"Qui connâit Résia et les Résiens?" Il viaggio di Ella von Schultz Adaïewsky e la nascita dell'etnomusicologia

Pianist, fine composer, Ella von Schultz Adaïevsky has incessantly committed herself about the overall reasons of music, with a deep musicological attitude. Born in St. Petersburg in 1846 in a German-Baltic family, she was always attentive to the appreciation of cultural diversities, first of all the linguistic ones. In the fall of 1883 she suddenly appeared as an ethnomusicologist in a little eastern-Alpine valley, the Val di Resia: in those years this scientific role had neither yet received a specific acknowledgement nor the same name by which we identify today this discipline. She went on the field to search for the musical culture of the little “mysterious” Slavic people living in that valley of the Italian side of Eastern Alps, as they still live there. Her passionate discovery of a musical culture was consigned to a large manuscript - written in French - fervently compiled and edited in several layers: it is a travelogue, a compendium of human experience and scientific research, a notebook for skilled musical transcriptions, and a musicological treatise of amazing amplitude and depth. Today, almost miraculously returned to the readers after a fortunate discovery, this manuscript aims for what it was: nothing less than a founding act of ethnomusicology in general, able to anticipate decades of heuristic methods and attitudes of extraordinary foresight and therefore upset our habits about the very origins of this discipline. Particularly significant are the dialogic relationship that Adaïewsky settled with the Resian people and the local musicians, and the empathic effort with which she was able to interact with them, respecting and admiring their musical forms which at first had seemed so strange that she could not decipher them in the light of her usual technical baggage. The interpretive effort was conducted with incredible erudition and perspicacity, comparing the metric-rhythmic patterns of ancient Greece with the internal rules of the Resian music, concluding that the musical sensibility of Resians showed that they had given similar solutions to problems of the same type. The relevance of the manuscript is therefore in its content, demonstrating an exceptional pioneering experience in the development of a surprisingly advanced - even to our eyes - scientific method. But it is a unique document because it is difficult to find in the ethnomusicological literature, such a work equally capable of revealing the mechanisms of formation of a research experience and its subsequent processing: the text is in fact full of corrections, additions, reassessments, ancillary informations written on the margin, which reveal a reflective path that is otherwise destined to remain implicit and sometimes deliberately concealed. There is no doubt that much of the quality of this work derived from the female gaze of Adaïewsky: so, stating the gender value of this founding experience, we can give back to the origins of European ethnomusicology also this further merit.