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Tessa

The people's music

I've written before about the beautiful 19th-century theater around the corner from us that looks like a miniature La Scala. It was built by the town in the 1860s and its interior was designed by Girolamo Magnani, a Fidenza native (back when it was still Borgo San Donnino). Hw was also a close friend of Giuseppe Verdi, who came from a village not far away, and designed the sets for some 20 of Verdi's operas. When Magnani died in 1889 the town named the theater in his honor. 

The view from a stage-side box.

The theater seats a little over 400 people, including all the boxes and the gallery at the top, and the acoustics are great. Just walking into that space is an aesthetic thrill. You can easily imagine the grandees of yesteryear chit-chatting in their boxes while listening (or not) to the music and peering down at the crowd below. I've noticed that some audience members still feel perfectly comfortable discussing the performance while it's still underway.

These very polite folks socialized before the opera got underway. 

Nowadays the theater is home to a small, Verdi-heavy opera season. This year's offerings include Verdi's Otello and Nabucco as well as Rossini's Cenerentola. The production of Otello was wonderful, the Nabucco a little less so, but still highly enjoyable. Rossini's La Cenerentola is coming up tonight.

The Nabucco cast takes a well-earned bow.

In Verdi's day operas, particularly his operas, were popular music. Today they're a very small part of what goes on at Teatro Magnani. There are pop concerts, plays, school performances, chamber music, weddings, cooking demonstrations, and one of Fidenza's wintertime traditions, an annual concert called "Cantare è Vivere"-- "to sing is to live." 

This free event always features I Cantori di Santa Margherita, the singers of Santa Margherita, an amateur choir based in the nearby village of that name, plus other groups from the surrounding area. In the past we never got around to attending; I'm generally not a huge fan of amateur choral music and we always seemed to have something else to do that afternoon. This year our neighbor Pia invited us to come along with her, so I asked Pam--my go-to source for advice of all kinds--what these concerts were like. "They're very popular but the music's not my cup of tea," she answered. "It's sort of mountain barbershop quartets."

I'd assumed these events centered on Christmas songs and classical chestnuts like the "Hallelujah" chorus. By contrast, mountain barbershop sounded intriguing. Danny and I told Pia to count us in.

The concert began the way almost every event in Italy begins: with speeches thanking everyone involved and celebrating the people and performances we were about to see and hear. The Santa Margherita group was up first, a choir of about 30 men and women wearing matching light-blue sweaters. 

Their first number was a very pretty and rather risque song, traditional in the region. It tells about a girl whose miller boyfriend comes to spend the evening with her while her parents are away. The parents return unexpectedly and, as near as I can understand, catch the two young people making like his mill--"he grinds, she grinds." Here's a video from 1982 (the group was first formed half a century ago) of their performance of the same tune. 

I enjoyed not only the tunefulness of their songs--they seemed very Italian to me--but also the choir's raw, untrained sound, especially the women's voices. You can imagine sherperdesses belting out these ditties to each other across alpine valleys.  

The next act on the bill hails from a village outside of Brescia, a city about 60 miles away, an all-male group called Il Coro Prealpi, meaning a chorus from the Alpine foothills. They looked quite butch in matching brown bomber-type jackets.

The program explained that their repertoire includes "songs that tell of the mountains, of their traditions, and of war." (Evidently a lot of Italy's traditional popular music stems from World War I.) Like the Santa Margheritans, the men sang a capella, amplifying only the soloists. Their set was a mix of contemporary and traditional songs, concluding with a Sardinian folk tune that, for reasons that escaped me, they sang in a circle with their backs to the audience. Here is a video of another of the choir's recent performances of the same tune.

The audience received both groups with plenty of warm applause. But it was the third and final group that really had the crowd bouncing in their seats. Dressed in flowing blue-and white church robes, they were from another village outside Brescia, but their name and their music were in English, because their repertoire is American gospel. 

The Gospel Time Choir is all white, and since they're based in a farming village outside of Brescia my guess is that they're all Italians. But while their English pronunciation was sometimes a little shaky, there was no denying their commitment to the muisc and the joy they took in performing it. They sounded great, as well as very loud. Unlike the other two groups, their voices were amplified and they sang to pre-recordaded tracks with drums, guitars, and brass. And while the other singers stood still while they sang, the Gospel Timers swayed and bobbed, waved their hands and clapped. By the end of their set many in the audience were doing likewise.

The difference is visible.

I've been reading The 1619 Project, so the historical context for gospel music--the abuse and suffering the United States has inflicted on its Black inhabitants over the centuries and their struggle not only to survive but also to push the nation to face up to its ideals--was very much on my mind. Having just read about how white "Redeemers" terrorized and murdered former slaves in the wake of the South's defeat in the Civil War, I was uncertain how to feel about a stageful of smiling Italians singing a gospel tune that proclaims, "I shall not fear the arrow by day, nor shall I fear the terror by night...[God] has set encampments around me. Whom shall I fear?" 

Was presenting this music as upbeat entertainment implicitly disputing or dismissing the history it came from? Was this a gross form of cultural appropriation? Is gospel's popularity in Italy and elsewhere in Europe yet more evidence of intractable racism, or a small reason for hope?

I don't know the answers to such questions. All I can say is that I could see no evidence of condescending minstrelsy in the singers onstage, whose joy in making this music infected everyone in the theater. (You can get a taste of their sound and draw your own conclusions from this unfortunately truncated video, although it's not as high-energy as some of the other numbers I saw them perform.) And let's face it, the gospel sound, with its beat and swing, was to the traditional tunes of the other groups as jazz and rock were to the old-fashioned popular forms they displaced. That other stuff pales (pardon the expression) in comparison to the vital, ecstatic elements that the Black diaspora has contributed to the cultural mix. 

The next day I read Wesley Morris's chapter on music in The 1619 Project. He describes how the musical forms created by enslaved people were in many respects "the start of American popular culture as we still know it" and "has midwifed the only true integration this country has known." 

But although white people have been loving Black music all along, but they've also been sanitizing, diluting, and stealing it. "Something about white America's [and Europe's?] desire for Blackness warps and cheapens it even in adoration," Morris writes. But he goes on to argue that what Black music uniquely delivers is a freedom born in defiance of extreme oppression, "the  music of a people who have survived, who not only won't stop but can't be stopped...music whose promise and possibility, whose rawness, humor, and carnality call out to everybody.." 

Clearly that includes amateur gospel singers in Italy and the people who gather to hear them, me included. As Morris says, "If freedom's ringing, who on earth wouldn't want to rock that bell?" Amen.