800, music substrate in Viggiano reached such a development that in the small Lucan town (around 6000 inhabitants living at 1000 m above the sea level) there was the creation of an important lute-making tradition. In the workshop of a master called Bellizia, a very refined artist, there was the production of harps, decorated with fine ornaments, and awarded in Naples. Famous and rich musicians used them.

Street musicians, instead, produced music and used music instruments but went to other workshops where a simpler harp was produced: it was diatonic and positive but also charming and efficient. The soundbox was produced using a special material, absolutely autochthon that gives to music a sound that will be defined as typically "viggianese". This material was taken from a wild pear-tree that is on the Apennines. The tradition of lute-makers continued in 1900 thanks to Vito Reale: in the United States, he donated to Nixon a violin he had produced. The tradition of harp production became famous in the world thanks to the firm founded by Victor Salvi, born in Chicago. His mother was from Viggiano and his father came from Venice: he was a very good lute maker and he went to Viggiano just to take advantage from their important tradition.

          ...to "listen to"...

Music culture of Viggiano, made first of street harpists, violinists, flutists, then made of orchestra players, does not belong only to Viggiano. It is unique and surprising, abnormal and "sui generis", and it must be considered as an authentic and precious heritage of Italy, like the lute-making tradition of Cremona. This tradition has to be considered a world heritage, thanks to errand musicians that made also audacious journeys through the world, to their hopes, their pains, etc.

The journeys of musicians represent the paradigm of humankind that is always searching its soul. They represent the exchanges and the enrichments among different civilizations, the fascination of different cultures and different realities.

The journeys of musicians represent an epic and heroic experience and they link to the several diasporas of humankind, the difficult experiences of populations, overwhelmed by injustices, abuses, in any time and any place.

Trying to learn the music tradition of Viggiano, that is the lost harp, the millenary wisdom, is not a romantic desire to recollect the past, an attempt to recall past and lost memories trying also to protect them, but it is an attempt to find new horizons and new meanings.

Music culture of Viggiano was a Southern archaic and folkloristic tradition to be used only with the aim to give a new life to Southern regions. Now, however, it can be more, a more complex and important reality, a universal epiphenomenon of past civilizations, a paradigm of deep realities, an exemplification of a micro reality that can start a dialectic and dialogic relation, an original relation with wider horizons. This is the strongest provocation from tradition to modernity: music is thus seen as an instrument of relativization of geographical boundaries; an instrument to abandon a mercantilist and local logics. Music is thus an intercultural instrument to overcome ethnic, religious and political limits, a way to feel the soul of peoples and of civilizations.

Enzo Vinicio Alliegro
Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II

translation by Linda Liguori