Introduction: Father Bartolomeo Di Salvo and his transcriptions of the Byzantine chants among the Albanians of Sicily

Abstract

Father Bartolomeo Di Salvo established an extensive collection of transcriptions of the Canti ecclesiastici della tradizione Siculo-Albanese (Ecclesiastical chants of the Italian-Albanian tradition in Sicily) in the 1950s and early 1960s. It was planned that this collection would be published soon after as the fifth volume in the Serie Subsidia of the Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae (MMB). A plan that in 2016, after about 50 years from the conception of the original editorial project has finally been realized with this publication. The collection of Father Bartolomeo Di Salvo consist of 259 pages, containing transcriptions of 484 items: whole chants, variants and analyses of formulaic schemes (moduli). The ready-to-print films of the collection have resided in the archive of MMB since the late 1960s: in this volume published in 2016, consisting of 328 pages, they are presented together with newly-prepared introductory material (by John Bergsagel, Girolamo Garofalo and Christian Troelsgård). The publication includes also critical notes and indices compiled thanks to the assistance of Giuseppe Sanfratello and an audio-cd containing a selection of the recordings collected by the Sicilian musicologist and ethomusicologist Ottavio Tiby in 1952-1953 for the Centro Nazionale Studi di Musica Popolare [Cnsmp] (National Center for Studies of Folk Music), today corresponding to the “Raccolta 20” (Collection 20) of the Archivi di Etnomusicologia dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia di Roma (Ethnomusicology Archives of the National Academy of Santa Cecilia of Rome).