The Folk Music of Tricarico
The visceral heartbeat of the cupa-cupa, the spirals of cosmic rhythm, and the poetic shout of a land that never stopped singing.
The Ancestral Beat of the South
In Tricarico, music does not accompany life: it generates it. Its roots run deep into a remote past, into rituals of possession and peasant catharsis where sound became a shield against the hardships of existence. There was no separation between work in the fields, the migration of transhumance, and song. The Lucanian tarantella, before being a festive dance, was a spiral of collective healing, a sonic exorcism born to restore harmony between the individual and the mystery of the seasons.
The melodic soul manifested itself in the "canto a distesa": a powerful, raw, open-air song that shepherds threw across the Basento valleys and the dry clay ravines. A cry of solitude, toil, and pride that filled the space, transforming daily effort into immediate poetry, passed down exclusively through oral tradition.
The Cathartic Rhythm
Music was not conceived as mere entertainment, but as medicine for the soul. In the Lucanian tarantella, the cyclical motion and obsessive percussion offered a symbolic liberation from daily toil and the sense of abandonment of the deep South.
The Instruments of the Rite
The Cupa Cupa
The primary instrument of the ritual and the carnival. A clay or wooden cylinder, covered by a stretched animal skin with a reed fixed in the middle. By rubbing the reed with a wet hand, it generates a deep, dark, and hypnotic friction sound that vibrates directly in the stomach and evokes the subterranean pulse of the earth.
The Canto a Distesa
Improvised polyphonies and "a distesa" songs were the radio frequencies of an ancient world. Free and timeless songs echoing on the hills of Tricarico, carrying the toil, melancholy, and pride of a civilization that lived in contact with the earth.
Antonio Infantino
Shaman, Architect, Visionary
Antonio Infantino (Sabaudia, April 6, 1944 – Florence, January 30, 2018) was not merely a musician, but a titanic figure in Italian art, capable of pulling the popular tradition of the South out of the nostalgic enclosure of folklore to project it into the international avant-garde. Born in Lazio, he spent his youth in Basilicata, settling in Potenza at the age of ten and absorbing the archaic polyphonies of the Lucanian territory. He then moved to Florence to study architecture, a city that became his intellectual and artistic home for the rest of his life.
An eclectic artist, poet, and painter, Infantino conceived art as a total ritual. During the years of social protest, his research crossed paths with apparently distant influences: free jazz, Brazilian percussion, and the experimental theatre of the famous Living Theatre. From these contaminations, a new theoretical vision was born: the "cosmic rhythm" and the spiral of the tarantella. Far from a purely academic approach, Infantino saw in the repetitive beat of the cupa-cupa and the tambourine a tool for psychological healing, a cathartic trance connecting the individual with the primordial forces of the universe.
In 1975, he founded the Tarantolati di Tricarico, a revolutionary ensemble composed of local musicians and peasants. The following year, in 1976, the group astonished the international public with a memorable concert at the Venice Biennale. Infantino's music combined the liberating energy of dance with a strong message of political and social protest. Historical songs like "La Morte Bianca (Tarantata dell'Italsider)" became protest anthems, exposing the exploitation of workers and industrial deaths with sharp, evocative lyrics.
In addition to composing protest songs and unique lyrical expressions, Infantino was also a craftsman of sound, designing and building modern variants of the cupa-cupa to improve its acoustic performance and turn it into a leading avant-garde solo instrument. His passing in Florence in 2018 left an irreplaceable void, but his flame continues to burn as a beacon for all Mediterranean ethnic music.
"The tarantella is not folklore for tourists. It is a hypnotic spiral that never ends, it is the rhythm of the cosmos made flesh. And the cupa-cupa is its primordial engine."— Antonio Infantino
Visual Archive (click to enlarge)
Agostino Cortese with the Lucanian ritual drum
Agotrance
The cupa-cupa meets electronics
Agostino Cortese, who grew up under the artistic shadow of Antonio Infantino, is the link between archaic tradition and digital modernity. With his Agotrance project, he takes a bold leap: he places the cupa-cupa and Lucanian percussion within electronic, techno, and ambient soundscapes.
This is not a simple modernization, but a recovery of the original meaning of the peasant ritual: trance. The cupa-cupa, with its hypnotic repetitiveness, becomes the kick drum of a contemporary tribal dance. The drum beats a millenary rhythm that pulses in unison with the frequencies of club culture, proving that the archaic ritual is still alive and speaks to the new generations.
"In my drum also beats a heart for Bob Dylan. Music is an open road that crosses times and borders."Agostino Cortese — Project "In my drum beats a heart for Bob Dylan too"
The Tarantolati of Tricarico
Since 1975, the caravan of rhythm
Founded in 1975 under the charismatic leadership of Antonio Infantino, the Tarantolati di Tricarico are the historical ensemble that redefined world music in Italy. They took the therapeutic rhythm of the South and transformed it into a discharge of pure collective energy that fired up stages around the world.
Characterized by a gritty polyphonic choir and a wall of tambourines and cupa-cupas, the Tarantolati stage concerts that are true sabbaths of liberating joy, where the audience is dragged into a timeless dance that unites different generations and worlds.
The Founding
Under the charismatic and theoretical guidance of Antonio Infantino, the ensemble that would change Italian folk forever is born.
Venice Biennale
The avant-garde debut that astonishes international intellectuals and art critics with the hypnotic force of the cupa-cupa.
Global World Music
Memorable performances around the world, bringing the peasant, Dionysian trance to the stages of international festivals.
The Legend Continues
An open collective of musicians, guardians of the original beat, ready to set every square ablaze.
The historic Tarantolati di Tricarico lineup led by Infantino
Officine Popolari Lucane
Pietro Cirillo and the Mediterranean caravan
The flame of the ancestral rhythm is kept alive today with pride by Pietro Cirillo and his Officine Popolari Lucane. Cirillo, a multi-instrumentalist and student of the historic fathers of Lucanian music, has created a true workshop of sound contamination.
The Officine Popolari Lucane combine the cupa-cupa and peasant songs with Mediterranean, African, and Balkan sounds. A caravan on the road celebrating the drum not as a museum piece, but as a universal language, capable of dialogue with the other shores of the sea and shouting the identity of a proud and continuously moving South.
Officine Popolari Lucane led by Pietro Cirillo