LA BADIA CORALE VAL CHISONE
WHO AND WHERE ARE WE ?
The Badia Corale Choir is a non-profit making musical association dedicated whose aim is to bring the rich and varied repertory of traditional songs of the valleys around Pinerolo (a small town situated about 40 kilometres south west of Turin at the entrance to the Pellice and Chisone valleys) to as wide a public as possible.
It was originally formed in 1967 and eventually adopted the name “Badia Corale Val Chisone”. The term Badie was the name given to youth associations formed within the pre-christian times whose prime activity was to organise, perform and safeguard the ritual dances, songs and events frequently tied to the different seansons, which eventually became absorbed by the Christian church. They were also sometimes used as defence units. During the years the association has carried out an enormous amount of field work, collecting, recording and listing original material.
The main aims of the Association are to continue the research and conservation work and to present the material collected to our listeners. There are three main linguistic realities in our area: Occitania/Lingua D’Oc to which group the local patois belong, French, which was introduced in the 16th century and dominates the repertoire coming from the Valdensian communities, and Piedmontese, the language of the sub alpine plain area.
Alongside the field work, working directly with the older inhabitants of the small scattered alpine valleys, there is the research carried out on old manuscripts, the so called “cahiers”, the notebooks where the traditional singers wrote down their songs which allows us to confront the variations in the song texts from one area to another and to compare local texts to materials in other archives (Ivrea, Torino, Briancon, Gap, Paris, Grenoble). Along with this research activities there is the work of transcribing and harmonising the songs for the mixed voice choir. The harmonizations are carried out keeping as close as possible to the original melody and spirit of the pieces.
Over the years these various activities have allowed us to build up a wide and varied repertoire going from laments dating from the 1700’s and historical narrative ballads in French to songs from the 19th century in Occitanian and more recent pieces from the Piedmontese plain.
We feel that the preservation of our traditional music heritage, born of a specific etnic reality and formed by the local culture with its precise role in reflecting and communicating that culture, is of fundamental importance to the local communities.
The choir hopes to communicate its own joy in the singing these songs which help us to remenber where our own roots lie. More recently the choir’s repertoire has been expanded to include various pieces written by choir members which reflect our cultural reality today.
The mixed voice choir performs pieces harmonised for four or more voices, pieces for male voices and pieces for female voices. Together with presenting the music of our area the choir also wears traditional costumes from the sourrounding valleys, some of which are authentic family heirlooms and some of which, like the Valdensian costume, are still worn on special occasion today. This choice underlines the desire of the choir to use local costume not as a purely pictoresque, folkloristic addition to its image, but to testify to links we all have to our past with its values, the hard work and the poverty of simple mountain communities. The costume worn by the men is a reconstruction in part of late 18th century nilitary uniform, and in part taken from illustrations of alpine dress from the same period.
As part of the activity of the Centre for Traditional Arts of the Civic Ethnografic Museum, in Pinerolo, an ethnophonic section containing the results of these years of research carried out by the Badia Corale Val Chisone has beeen opened in November 1999. This section is aimed at safeguarding the local traditional song and music heritage and at the same time making it available to whoever wishes to listen to these voices from our past.
Laments, lillabies, songs of love and war and stories of everyday life come to life again thanks to recordings, made as long ago as 1967 and now accessible to all thanks to modern technology.
The Ethnophonic Section of the Ethnographic Museum is dedicated to Augusto Burlo, friend and chorister, whose entusiasm and hard work has helped to make all this possible; he also designed the choir’s emblem: the crowing cock.