In the centuries before World War II, the launeddas was the most prestigious musical instrument in South Sardinian culture. Every Sunday, dancing began after Mass and continued late into the night. This was the only time it was socially acceptable for unmarried couples to hold hands.
As well as commanding these pulsating circle dances with music of magisterial complexity, the launeddas led religious processions and accompanied songs of courtship. Before the twentieth century, it also accompanied the Kyrie and Gloria inside church.
Attitudes to the instrument changed, however, during Mussolini’s rule (1922–1943). The launeddas became associated with backwardness and poverty and by the 1970s, many Sardinians had never heard a launeddas. During that low-point, its greatest living exponent, Luigi Lai, was making his living as a saxophonist in Switzerland. The instrument has since enjoyed a renaissance, aided by substantial documentation by the brilliant Danish ethnomusicologist Andreas Fridolin Weis Bentzon (1936–1971). Bentzon made all his recordings between 1958 and 1962, while Lai was abroad.
Luigi Lai was born in 1932 in San Vito in south-east Sardinia, the heartland of the launeddas. He was trained by Antonio Lara (1886–1979) and taken under the wing of Efisio Melis (1890–1970), the two greatest exponents of that era. Between the ages of 9 and 24, Lai played with them at countless festivals, their favourite support player. His physical stamina and technical genius enabled them to keep dancers enthralled for hours on end.
At the age of 24, Luigi Lai moved to Switzerland to study music and worked there for 15 years. Since his return to Sardinia in 1971, no-one has had more impact or authority reversing the decline and folkorization of the launeddas. Embracing a wide range of musical styles, Lai has collaborated with numerous artists and represented Sardinia in every corner of the globe. The Irish painter J.B. Vallely recalls:
“Luigi's arrival was a milestone occasion in the history of the William Kennedy Piping Festival. This unassuming man produced a series of canes from his battered box and proceeded to play for fourteen minutes nonstop. When he finished there was a standing ovation that equaled the length of the piece he played. Luigi has returned on two further occasions and both times stole the show again.”
As a lad, Luigi Lai would cycle through the Sardinian countryside, singing the day’s lesson on his way home. Music teachers across the world use the human voice to convey fingerings and expression to their pupils. The practice of singing helps finer details and artistic nuances sink deeper into memory. Although it is perfectly normal for singing to have a primary role in remembering and transmitting instrumental expertise, its existence may be unknown, except to players taught the old way.
Learning using vocables is very different to learning using recordings. It is especially advantageous when the musical instrument does not vary in loudness and there are no silences separating phrases. The musical sense and structure can be clarified, the emotional message highlighted, when the sound of the pipes is substituted by the human voice; pieces are memorized faster, perhaps retained longer, and with less risk of disintegration or falsification. Laying down neural pathways by singing seems to elicit a deeper musicality and fidelity to the lineage, channelling the collective genius of generations.
Written scores and audio recordings are a mixed blessing because they become scripture. Their fixity undermines essential qualities – life and spirited mischief, creative agency, responsiveness, and emotional power. These are mobilized by singing. Traditions of “vocabelizing” are rich and varied, perhaps the most well-known being Indian padhant and Scottish Gaelic canntaireachd. This website presents the first documentation of Sardinian vocabelizing.
Bentzon was unable to record pieces in their entirety and vocabelizing was completely overlooked. Aware of the value of singing as a pedagogical tool – and the growing dependence of launeddas players on Bentzon’s fieldwork – Barnaby Brown was awarded a research grant by the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland’s Athenaeum Award scheme to give future generations access to Sardinian mouth music. The recordings he made with Carlo D’Alessandro in 2011 and 2012 fill an important gap in the ethnographic record, documenting for posterity the virtuosic way in which launeddas music is taught and memorized.
A special focus was given to the five balli professionali considered by Luigi Lai to be his most valuable cultural inheritance. Following the advice of Peter Cooke, who made over 1100 field recordings for the School of Scottish Studies, Lai’s vocabelizing of these pieces was captured on multiple occasions. The possibility of comparing different renditions, recorded a year apart, grants students a richer understanding of a practice that celebrates fluidity.
Artistic agency, or improvisational spontaneity, exist in how the phrases of the iscala develop, and in how a noda is sung. Each principal noda provides an opportunity for the soloist to demonstrate mastery and imaginative genius. Although the sequence of nodas is canonical, what happens in between them sets performers apart. Is it predictable, or awe-inspiring? Whenever polyphony is complex, there is a choice over which hand to sing. On the first field trip, in April 2011, Lai’s launeddas playing and vocabelizing were recorded untethered. On the second trip, in April 2012, they were synchronized so that vocables would correspond precisely with the 2011 documentation of launeddas fingering: a detail invisible in Bentzon’s audio recordings.
The Luigi Lai Archive was launched on 22 December 2024 with complete performances of each cuntzertu – on launeddas and vocabelizing – progressing through the steps of the iscala in a reasonably concise form. Students can hunt out elsewhere Lai’s grandiose elaborations that could double the length of each cuntzertu: in his words, rather than walking briskly from A to B, stopping to admire the view between each principal noda. Lai’s most magisterial performances – taking scenic detours, in no hurry to get home – are found in live recordings where conditions elicited something magical. The nature of the idiom – micro-variation and thematic cogency – means there is enough vocabelizing in this archive to enable it to thrive in strong connection with the lineage of launeddas players from Sarrabus.
