To speak about Sardinian music as though it were a single tradition is already to simplify it.

The island contains musical practices shaped by different communities, languages, religious occasions and forms of social life. The launeddas of southern Sardinia belong to a different musical context from the multipart singing of Santu Lussurgiu or the canto a chitarra traditions associated particularly with Logudoro and the centre-north. Even canto a tenore, perhaps one of the practices most immediately identified with Sardinia outside the island, changes from one community to another.

What connects these traditions is not a single recognisable Sardinian sound.

It is something more complex: the way musical knowledge becomes rooted in a community, passed between people and reshaped through use.

This makes the relationship between tradition and contemporary creation more complicated than the familiar contrast between an old musical culture and musicians who later began to modernise it. Change was already there. It can be heard in variations created during performance, in local ways of singing shared forms, in instruments adopted from elsewhere and eventually made local, and in the decisions musicians continue to make about what should be preserved and what can change.

Sardinian music has remained alive partly because it has never been entirely still.

A tradition made of differences

The launeddas offer a useful place to begin, partly because their sound has become such a strong musical symbol of Sardinia.

The instrument consists of three single-reed pipes. The longest, su tumbu, provides a drone, while sa mancosa manna and sa mancosedda carry the melodic material. Circular breathing allows the player to maintain an uninterrupted flow of air. Different relationships between the pipes create different cuntzertus, associated with particular scales and repertories.

But describing the construction of the instrument tells us only part of what the launeddas are.

Their music belongs to social contexts: religious processions, celebrations, collective dancing and other occasions in which playing has a particular function. In dance repertory, recognised musical modules, often referred to as nodas, can be developed through rhythmic and melodic variation. A performance therefore moves between the return of known material and decisions made in the moment.

That matters more than presenting the instrument simply as a perfectly preserved object from antiquity.

Archaeological evidence from Sardinia includes a small bronze figure from the early Iron Age depicting a musician holding three pipes. It provides important evidence for the long presence of related multi-pipe instruments on the island. It does not prove that today's launeddas repertory, technique or social function has remained unchanged for thousands of years.
 

The history becomes more interesting when continuity and transformation are allowed to exist together.

The same is true of Sardinian vocal traditions.

Canto a tenore is built around four specialised voices: boche, mesu boche, contra and bassu. The lead voice carries the poetic text while the others form the accompanying vocal texture. The deep timbres of bassu and contra are among the practice's most immediately recognisable elements.

Canto a tenore was proclaimed by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2005 and entered the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008.

Yet even here, the idea of one fixed musical language quickly breaks down.

The practice is documented in more than sixty communities across central and northern Sardinia, with locally recognised musical codes and ways of performing. Singers work from melodic and harmonic formulas they know, but these can be combined and varied during the performance. The sequence is not simply reproduced in exactly the same form each time.

The poetry can change too. Alongside inherited texts, singers have addressed subjects such as emigration, unemployment and politics. A musical practice recognised internationally as heritage can therefore contain contemporary life within it.

Nor should canto a tenore be used as shorthand for all Sardinian multipart singing.

At Santu Lussurgiu, for example, canto a cuncordu belongs to another musical and social setting, historically connected with lay confraternities and religious repertories, particularly during Holy Week. Other forms and local practices exist elsewhere on the island.

Canto a chitarra introduces another kind of difference.

In its specialised form, singers perform within recognised poetic and musical frameworks while developing individual approaches to ornamentation, phrasing and interpretation. A professional singer can become identifiable through a personal traggiu. ISRE dates the recognisable modern public form of the genre to the early twentieth century, when organised singing competitions developed from earlier social practices.

This is worth remembering whenever Sardinian traditions are described simply as ancient.

Not everything considered traditional has the same age, the same history or the same relationship with the past.

What these practices share is not sameness. They show how musical identities become attached to particular communities while remaining open to interpretation.

Oral tradition does not mean repetition

The word tradition can suggest repetition, as though the task of each generation were to reproduce what the previous one had already established.

The musical evidence is less static.

In launeddas dance repertory, variation is part of performance. In canto a tenore, singers combine and modify shared formulas. In canto a chitarra, a common framework gives individual singers room to establish recognisable musical identities.

Rules do not remove creativity. They create the conditions within which creativity can be understood.

Research conducted by Sardinian composer Franco Oppo between 1985 and 1987 makes this particularly clear.

Working with dozens of launeddas players and instrument makers in central and southern Sardinia, Oppo initially investigated questions including tuning and scale systems. The recordings and documentation that resulted revealed something broader. Musicians discussed choices, followed some established schemes while departing from others, and demonstrated forms of invention in both instrument making and performance.

Some aspects of the tradition proved less predictable than a formal description of the musical system might suggest.

This does not mean that anything can be changed without consequence.

A musician needs to know a language before a variation can carry meaning within it. Oral transmission depends on memory, listening, imitation, correction and repeated contact between people. But those processes inevitably involve interpretation.

Change did not arrive when contemporary musicians discovered traditional Sardinian music.

It was already present in the way the music was being made.

