Lucia
Ronchetti

PRESENTATION
The Corsican Voceri represent one of the most important repertory of funeral songs, as practiced in different ancient cultures. Starting from 1841, the Italian linguist and historian Niccolò Tommaseo, analysed the original aspects of the Voceru and transcribed many of them, attending Corsican funeral’s lamentations. Very poor, uneducated women, in mourning for the lost of a person of the family, performed the songs, both as ritual form and as personal memory, creating their own original contributes.
Some of the Voceri became somehow famous within the Corsican lower class, inciting new virtuous and extreme productions. In the sixties, the french ethnomusicologist Felix Quilici, conducted a vast camp-research, collecting live recordings and doing accurate text’s transcriptions, giving an idea of the immensity of this special vocal production, stressing its unique character.
Corsican women of the past, alienated by the life acceptance of a dominated social role, in the moment of the death of one member of their family, started to speak and address the audience, through a dense vocal improvisation where words and melodic invention have the function to express their deep wound and dolour. Their language is sculptural and visionary, the voice is powerful involving the empathic vibration of the all body.
In the score, the six female voices are representing different corsican women speaking about their losts and their desesperations, singing in Corsican original language, giving new voices to the original texts.