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Tribute To WWI

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“Today I welcome every kind of tribute to WWI memory, even if most of them have remained encrusted in rhetoric and emphasis. Unfortunately, I’ve hardly met anyone interested in recovering soldier’s songs, because Italy deeply lack of popular culture. I’ve experienced this condition when, four years ago, I played in front of some of the most eminent Italian WWI historians. I played with some members of the Toscanini orchestra during a conference, reviving WWI soldiers’ and trenches tunes. At the end of my performance, the historians were astonished: they never thought that was possible to do anything like that. They didn’t even want to leave and were asking for more and more encores. I also lost my train that night because they were begging for more songs; they were saying “we have …show more content…

That can happen because people were already used to dance to them one hundred years ago. To honour this repertoire, we have to attract people to it. We just hosed a seed that was already planted, maybe we added some fertilizer, but these songs are part of our genetic pool”. (Canossi, 2015) As a matter of fact, not only the audience is deeply changed but also the performers. Pedrotti, who linked his career to WWI repertoire, revealed that Coro della S.A.T. has been strongly transformed in the last decades, also because the human canvas has changed. “Years ago, there were really gifted voices which could sing for hours and hours with no break; while today it is impossible to find anything like that. Voices are still beautiful, but are more choral ones, more reliant on the choir director. When I started, I remember that people were more spontaneous and natural about singing. Years ago, singing was indeed commonplace and widespread among young people”. (Pedrotti, 2015) The director also noticed a transformation in songwriting and

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