After an abysmal winter, the arrival of
spring, with its inspiring explosion of color in the countryside, has
helped alleviate the depression fostered by too much time reading the
news. On top of that, a series of fortuitous coincidences has
brought me closer to my roots.
Rummaging back through my old high
school yearbook, I find little mention of my activities there. While
more ambitious kids were listed as being on the Student Council, the
varsity football team, the Spanish or German club, the yearbook
staff, or an endless number of other organizations devised to allow
each student the opportunity to compile an impressive resumè of
extracurricular activities, I was dutifully recorded as having been a
door holder, and my future plans were listed as “undecided”. We
each had a quotation affixed to our name. Mine read “I wish I
might show the world how to enjoy itself”. Whether this was
written by a magically prescient classmate, or was simply a comment
generated by my precocious tendency to abuse alcohol, I've never been
sure. Since my academic performance was little better than my
extracurricular curriculum, it's a wonder that I did get admitted to
the college of my choice, but then, that college did have something
of a reputation as a party school, and perhaps they saw in me some
potential. Indeed, while never destined to be student body
president, I did get to be social chairman of my fraternity. In that
capacity I tried to organize theme parties and was routinely
frustrated by the members failing to show up in sufficiently
imaginative costumes. It's gone on that way over a lifetime, in
which I've encouraged people to cut loose on Fire Island, go to jazz
festivals, and visit Umbria. In recent years I've pushed our growing
contingent of foreign residents to get together at the Circolo of
Acqualoreto every Wednesday for a happy hour. While it's a hit or
miss operation, it's proven more successful than some previous
efforts, such as my ill-fated attempt to organize a bocce tournament
in the village. Only people from Ireland, Australia and Bermuda
participated in significant numbers. Actually, they are also active
supporters of the Happy Hour. Very few Italians!
Every now and then, there is some
unanticipated success. Once upon a time in my first grade class
there was a little girl named Barbara Boo Boo Bagg. She was the
cutest girl in the class. As she matured, BooBoo became simply Boo
and she remained the cutest girl in the school. While I hadn't seen
her for four decades, I have spoken with her, and her affable husband
Dick, numerous times by phone, always suggesting that they visit
Umbria. One year, on her birthday, I even emailed her a digital file
of “BooBoo's Birthday” by Thelonious Monk, whose own daughter
Barbara was also known as BooBoo. Miracle of miracles- this year Boo
and Dick came to see Umbria. I suggested they come to visit us on a
Wednesday so that they could come to our Happy Hour, but after a
morning of sight-seeing and an afternoon of eating, drinking wine and
talking, Boo was too concerned about their navigating the narrow and
sinuous roads back to their lodgings on Mt. Subasio in the dark. We
had a good turnout that evening and it was a shame that they missed
it. At a certain age, I suppose we should all learn such prudence,
and I pledge to work at it sometime soon.
At another of our Happy Hours last
September, I met a man named Peter Prinssen, who was a guest of some
of our Dutch neighbors up the hill in Morruzze. Having noted my
Dutch name, Peter wrote to ask if I would be interested in knowing
more about my family history. Apparently all this sort of
information is now on the internet in Holland. I sent him what I
already knew and in short order he got back to me with considerably
more detailed information on the De Graaf family, as well as some
information about my grandmother's family in Friesland. More may
still be coming. The miracle of Google Maps brought me pictures of
both places of family origin and renewed curiosity about why they
left. Did somebody do something bad? I suppose most emigration is
about economic opportunity. Why else would anybody move to to
Houston for example, or why from a the tidy village of Goedereede on
the island of Goeree-Overflakkee to Paterson, New Jersey? For that
matter, my neighbors and I now live in what we regard as an earthly
paradise, only because the area was abandoned after WWII by people
fleeing the drudgery of work in the fields for new opportunities
working in urban factories.
