Engaging creatively with a traditional soundscape: goat bells—from landscape to performance

This article offers an insight into a creative process that relies on ways of engaging creatively with a folk approach to sound. It discusses the adoption of elements of the Calabrian use of bells for herd animals in a composition titled <i>All’Erva Radicchia</i>. Positioned at the intersection between ethnographic and artistic practice in the wake of Steven Feld’s ‘mixed genre’, the piece complements the author’s research into Calabrian animal bells. The piece draws on the network of relationships that animal bells initiate between various agents in Calabria and reproduces in performance the sound of a goat flock. The article discusses the adoption of structural elements of a sound tradition and the exploration of new composition and performance practice to generate music that is able to communicate knowledge about folk phenomena that would unlikely be communicated otherwise.

本文探析了一种以创新性手法践行民俗声音创作路径的创意生成流程。文中探讨了在题为《All’Erva Radicchia》的作品中，对卡拉布里亚地区牧群牲畜铃铛使用元素的借鉴应用。该作品立足史蒂文·费尔德提出的“混合体裁”理论，处于民族志实践与艺术实践的交叉领域，同时对作者关于卡拉布里亚牲畜铃铛的研究形成了有益补充。该作品依托卡拉布里亚地区牲畜铃铛所构建的各类主体间关系网络，并在演奏中还原了山羊群的声响场景。本文探讨了对声音传统结构元素的吸纳，以及对新型创作与演奏实践的探索，以此生成能够传递民俗现象相关知识的音乐——这类知识若脱离此类实践则大概率难以被有效传递。