For those who have ears to hear. Individual Signatures in Sardinian Multipart Singing

Personalizations of sounds are essentially inevitable in multipart singings performed by a single voice for each vocal part. According to the different music practices, this kind of performative mechanism has an exclusive character, since it requires special capabilities of the singers, each of whom has to bring him/herself completely into play. Everyone’s contribution is a necessary element of a collective making event, so that the individual performance includes a large component of personal responsibility because of possible individual mistakes which could compromise the musical outcome, altering or damaging the collective action. At the same time, the mechanism allows very relevant possibilities to express individual musical personality. Every part works like a pattern (here, it does not really matter if it is a mnemonic trace, a written source, etc.), tolerating a certain amount of re-invention on the basis of recurrent features. Multiple elements contribute to every performative act, both according to and beyond the will of a single performer, basically referring to the expected music overlapping. The actual working of the mechanism is fully understood and interpreted by all the singers involved in the performance and by the other 96 persons sharing the exclusive knowledge requested by that specific music practice. External listeners (including musicologists) might not understand in detail the mechanism, elaborating representations more or less different from the inner ones. On the basis of my researches on orally transmitted confraternal multipart singing in Sardinia, I shall deal with significant examples of both clear and intentional “signatures” of part renditions, and singing passages that might be differently understood. Interpretations from my analytical point of view will be integrated with the performers’ representations within the dialogical approach I have experienced in some of my recent works.