Saturday 22nd August at Meeting the Choir CET of Milan

Rimini, 21st August 2015 – “A heart bigger than the war. The songs of the soldier people in the first worldwide conflict” is the title of the Choir CET (CET: Canto e Tradizione Milano, Song and Tradition Milan) that will take place Saturday 22nd August at 9.45 p.m. in Arena Frecciarossa, after 100 years since the entry of Italy in the Great War.
It is an opportunity to rediscover, among the songs that Italian soldiers brought up to the borders, the signs of an even bigger humanity. Such an authentic inventory – glorified by Italian musical tradition, of great artistic value – shows the depth of men’s heart in our daily trials and in the history’s ones as well: love and war, work and rest, peace and human fraternity, wait and nostalgia… when they break up into singing, the find their most dizzying expression.
The week during the Meeting also hosts the exposition of the same title as this. One of the most suggestive and characteristic themes of Alpine tradition (in more general terms, of all expressions in mass music) is nostalgia, melancholy, the heart-felt lack of something (Someone) that could fill men’s hearts.
The simplicity of human experiences, consigned to the fairest songs, brings to this apex of wait – often unconscious – to the expression of the founding need of men’s hearts. In many cases the text presents elementary evocations concerning life and death, love and war, crafts and seasons; among the words a new truth of individual histories will be found, together with a human question – often rough or yet confused: but in the musical dimension, the presentiment of the true depth of men’s desire, and a possible fullness, becomes actual. By singing together – in the communion among men who release, through some songs, and especially in the melodies’ beauty of expression – one can realize a possible answer which goes beyond the sum of individuals, as well as the musical harmony breaks the measure of the single voices.
“This experience, typical of any singing community” tell the young choristers, “is the same that repeats today for those, like us, try to honour the Alpine inventory and its beauty: small sign, yet authentic, that Beauty fills hearts”.
These songs are a tale of the ability to face circumstances way more superior than the ability of individuals or groups (as in the experience of war), circumstances incapable to limit or overpower the hearts of those involved. In the songs, even the most melancholic and dramatic, there is no sign of recrimination or despair, rather a plain feeling of compassion and hope. Technique’s violence, its danger to the entirety of humans, is never the real matter. In fact it is quite the contrary; that is to say, the matter is mankind and its capability to crave, love, offer – until a prayer, often unconscious (as in “Monte Canino”, “Ai preât”, “In cil e je une stele”…), because sure of a bigger origin, and a bigger destiny.

(M.T.)