The sonazzos

The sonazzos (in Sardinian language) are bells used by the shepherds of Sardinia to identify animals. These bells, tied to the necks of animals, are made in Sardinia by very refined craftsmen and are real musical instruments despite their practical use. Each bell has its own stamp and can thus identify the animal that wears it.

The sonazzos

The employment of sonazzos also characterizes ritual moments in the life of Sardinia. This is the case of the carnival which takes place in the center of the island in the region of the mountains: Barbagia. The carnival is called Carrase care Where Carre-de-Secare (in Sardinian), that is to say carne viva da smembrare (in Italian), living flesh (carnage) to tear (lacerate, tear to pieces) (see also: Turchi 1990, Maschere, Miti e Feste della Sardegna/Disguises, Myths and Festivities of Sardinia).

The archaic ritual behind the Sardinian carnival resembles the rituals devoted to Dionysus. In the procession of traditional disguises we find the mask of Mamuthone. These masks walk slowly through the streets of the village of Mamoiada carrying, attached to their backs, numerous cow or sheep bells, the sonazzos, of different sizes, and also animal bones, which they shake while making a synchronous jump. Traditionally there are thirteen mamuthones. This ritual generates a lot of percussive sounds followed by short resonances.

We know neither the genesis nor the primordial meaning of the ancestral ritual. It is a very slow, obscure and funereal “dance”. We can assume that it symbolizes the relationship between man, animal, land and nature in the context of the agricultural and pastoral world. However, this ritual alludes to a Dionysian cult (Maimone for the Sardinians is Dionysus).

The pantomime of mamuthones is the ritual that symbolizes the sacrifice of Dionysus, his murder, in order to bring nature back to life in the spring. This explains the name of the carnival Carrasecare because according to the myth, the god is torn and devoured. One can suppose that in antiquity one practiced in Sardinia the human sacrifice and at a more recent time certainly the sacrifice of animals, goats, ewes, sheep, and cows.

In the myth of Dionysos, the child god is attracted by the Titans who use games, cowbells and bells (the sonazzos) to approach him before tearing his body apart, devouring it and throwing the pieces into the waters. Sonazzos thus has the symbolic role of opening composition of a series of pieces inspired by the myth and the ancestral cultures of the Mediterranean and especially of Sardinia.

The bells that attract Dionysos are also "signals" that wake us up and prepare us for a different sound universe. However, our inspiration from myth is sonic rather than narrative. We have imagined sound worlds in order to sublimate and evoke these ancestral rituals based on our sound perception of the ritual. We do not wish in any way to tell an episode in a narrative way.

Word sonazzos can also mean suonacci, cattivi suoni (in Italian), bad sounds. Our goal was to make sound art starting from rudimentary sound. In the project Sonazzos we used a formal model borrowed from the pantomime of mamuthones which can be described as follows: a group of violently struck sounds (the masks shake their backs making a synchronous jump) followed by a resonance of the sonazzos, followed by silence.

In Sonazzos, an initial musical unit recalls this gesture of the masks of the mamuthones and this sound fragment is transformed little by little by micro-variants. This sound universe can also recall the movements of animals in groups in the silence of the countryside, movements followed by the irregular noises of sonazzos.

In the piece, the free resonance of the bells is conceived as an “elastic”, “extensible”, “open” and “variable” space from a temporal point of view, where new musical materials find their place. At the level of the macro-form the work is characterized by three episodes: (1) the primordial matter is first presented and elaborated, (2) interrupted by a new central episode and then (3) re-exposed in the third part where it is still elaborated in a dynamic way.

In the piece there are many percussion instruments played by a single performer. In Sonazzos are used: a vibraphone without smorzatori, a suspended cymbal, three gongs, a tam-tam, 2 congas, two low tom-toms, two wood-blocks, two timpani plus four metal-blocks (the sonazzos) suspended on the skin of the timpani.