A Song of Many Colours: Musical Hybridity in Corsica

This paper examines the way in which hybridity as a musical concept has informed the activities of a selection of contemporary groups in the Mediterranean island of Corsica (France), where the French concept of métissage already had its parallel in that of polyphony, reified in the 1990s as 'the symbol of the profound Corsican being'. I illustrate my discussion with reference to recent work by Les Nouvelles Polyphonies Corses and I Muvrini, whose members have progressed from youthful beginnings in the 1970s as part of the movement for cultural renewal within the island to become established professional artists regularly working with musicians from other parts of the globe. I show how the evolution of the music has been underpinned by a series of socio-political and ideological developments, including: the ecumenical impulse that followed the more inward-looking nationalist phase of the 1970s and early 1980s; the mapping of postmodern notions of polyphony as a rhetorical device accommodating multiple discourses onto the indigenous paghjella style; a desire to re-embrace a Mediterranean identity, with the Mediterranean itself represented as syncretic by nature; and the notion of a new 'Europe of regions', in which linguistic minorities are brought together in a multi-coloured cultural mosaic. Via an account of the genesis of representative songs/albums and an examination of the way in which the different 'voices' are woven together to form a multi-textured musical fabric, I suggest that the métissage trend is by no means a theoretical abstraction but that individual cases represent meaningful encounters, each with its own specific history, motivation, and inner logic that is both artistic and profoundly human.