Hurdy-gurdy Festival in Pragelato (TO)

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The Hurdy-gurdy is a stringed musical instrument of ancient origins still used in many European countries for the performance of traditional folk music.

At the base of the operation of the instrument there is a wooden wheel, covered with pitch and operated by a crank that rubs the various strings: the trebles, the drones and the trompette.
The trebles, usually two placed in the central part of the instrument, are controlled by a chromatic keyboard and create the melody.
The drones, placed near the soundboard, produce a continuous sound.
The rope of the trompette, resting on a movable bridge also called Chien (dog), instead produces a characteristic buzzing sound used as a rhythmic accompaniment.
The hurdy-gurdy is normally placed on the player’s legs, but it can also be played standing.
Depending on the posture adopted, one or more straps secure the instrument to the body.

The progenitor of the hurdy-gurdy is the organistrum, a huge chordophone used in the Gothic period in monastic settings to teach music and perform sacred pieces.
As can be seen from the depictions on the Portico of Glory in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, it was much larger than the modern hurdy-gurdy and had to be played simultaneously by two people, one of whom was exclusively responsible for rotating the crank.

Around the thirteenth century, the size of the instrument was reduced to the point of making it usable by a single musician.
In Europe it is known as Symphonia, probably due to the polyphonic characteristics of the instrument.
In short, its popularity expanded its use to religious processions and theatrical performances, until it became the typical work tool for wandering minstrels and beggars (often blind, which also makes it known as “viola da orbi”).

In the second half of the seventeenth century the instrument appeared in the French court as part of the pastoral fashion of the aristocracy of those years.
The work of the luthier Henri Bâton, who takes care of its external appearance by bringing it closer to the form we know today and endows it with a more precise intonation, redeems the hurdy-gurdy from its fame as a street instrument and decrees its wide success especially among the female public.

Interest in the hurdy-gurdy was rekindled in Italy during the seventies.
It is rediscovered as a symbolic instrument of the folk revival and used in the revival of traditional music.
More recently, the hurdy-gurdy has also been used in different musical genres, from jazz to rock, from ethnic music to new experimental electronic music.

A great fan of hurdy-gurdy was the Hungarian composer and pioneer of ethnomusicology Bela Bartók.
An electrified version is now used by various folk groups (the most famous of which is that of Lou Dalfin, born in 1982 in the Occitan valleys of Piedmont precisely in order to revisit traditional Occitan music) and by the French virtuoso Guilhem Desq.

Today the Lou Magnaut cultural association carries on this tradition in the heart of the Occitan valleys, right in Pragelato in Val Chisone, former headquarters of the Escartons.