The song

Here we are: summer’s gone, and our 20th Summer Festival, entitled “Celebration”, is now a memory. By now, that wonderful month has moved to the land where the air breathes differently, and time is a whole other ballgame…

In Italian, the festival had a subtitle, “ci riCordiamo”, which means “we remember”, but which implies a movement of the heart. English says “to learn by heart”, which places the memory firmly in the organ of feeling, where it will not likely surrender to the predatory dictates of the head.

In fact these days our heads are doing some high volume, high speed dictating: howling out something like a cultural civil war in America and much of Europe; shrieking of a shameful war In Ukraine, now playing with a nuclear imperative which will know no bounds; screaming in global chorus of an environmental collapse already upon us… by now the apocalyptic howl doesn’t surprise us.

And we at La Luna nel Pozzo, how are we responding to this deafening sound? With song. Ours is a song of beauty, which we’ve been studying for 20 years, because we feel it imperative that beauty be learned by heart. This year, for example, at the Night of the Black Moon: after that voyage, one of our guests left us a message, in the form of a haiku:

Song is
the silence
of the countryside.

Here in the countryside we continue to sing, to sing in full voice and in full silence, because nature reminds us— or rather, rehearts us— that beauty is for all, all that feel the need, even today. Especially today.

And you? Do you hear the song? You, woman, man or other; you normopathic music lover; you ancient child, infantile adult, freed in your dreams of the labels which divide us and abandon us, alone— how do you respond to this wild, gentle song?

We can offer only this, as it’s all we know: a simple solace, an antique balsam, fragile but surprisingly resilient— learned in the heart, not in the head— we can offer only beauty, language of the heart, song of the countryside.

We are grateful for this opportunity: to sing together with you in this night, until the coming of dawn.