The scartocciatura was one of those jobs that, in the Marche, was never done in solitude. Families and neighbors would sit together stripping the husks from the corn, often well into the evening. At some point (you can bet on it!) somebody would begin to sing; a woman might take the first line, a man come in after her, and before long the two voices would move around each other, sometimes close enough to sound almost uncomfortable, then coming back together at the end of the phrase, with the answering voice often doing the work of an instrument.
This was the canto a vatoccu, a form of two-part singing once heard across much of the Marche and especially associated with agricultural work. It belongs to a broader family of rural polyphonic traditions found throughout the central Adriatic and Apennine areas. The Marche, however, developed a particularly recognizable version of it, built on the very tension and interaction between two independent voices.
