ABSTRACT
Wednesday, 26 September 1973, in the afternoon. Italian ethnomusicologist, folk revivalist and organizer of cultural events Roberto Leydi introduces the first in a series of seminars, under the title ‘Laboratorio di musica popolare – Folk Music Workshop’, at the Autunno Musicale di Como, an annual music festival at its peak of popularity, in the small town located at the southern end of the eponymous Alpine lake:
Two days later, on Friday 28 September, during a discussion in one of the subsequent seminars, Leydi gives the measure of that widening interest: ‘all of you today, eighteen hundred people yesterday, and hundreds of thousands of people around Italy, attracted by these matters’ (Piccardo 1975, 108, my translation).
