In the community of Farindola, in its rural districts and foothill hamlets situated in the Upper Tavo Valley, groups of women and men used to sing during agricultural work, largely carried out by hand or with the aid of just animal traction, before the mechanisation of farming progressively took hold during the second half of the twentieth century. Following the radical transformations in working practices and the gradual abandonment of the area by many of its inhabitants, who moved further downhill in search of different employment opportunities, these cultural forms, which had sedimented over centuries, gradually disappeared as well. In them, labour was eased through singing, understood as an instrument of dialogue and communication, of easing social relations, of courtship and of expressing emotions through poetic verses — often improvised — and through the cultivation of powerful and penetrating voices capable of covering even great distances between groups of agricultural workers.

The singing repertoires associated with agricultural work are among the oldest sedimentation and strongest persistence in people’s memory, even though they have not remained in active use for at least four decades. They also display the most archaic musical features among those still remembered and circulating within the rural communities of the eastern Gran Sasso area. Recalling her participation in agricultural labour during her youth and the singing skills of the women who accompanied that period of her life — including her mother Maria Salzetta, a master of peasant singing — Bambina Miraglia classifies the work arie (“airs”), the specific melodies, into three principal categories closely linked to the annual agricultural cycle: arie for wheat weeding, performed while manually removing weeds during the warm spring months; harvesting arie, sung during the summer; and arie for olive gathering in autumn, each of which could in turn present different modes of performance, melodic organisation, harmonic structure, rhythmic pattern, versification and textual content.

For Bambina Miraglia, singing aunitë — united, together — was a way of expressing “the affection people had for one another” through a distinctive mode of shaping sturnillë, also known as canzunë, on the work arie. These compositions were conceived to be sung outdoors, a voce stesa (with a fully projected voice), and performed with a particularly powerful and effortful vocal emission, based on a complex use of head resonance and facial cavities. “Knowing how to sing li sturnillë, also called canzunë,” states the ethnomusicologist Marco Magistrali, who has long devoted his studies to them, “means not only knowing many of them and using them at the appropriate moment, but also being able to modulate the voice by enriching the modal musical structure with ornamental flourishes and extending the melodic supports while projecting the voice over great distances.” Not infrequently, work arie took on a polyvocal form: one in which two melodic lines, lu addë and lu bbassë — the high and the low voice — extend the final notes of each verse, suspending the rhythmic pulse provided by the syllables and thereby creating a suggestive and prolonged sonic blend.