One of our neighbors here, Lin Widmann,
has a daughter Christy who lives in Holland. Last week, between
them, and with the help of the Circolo, they arranged a choral
concert in the church of Acqualoreto. The group, Doulce Memorire,
directed by Felix van den Hombergh, is from Haarlem and was starting
a concert tour of Umbria, singing works by Dutch composers from
medieval times to the present. The voices of the twelve men and
twelve women of the chorus were merged, contrasted and woven together
brilliantly. Much of the music, at least on first hearing, didn't
seem to me memorable in its own right, but served as a vehicle for
the beauty of the voices. During a brief interval, four members of
the chorus played a series of wind instruments, three flutes and a
bassoon, I believe. The counterpoint was delightful. Following that
came the highlight of the concert, an absolutely mesmerizing
rendition of Joep Franssens' modern piece, “Harmony of the
Spheres”. It's a long droning work with rising and falling voices
and pulsing sounds generated by the close harmonies. The acoustics
of the church worked well with this music and the effect was
spectacular.
After the concert, the members of the
chorus walked through the village, paused for a drink at the Circolo
bar and went on to a supper, provided by the Circolo, at the ex-
school. I have fond memories of my Dutch forebears but if truth be
told, they were a dour group. Not these! During the long meal,
various groups of them would spontaneously break into song. It was a
very happy evening for all of us there. The only slightly sad note
of the evening was that the very enthusiastic audience was not a bit
larger.
Three days later, to celebrate May Day
and the fifth anniversary of the Circolo, another choral group of the
same size, the Coro Nomantum from Rome, gave a concert in the piazza.
The director was pleased by the acoustics of the piazza, but a
piazza is neither a church nor an auditorium and a little of the
force and the majesty of the sound is lost in singing the traditional
music outdoors. They sung works dating from 1200 through the 1500's
to Mozart before turning to modern songs such as Paul Simon's Sound
of Silence, Twist and Shout and Barbaram. There was a novelty number
about cats and birds in which the lead cat was a girl wearing
sunglasses which turned bright green when she raised her head to the
light as she meowed. Nice effect! The group has fun with the pop
songs but their best work was the Mozart. This concert was well
attended, especially considering the weather, which had threatened
rain all day but fortunately held off. There was free food following
the concert, the universal secret to boosting attendance at events
which should, but don't always, attract people on their own merits.
Two days later we went to another
choral concert, this time in Todi, by the Chorus of the University of
Perugia. This was another return to our roots in a sense because two
of our daughters sang in this group while at the University and we
still knew a few of the participants. Again, the program was varied,
with a progression somewhat similar to that of the Nomentum concert.
It differed in that it featured a soprano soloist and the chorus
consisted of twenty-two women and eleven men. Some numbers were sung
by the women alone or the men alone or just by the soloist. They
opened with Tourdion by P. Attaignant, a piece which showed off the
counterpoint between the sections better than anything else in the
concert. An English drinking song sung by the men alone didn't sound
robust enough for a drinking song, and I'm not an enthusiast of the
music of Donizetti or Bellini. Verdi's Coro dei Schiavi Ebrei was
splendid, after which they turned to more recent music by Jobim,
Gershwin, and the Beach Boys. Yes, this chorus too, did Barbara Ann,
or Barbaram as it sounds to me. They were a little livelier with it
than the Romans but their best moments with the modern music came
with Siyahamba, an African piece which played the male and female
voices off against each other very well, and a brilliant arrangement
of Ennio Morriconi's music for the film “C'era una Volta il West”
The soprano, Elena Vigorito, soared over the combined voices of the
chorus to wonderful effect. The arrangement was by the piano player,
Francesco Andreucci, a native of Todi. They sang in the Sala del
Consiglio, a magnificent room, which is a joy simply to sit in. This
was a free concert in this gorgeous room, well publicized in Todi, a
city of possibly 15,000 people. There was a bigger crowd at the
concert in the piazza of Acqualoreto, population +/- 150.
Nevertheless, the small audience was very appreciative. My wife was
ecstatic, and wants to bring them to Acqualoreto for a concert. I
will try to make it happen.
The saying goes “you can lead a horse
to water but you can't make her drink.” That's the story of my
life, except that I deal with people, not horses. Getting them to
drink isn't usually so hard. Getting them to eat is even easier.
It's getting them to listen, where it really gets to be difficult.
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