Cammini della Lira 2027 - The modal roots of Calabrian music

This edition of I Cammini della Lira explores the modal roots of Calabrian music through an encounter between a local collective and a collective of musicians from Greece. Hosted by Entopan at its cultural hub in Caraffa di Catanzaro, the festival will become a space for shared artistic research, where performance, listening and collective experimentation offer ways of asking how musical traditions carry traces of contact, movement and exchange. Calabria provides a setting for this investigation: a borderland within the Mediterranean, shaped by overlapping histories, languages and cultural relationships. Its musical heritage will be approached as a living field of practices, memories and possibilities. Rather than assuming a single origin or an uninterrupted connection between past and present, the festival will explore the questions that emerge when Calabrian musicians place their repertoires alongside those of their Greek counterparts. Modality will provide the common ground for this exchange. The focus will extend beyond scales to encompass melodic movement, characteristic intervals, tonal centres, drones, ornamentation and the relationship between melody and rhythm. Particular attention will be given to the ways musicians shape a phrase, sustain a note, introduce variation and create a sense of direction. These elements will be explored through sound and embodied knowledge, allowing differences of interpretation to become starting points for dialogue. The festival adopts an artistic research method in which making music is itself a means of investigation. Musicians will bring selected materials from their own practices into a shared working process, testing ideas through demonstration, imitation, improvisation and arrangement.

 Questions will arise from rehearsals as much as from discussion: what happens when a melody meets another approach to intonation? How does an accompaniment change its modal character? Which features invite a shared interpretation, and which resist translation? The encounter between the two collectives will preserve the specificity of their experiences while opening a space for mutual transformation. The aim is neither to merge distinct traditions into a uniform Mediterranean sound nor to present musical resemblance as proof of historical descent. Instead, the artists will examine affinities and differences through practical collaboration, making their choices audible and recognising that productive exchange can also reveal distance, uncertainty and contrasting musical expectations. Musical presentations by the participating artists will introduce audiences to the sounds, repertoires and interpretative approaches that inform the research. These performances will provide reference points for understanding the collaborative process and the individual voices within it. Alongside them, the musicians will form a transnational ensemble specifically for the occasion, developing a shared programme through the encounter between Calabrian and Greek musical practices. A final public performance by this ensemble will share the outcomes of the experiment. It will present the arrangements, discoveries and creative responses developed during the festival, offering audiences an opportunity to hear how the initial materials have been reconsidered through collective work. The performance will be both an artistic event and a moment of reflection on the possibilities opened by the research. At Entopan's cultural hub in Caraffa di Catanzaro, I Cammini della Lira will connect local knowledge with international collaboration, bringing artists and audiences into a shared exploration of Calabria's musical horizons. By placing modal practices at the centre of an encounter between neighbours across the Mediterranean, this edition proposes a festival in which heritage becomes a resource for enquiry, creativity and new relationships. New musical paths will emerge from the shared enquiry.