Rigodon Sauvage, with a repertoire (Southern Alps, Dauphiné) drawn from folklorists’ compilations and field recordings, has created an innovative style, giving a contemporary echo to a long musical history.

The dominant image of the traditional music and dance of the Southern Alps and, more broadly, the Dauphiné, commonly associates the music with the violin and the dance with the rigodon. This image is the culmination of a rich musical history that has been traced through archives, folklorists’ works and fieldwork. This history, with its mechanisms common to all the French provinces, has exacerbated certain salient features of popular musical practices, giving them an unprecedented representative value and place.

These practices and the repertoires that have emerged have their own particularities – melodic-rhythmic forms, types of learning, functions, relationship to dance, etc. These practices and repertoires are very different from “learned” music, even though they are geographically and sometimes culturally close.