Music of Corsica

Every June, Calvi is home to an International Jazz Festival and in September there are the annual Rencontres de Chants Polyphoniques.

Traditional dances like the quatriglia (quadrille) or the scuttiscia (Scottish) have known some kind of revival over the last twenty years, groups like Diana di L'alba and Dopu Cena recorded the music and the associations Tutti in Piazza and Ochju à Ochju animate dance nights and teach as well.

Some popular modern groups include I Chjami Aghjalesi, the Palatini, A Filetta, Terra, Voce di Corsica, Alte Voce, Barbara Furtuna, Vaghjime, Cinqui So', all-female Donnisulana, Les Nouvelles Polyphonies Corses, Tavagna, Canta u Populu Corsu, I Muvrini, and Ployphonies Corses Sarocchi.

[1] In the late 1980s, owing to the growth in popularity of so-called World Music - especially the success of the Bulgarian polyphonic choral recordings of the album Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares - Corsican artists such as Voce di Corsica began to record music for the international market.

Ethnomusicologist Caroline Bithell describes some of these changes, saying that paghjella recordings began to shift from a more polyphonic sound to a more "homophonic sound where the emphasis is on the effect created by the sum of the voices," as opposed to earlier examples of paghjella, "where the individual voices and melodic lines are far more clearly differentiated and behave more independently.

"[1] Additionally, younger singers may have a tendency to exaggerate use of elements considered by outside music consumers to be "typically Corsican," such as heavy use of melisma.