The renascence of forgotten instruments has been an important issue in the musical world in the last decades, and it is linked to the strangulation of the Western musical language as a consequence of the modernist search for the new: the culture of progress. This reaction made possible the critique of the cultural centralism and the valuation of the peripheries. This is the context for the rising of the so-called Historically Informed Performance movement (HIP), which retakes old interpretative practices through the use of long abandoned instruments as much as the reevaluation of the performer as a co-creator of the musical work, this happening after a long period of romanticist filter. On the other side, the post-modern re-emergence of local identities urged a valuation and re-signification of regional musical practices that feed the cultural industry of the so-called World Music. In this article we are putting side by side the Baroque violin and the rabeca, two instruments with no apparent historic connection but that well represent the above described moment. The new usages and new contexts given to both these instruments in the contemporary world instigate the reflection about a possible sense behind these phenomena.
PIEDADE, A. T. C.; Fiaminghi, L. H. Rabeca Reborn: the revival of the Brazilian fiddle and the historical performance of music. In Michelle Castellengo et Hugues Genevois (dir.) La musique et ses instruments.1 ed. Paris : Éditions Delatour France, 2013, v.1, p. 497-508.