C'era una volta a Sannio
- Antonio Forte
- Aug 6
- 5 min read
Once upon a time in Samnium. Like many other places in Italy, Molise has many bronze statues. The ancient Samnites left behind a vast number that have found their way into museums, and I take great pleasure in thinking about how many more may still be hidden: hiding up in the mountains in some undiscovered location; buried deep in a bosco ('forest'), having been tossed into the depths of a now-abandoned pozzo ('well') ages ago; or perhaps just below the surface, awaiting a farmer or unsuspecting hiker to but scrape a bit of the topsoil, unearthing an object holding a forgotten story.
[Caption: The remains of an ancient pozzo (well), found while hiking in the mountains above the village of Collemacchia.]
[Caption: A bronze statuette of the Samnite goddess Menervas (Greek Athena, Roman Minerva), found during the excavations at the theatre/temple of Pietrabbondante.]
The origin story of the Samnites (their Ver Sacrum, or 'Sacred Spring' in Latin) involved ritual migration of villagers following a young bull, and throughout their history the bull was used as a symbol of cultural identity, mythos, and even military propaganda. The word for calf in Italian is vitello (or 'veal,' oten found on Italian restaurant menus), which has its origins in the Oscan word VÍTELIÚ, meaning 'young bull.' From about the 3rd to 1st centuries BCE, the word Víteliú came to stand for those Oscan-speaking, non-Roman tribes, which the Romans would soon absorb, subsume, subjugate, and/or destroy. And eventually, like the peoples themselves, the language was Romanized, Latinized, so that Víteliú became Italia, and thence the modern name for the country of Italy.
[Caption: Several examples of Samnite coins, many including the picture of a bull. Note the VÍTELIÚ in the top row being Latinized into ITALIA below.]
[Caption: Left: My favorite Samnite coin, now in the British Museum. Right: An artist's reinterpretation of this coin as a bronze statue, depicting the Samnite VÍTELIÚ bull mauling the Roman wolf (significant in Rome's origin myth of Romulus and Remus), on display in the Samnite Museum, Campobasso.]
[Caption: A few steps away from the Samnite Museum, a bronze statue of Fred Bongusto, a famous musician from Campobasso.]
And while hiking in Molise, if one listens closely, one can still hear the cowbells echoing down the mountainsides, from the cultivated fields of the valleys, up the forested colli ('hills'), and atop the limestone-studded peaks. Just a few mountains away from Collemacchia sits the historic Scapoli, home of the zampogna, or Italian bagpipe. This year was the 50th International Zampogna Festival, and my fourth visit to the festa. Recently, I discovered that my trisnonno (great-greatgrandfather) was a zampognaro ('zampogna player'). For four years I have been playing the ciaramella, an instrument that always accompanies the zampogna and what one starts with on their way to learning the zampogna. I aspire to grow into a zampognaro, eventually.
[Caption: A bronze statue of a zampognaro, in the town of Scapoli.]
[Caption: An artwork from the recent exhibition 'Il grano e la tela' ('The Grain and The Tile') in the village of Mennella. This one is titled 'C'era una volta a Scapoli' ('Once Upon a Time in Scapoli'), by the artist named P. Asta. It uses hanging metal tiles to depict the traditional musicians of Scapoli playing zampogne and ciaramelle. This exhibition took place at the village aia in Mennella. An aia is a flat, open, tiled area where a community comes together to thresh their wheat or other grains, and also includes a small stone building for storing the grain. The aia's stone building in Mennella has been renovated and transformed into a two-storey gallery space.]
[Caption: Left: A photo of the aia above the village of Filignano, near Collemacchia. Right: My sketch of the old aia.]
[Caption: A moment of improvising on Filignano's aia with a small wooden flauto ('flute').]
[Caption: Zampogna, ciaramella, and singing, outside my bedroom window in the village of Collemacchia, the night before the International Zampogna Festival.]
One of the special presentations at the Zampogna Fest this year, was one titled Musette Barocca Francese ('Frence Baroque Musette'), given by one of the world's leading experts on the musette, Jean-Pierre Van Hees. The presentation was an historical overview of the musette, a time- and place-specific species of bagpipe. Expecting to hear more of the bright, nasally, piercing wail of another offshoot of the bagpipe family tree, my ears immediately perked up, my sonic interest was piqued. Instead of the oft-klaxon clarion call, my ears were greeted by the warm, sweet, and slightly mellow tone of this peculiar instrument. The musette is indeed a bagpipe (meaning, there is a bag that fills with air, and there is a pipe--or pipes--that the air is forced through in order to create drones and melody), but unlike the stereotypical set, the mouth is not involved in the bag's inflation: indeed there is a bag under one arm used for forcing air through the double reeds of each of the pipes, but under the player's other arm is a set of bellows, like those used to entice the flames in a fireplace, or like a miniature accordion.
[Caption: Jean-Pierre Van Hees demonstrating his musette. Note in the background, from outside the open door, a ciaramella begins to accompany, in the same key but with a natural four (C-natural) instead of the sharpened four (C#) Jean-Pierre is using. Despite my enjoyment of the accidental duet, they quickly shut the door.]
As any musician is wont to do, my brain immediately began thinking of the physics that went into creating such timbre in this unusual instrument: basically, what ingredients could I use? what mixture of sound waves could cause such tonal qualities? how could I synthesize this sound?
[Caption: A bit more of Van Hees' musette, this time solo.]
Without physical means for constructing the instrument, I turned to a long-trusted digital friend, MAX/MSP. After a moment of pondering the various waveforms (sine, triangle, sawtooth, square, etc.) and what tonal qualities each possesses, I concocted a specific recipe of sine and triangle waves, also utilizing a resonant bandpass filter, whose center frequency was set to follow the frequency of the oscillators. And after some programming and sequencing, I came up with an apparatus (a.k.a. computer instrument). In doing so, I also realized that the bass/base note of Van Hees' musette was a G, but not the typical 98Hz, as modern instruments are tuned. No, this musette had a G tuned to (roughly) 96Hz, which means that the usual A=440Hz was tuned down to the more historically significant A=432Hz. Among many other factors in the musette's construction, this small change in tuning must also contribute to the tonal character: perhaps there is less 'tension' physically, as the sound waves' frequencies are just a bit slower, their wavelengths just a bit longer.
[Caption: musette_apparatus_1 [G=96Hz], a computer instrument of my own design.]
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