| Abstrakt: |
This manuscript – held in the library of the Centro di Ricerca e Documentazione – Istituto per i Beni Musicali in Piemonte in Saluzzo (CN) and included in the interesting musical collection “Fondo Umberto II” – contains the music of twenty folk tunes, arranged for solo keyboard by Giovanni Giorgio Anglois (1768-1826), string bass player and composer. The manuscript, which was probably copied in Turin, can be dated around 1820- 1825 and is therefore one of the first chronological attestations of the melody of these songs. Some examples are the first and the last songs, respectively Cosa fastu li Catligna (having the music of the Monferrina, more recently known with the title Maria Catlina – see also La corrente in Nigra’s collection n. 131) and L’prejve annamorà (another tune that is still popular today, documented as Ninetta in Sinigaglia’s collection). Other songs in the book are also identified in the collections by Nigra and Sinigaglia. Also, a good part of the volume Musica di Venti Canzoni Piemontesi – nine pieces out of twenty – refers to music that is traditionally associated with the works of Ignazio Isler, a poet who wrote in Piedmontese language and worked in Turin, and whose poems are presented along with music in some manuscripts. The presence of these pieces in the book suggests a continuity from the mid-eighteenth to the following century, when a bourgeois audience played these folk tunes as a characteristic mix of dance music and popular airs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
