Voice, body, technologies : tales from an Arbëresh Village

Across a variety of contexts, and thanks to various interdisciplinary cross-pollinations, the human voice has come to constitute one of the key fields of ethnomusicological research. Technology plays an important role in the practice of vocal performance as well as the practice of ethnomusicological scholarship; yet the implications of the voice’s mediatization have not always received adequate consideration. This essay raises a few theoretical and ethnographical questions related to vocal performance and its cultural production, particularly with regards to technology, a term used here broadly to include systems of versification in oral performance as well as recording devices. The case studies examined are drawn from the author’s own field research, and concern the arbëresh minority of S. Costantino Albanese, in the southern Italian region of Basilicata.