In Italy, a choir of immigrants and locals tells the story of Venice
Giuseppina has been studying music for about 50 years, focusing specifically on Venetian songs passed down through oral tradition and with “layers of beauty and complexity”. Most, however, have already been lost to time.
“They’re being submerged,” she says, intentionally evoking the rising sea levels that threaten the sinking city. The folk songs have been preserved more in the historic city than on the mainland – much like the dialect, architecture and traditions, such as glass-making, rowing and lace-weaving – because of the city’s geographic isolation.
Giuseppina was born in 1958 in a town on the mainland close to Venice.
She remembers singing nursery rhymes when she was little with her mother and then with her friends when she was an adolescent. “We would sit together, laugh and sing,” she says. “It was our way of being.”
But the awareness that music “could become her whole world”, as she puts it, came later.
In the 1970s, when she was 18, she worked as a secretary in a factory. While helping her town organise its annual carnival, she met one of the leaders of a vibrant folk revival scene, singer-songwriter Gualtiero Bertelli, and then eventually singer Luisa Ronchini, who lived in Venice. They would become her mentors. Musicians and composers, much like ethnomusicologists, would go around with equipment to record the city’s work and folk songs, preserving culture they knew was at risk of disappearing and then adapting it in their own music at a time of protests.
The 1970s saw a continuation of the political momentum that was sparked in 1968 as students, feminists and workers held marches and sit-ins to protest for better pay, denounce religious conservatism by pushing for abortion and divorce rights, and advocate for affordable housing. Giuseppina started taking the train with her friends to Venice to participate.
“When you were together in a group, you would sing,” she explains. They would sing as soon as they gathered at the train station, during the short ride to the island and then as protesters filled piazzas and the narrow medieval streets, which were still occupied by artisans and taverns. “It was a way for me to enter into the life of the city, for the first time, to learn about its history as well as its problems,” she says.
Meanwhile, Giuseppina joined the folk revival scene, practising and performing with Bertelli and Ronchini, the biggest names at the time. They were reinterpreting musica popolare, or traditional folk songs, to amplify the struggles of workers occupying factories to demand better working conditions or the plight of bead-stringers, the women threading glass beads to sell. The work song “semo tutte impiraresse,” or “we are all bead-stringers,” was collected by Ronchini from the women. “We work all day like machines,” the women would sing, “for just enough coins to buy food.”
Giuseppina identified the most with the oldest songs, she says. “I let myself go. I lose myself in these songs,” she says. “These are songs of workers and farmers. I hear the voice of my mother and aunts.” She came from a working-class background. Her father was a farmer and then a hospital worker while her mother worked as a cleaner. Protest songs brought her closer to her roots, she felt, and also taught her about the power in collective expression.
In creating the choir, Giuseppina drew from this music. For her, these songs are powerful because they are about giving marginalised people a voice.
“We are drawing from this deep well of oral tradition that tells the stories of men and women who, despite not being trained artists, had an incredible capacity to narrate their own experience.”
In the choir, everyone has a voice that is unique and beautiful, she says. “The work is to let the beauty express itself along with an awareness of the context.”
Giuseppina has blue hawk eyes she uses to scan the group, reprimanding choir members who aren’t paying attention. She pumps her arms like wings to tell the choir to gather energy, lowers her hands and body to get them to quiet down.
She and Prince have an unspoken bond. They met when he joined the choir eight years ago, and she has seen him grow in confidence although she chides him for still not speaking Italian. He is quiet while she can be domineering. He listens carefully, offers feedback to the group and is never one of the troublemakers she has to keep her eye on who talk during rehearsal or fail to follow her instructions
“Prince is a true artist,” Giuseppina explains during a car ride in March to a new rehearsal space in the industrial district.
“He is shy, but when he speaks, he says things that are very personal,” she says. “I would like him to find inner peace. I want his happiness.”
Source: Apps Support