When something new becomes traditional

There is another useful complication.

Not every instrument now associated with Sardinian traditional music originated on the island, and not every one has been present for an exceptionally long period.

Regional musical documentation dates the introduction of the guitar to Sardinia to the island's Spanish period. The diatonic organetto and accordion arrived much later, between the second half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth.

Both became deeply embedded in local musical life.

The organetto developed a particularly important role in parts of central and northern Sardinia and in dance repertories. Accordion became common in other contexts, including professional canto a chitarra competitions.

Today, neither instrument necessarily feels foreign within Sardinian traditional music.

Their history raises a useful question.

At what point does something that arrived from somewhere else become local?

The answer cannot depend only on age. It also lies in what musicians do with an instrument: the techniques they develop, the repertories that grow around it, the social situations in which it becomes useful and the expectations a community gradually attaches to its sound.

Tradition does not simply inherit.

It also absorbs.

Preservation without freezing the music

None of this makes preservation unnecessary.

UNESCO has warned that canto a tenore can be weakened by social and economic changes and by performances removed from the situations in which the music has traditionally lived. When a complex musical practice becomes something presented mainly on a stage, there is a risk that the repertory narrows towards what an outside audience most easily recognises.

The danger is real.

But preservation can create another problem when it starts to demand immobility.

The Sardinian safeguarding project Amparu addresses this directly. Its stated aim is to maintain canto a tenore as living heritage while avoiding its transformation into a museum object. Its work has included field research, documentation of local variants, activity with schools and younger generations, and renewed attention to informal social spaces where singing can continue as part of communal life.

That distinction matters.

A recording can be preserved unchanged.

A musical culture cannot.

Safeguarding a living musical practice means protecting the people, knowledge, relationships and contexts that allow it to continue. It means giving another generation the possibility of learning the music well enough to take responsibility for it.

The sound itself is only part of what is being preserved.

Contemporary Sardinia: more than one way of carrying roots

Once tradition is understood in this way, contemporary Sardinian music stops looking like a separate chapter.

There is no single route from inherited culture into the present.

Some musicians work directly with traditional repertory. Others begin with particular instruments, texts or techniques and place them beside jazz, improvisation or electronic sound. Others create music with no obvious traditional quotation at all, while their relationship with Sardinia remains fundamental to what they make.

These are different artistic positions. They should remain different.

Reworking the tradition

Ispiriendi offers one clear example of deliberate reinterpretation.

The project brought together Marco Muntoni's voice, Giulia Cartasegna's violin, benas, percussion and other sounds with Roberto Diana's Weissenborn, acoustic and electric guitars, bass and banjo. Its 2019 album combined original work with material drawn from Sardinian repertory and approached arrangement as transformation rather than reconstruction.

The same year, the Archivio Mario Cervo included Ispiriendi in its cultural programme, presenting the group as musicians from different backgrounds working with Sardinian tradition and culture through an unusual instrumental combination.

Limen Collective takes another route.

On Perda e Bentu, Sardinian material enters a compositional setting shaped by jazz, improvisation and a broader Mediterranean musical vocabulary. Language, memory and inherited material are not simply added to the arrangement as signs of place. They are part of how the music is constructed.

The album later received the Premio Mario Cervo, a recognition dedicated to recorded work by Sardinian artists and to the broader musical culture documented by the Archivio Mario Cervo.

These projects belong to a wider field.

Gavino Murgia has brought his background in canto a tenore into dialogue with saxophones, jazz and improvisation. Enzo Favata has worked with the Cuncordu di Castelsardo in settings where traditional vocal repertory remains structurally present alongside contemporary instrumental languages.

Paolo Angeli offers another revealing case. His prepared Sardinian guitar developed partly from a decade of study with Giovanni Scanu, a musician from Luras associated with Gallurese and Logudorese guitar traditions. From that apprenticeship, Angeli moved towards an individual language involving improvisation, experimental music and amplified guitar.

The result is not simply traditional music with contemporary decoration.

It is what can happen when a musician learns a language deeply enough to respond to it in another one.

Roots without quotation

There is another relationship with Sardinia that can be easier to overlook because its musical signs are less obvious.

Simone Soro does not ask the violin to imitate a traditional Sardinian ensemble on Ispiràle. The album moves between classical training, jazz, improvisation, electronics, tango, afrobeat and other musical references.

Soro has described the record in relation to a rediscovery of his Sardinian roots, family and personal history. The title itself, Ispiràle, is a Logudorese Sardinian word meaning spiral.

In 2025, the album was among the recordings that received the Premio Mario Cervo.

The significance is not that an institution has certified the album as sufficiently Sardinian. It is almost the opposite. A work can belong to the contemporary musical culture of Sardinia without reproducing a recognisable traditional vocabulary.

Safir Nou suggests another possibility.

The group's work moves through acoustic and electronic instrumentation, contemporary composition and detailed attention to texture. The album Liminal developed through several years of writing, research, travel and collaboration, using guitars, violin, double bass, accordion, percussion and electronics.

It received the Premio Mario Cervo in 2022.

