Maria Moramarco – Stella Ariènte (Visage Music, 2021)
In Stella Ariènte, Maria Moramarco channels ancient songs. With the voice of someone who’s walked those dusty pilgrimage roads herself, she revives a rare and emotionally raw repertoire from the Alta Murgia region of southern Italy. For sure, the album is both a spiritual excavation and a musical time capsule. The result is as haunting as it is heartfelt.
At its core, Stella Ariènte is rooted in the ancient tradition of devotional pilgrimage songs, laments, and prayers sung by those walking barefoot toward sanctuary, hair unbound, tongues heavy with grief or gratitude. These aren’t polished hymns or church choir standards. Instead, they’re visceral, intensely personal invocations, pleas for a brother’s safe return from war, or for deliverance from illness. The music is both anchor and offering, steeped in ritual, pain, and hope.
Moramarco approaches this material as a cultural conduit. She’s spent decades researching and preserving the oral traditions of her native Puglia, performing with the group Uaragniaun and collecting songs since the 1970s. That dedication shows in every syllable. Her voice is technically skilled, weathered, grounded, and deeply expressive. You hear the cracked edges of old women’s prayers, the soaring wails of supplicants, the hushed murmur of belief handed down through generations.
Vocally, she draws from a style that’s almost vanished, a pre-commercial, pre-conservatory way of singing that lives in the tension between speech and melody. There’s a certain kinship here with Spanish flamenco saetas, those Andalusian holy week chants that erupt from balconies during processions. Yet Moramarco’s phrasing is earthier, more subterranean, almost whispered into the stones of the land itself.
Instrumentally, the album features frame drums, accordion and intricate strings. These arrangements give space to the voice, to breath, to the echo of history.
Buy Stella Ariènte.
Author: Iliana Cabrera
