« Si le folklore musical existe, alors il est vivant ; s’il est vivant, alors il est normal qu’il meure »

Italian ethnomusicology has never been characterised, as it is in France, by a strong dichotomy between research within the country and research "outside the house" in Diego Carpitella’s words. Until recently, it was confronted with living musical contexts, emerging from a mosaic of economic and cultural strata and social issues unique in the European panorama. It has also never failed to engage in dialogue with historical, philological and literary studies on crucial issues such as the relationship between orality and writing, the learned and the popular, conservative and innovative musical traditions, continental and Mediterranean, all of which have made Italy a very special laboratory for the study of music in the last century.Based on my career as an activist in the first political folk revival, then as a musician and finally as an ethnomusicologist, this article aims to re-read the events that led to a so-called 'heritage age'. It aims to contribute to a realistic analysis of an oral tradition that has now disappeared, discussing the assumptions that musical folklore can resist and renew itself despite historical and social changes, in order to provide the critical distance needed for the anthropological and musical study of current processes of heritagization.