Engaging creatively with a traditional soundscape: goat bells—from landscape to performance

This article offers an insight into a creative process that relies on ways of engaging creatively with a folk approach to sound. It discusses the adoption of elements of the Calabrian use of bells for herd animals in a composition titled All’Erva Radicchia. Positioned at the intersection between ethnographic and artistic practice in the wake of Steven Feld’s ‘mixed genre’, the piece complements the author’s research into Calabrian animal bells. The piece draws on the network of relationships that animal bells initiate between various agents in Calabria and reproduces in performance the sound of a goat flock. The article discusses the adoption of structural elements of a sound tradition and the exploration of new composition and performance practice to generate music that is able to communicate knowledge about folk phenomena that would unlikely be communicated otherwise.