Again, the point is not to classify the record as traditional music. It is to recognise that contemporary Sardinian musical culture includes work whose relationship with the island does not need to be demonstrated through a fixed collection of symbols.

If Sardinian identity is recognised only when launeddas enter an arrangement, when a traditional melody appears, or when a text is sung in Sardinian, then the definition is being imposed from outside.

Musicians themselves may carry their relationship with the island in less visible ways: through personal history, language, family, memory, musical education or simply the place from which they learned to listen.

When place remains even when the sound changes

Roberto Diana's Raighes Vol 1 offers another perspective.

Released in 2012, the instrumental album revolves around guitars and a musical language that moves between Mediterranean folk references and rock. Its title uses the Sardinian word raighes, roots, and the record was conceived around the idea that origins remain part of a person even when their path leads elsewhere.

It is not an album of Sardinian traditional music.

That distinction is precisely what makes it relevant here.

Diana was born in Luras, the same Gallurese town as Giovanni Scanu. Scanu belonged to a specific guitar tradition and later became an important source of knowledge for Paolo Angeli. Diana's musical vocabulary developed in a very different direction, through acoustic and electric guitar, slide playing, Weissenborn and instrumental composition outside the traditional repertory.

There is no reason to invent a direct musical lineage between them.

The more interesting fact is that there does not need to be one.

A place can contain several musical histories at once.

Luras can belong to the history of Sardinian guitar traditions and at the same time be the starting point for a guitarist whose work follows another vocabulary entirely. Cultural continuity does not require musicians from the same place to reproduce the same sound.

Sometimes the connection lies simply in the fact that the question of where we come from continues to matter.

Who decides what sounds Sardinian?

This leads to a difficult question.

What does an international listener expect Sardinian music to sound like?

The most recognisable signs are understandable. Launeddas have a distinctive timbre. Canto a tenore is difficult to confuse with anything else once heard. Traditional languages, particular vocal techniques and local instruments provide strong points of cultural recognition.

The problem begins when those signs become requirements.

If music needs to contain them before it can be heard as Sardinian, contemporary musicians are left with a strange responsibility: continually demonstrating their origin through a limited vocabulary of recognised symbols.

Broad categories such as folk and world music can create a similar problem. They may be useful for organising recordings, festivals or collections, but they tell us little about the specific relationships between musicians and particular Sardinian practices.

A canto a tenore group, Safir Nou, a launeddas player, Simone Soro and Limen Collective may all circulate somewhere within these broad cultural categories while making fundamentally different music.

The Archivio Mario Cervo offers a useful counterpoint. Its work is centred on the recorded musical history of Sardinia, with traditional repertories at its core, but its collection extends through many other forms of music made by Sardinian artists.

The musical history of a place does not end when musicians stop sounding traditional.

This may be the more useful way to listen.

Not every Sardinian musician has to preserve a traditional form.

Not every contemporary reinterpretation becomes meaningful simply because it contains traditional material.

And not every relationship with Sardinia needs to be immediately audible to someone who does not know the place.

Cultural identity is not a checklist of instruments.

A tradition that remains unfinished

A launeddas player learns established nodas and makes choices within them.

Four singers begin from musical forms they know and create a performance that will not be repeated in exactly the same way.

An instrument that once arrived from elsewhere can, over generations, acquire techniques and repertories that make it inseparable from local musical life.

A contemporary violinist can look towards his Sardinian roots while composing through jazz and improvisation.

A guitarist born in Luras can make music that sounds nothing like the guitar tradition associated with Giovanni Scanu and still carry that place within his work.

These situations do not all describe the same kind of continuity.

They do not need to.

Perhaps the mistake is expecting cultural continuity to produce sameness.

Sardinian music remains meaningful because people continue to make decisions inside it and around it. Some protect highly specialised practices. Some reinterpret inherited material. Some move far from those forms while retaining a relationship with the island that continues to shape what they create.

Tradition does not become less real because it changes.

And contemporary Sardinian music does not become less Sardinian because it refuses to sound the way someone else expects.

For further listening, our Sardinian Music selection brings together some of the traditional and contemporary musicians discussed here.

Sources

• UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, Canto a tenore, Sardinian pastoral songs
• SardegnaCultura, Regione Autonoma della Sardegna, resources on launeddas, canto a tenore, canto a chitarra and Sardinian instrumental music
• Ignazio Macchiarella, research on canto a cuncordu and the musical practices of Santu Lussurgiu
• Delia Dattilo, research on Franco Oppo’s fieldwork with Sardinian launeddas players and instrument makers
• Regione Autonoma della Sardegna, Amparu, safeguarding project for canto a tenore
• Archivio Mario Cervo, archive and documentation of recorded music by Sardinian artists

Image credits

• Launeddas procession, Cagliari: Urfin7, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
• Historical launeddas player, Sant’Antioco: Fratelli Alinari / Rijksmuseum, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
• Tenores di Bitti “Mialinu Pira”: Sardegnabella, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
• Limen Collective, Simone Soro, Safir Nou and Roberto Diana: photographs courtesy of the artists