A Historical Overview of Musical Worship & Culture in Sardinia 459
Gregorian chant in Latin and Spanish, which have their roots in the medieval
tradition).99 Some stanzas (coblas) of these paraliturgical documents, such as
Lamentos, were probably sung with melodies from the oral tradition, which is
unfortunately lost. On the other hand, there are examples of cantus fractus,
including a monodic Credo Sardo from a Dominican environment in the eigh-
teenth century.100
The current repertoire of the brotherhoods ranges from peculiar intona-
tion ( “multipart singing”) based on the Latin text of Psalm 50, Miserere, Stabat
mater, and other forms of liturgical literature in Latin and the Sardinian
language.101 Oral songs, based on medieval hymns, are still widespread, e.g.
Vexilla regis in iambic dimeters for Holy Friday.102 From a harmonic point of
view, the influence of the “faux bourdon” in Sardinian “multipart signing” has
been authoritatively demonstrated.103 The “lexical borrowing” from cultivated
medieval music—e.g. tenore, contra, cuntraltu, mutetu—is a further strand of
study that requires investigation.
Overall, the specific contributions of Sardinian music during the Middle
Ages (such as the chant “a cuncordu,” or the chant “a tenore” and the launed-
das), are not yet known. From the methodological point of view, it is neces-
sary to always keep critical historical awareness, and to analyze and compare
every single piece without axioms. Traditions that could be distinguished as
either “sacred” or “profane,” literary or oral, local and/or international, merged
in complex cultural dynamics during the Middle Ages.104
99 Giampaolo Mele, La Passione di Nostro Signore Gesù Cristo. Testi liturgici, paraliturgici e
musicali in un manoscritto sardo del Settecento (Oristano, 1988), pp. 20–29.
100 Giampaolo Mele, “Due Credo inediti, ‘Sardo’ e ‘Maltés’, in una fonte con canto fratto del
secolo XVIII,” in Il canto fratto: l’altro gregoriano: atti del convegno internazionale di studi,
Parma-Arezzo, 3–6 dicembre 2003, eds Marco Gozzi and Francesco Luisi (Rome, 2006), pp.
221–226 (233–238: musical transcription).
101 Ignazio Macchiarella and Giampaolo Mele, eds, Una rete per lo studio del canto a più voci
fra oralità e scrittura, CD-book (Udine, 2008).
102 Ibid., p. 47.
103 Ignazio Macchiarella, Il falso bordone fra tradizione orale e tradizione scritta (Lucca,
1995). See also, Ignazio Macchiarella, Cantare a cuncordu. Uno studio a più voci, preface of
Giampaolo Mele (Udine, 2009).
104 Giampaolo Mele, “ ‘Vox viva versus vox mortua.’ Problemi storici sulle fonti della polivoca-
lità liturgica sarda tra Medioevo ed Età Spagnola,” in Un Millennio di polifonia liturgica tra
oralità e scrittura, eds Giulio Cattin and Franco Alberto Gallo (Bologna, 2002). See, for the
liturgical sources, Bonifacio Giacomo Baroffio, “I codici liturgici: specchio della cultura
italiana nel medioevo. Punti fermi—appunti di lettura—spunti di ricerca,” Ecclesia Orans
9 (1992), pp. 233–276.