Community

To run concerts or small musical workshops with children within support communities or in places where there is great
suffering is a profound experience.
In the concerts put forward by Musa!, music and musical connection with the public reach beyond where words can reach. They involve people. They can evoke other worlds and nourish dreams of an elsewhere.
I will never forget the concert that we gave at the high-security prison at Campobasso, for the families of the inmates, the majority condemned to life imprisonment and rarely able to meet their families.

Very slowly, the music, the absence of words and the listeners’ sitting positions, on a carpet surrounded by musicians, broke down all feelings of embarrassment and resistance. This was all the more true because contention, a sense of guilt and inadequacy very often build up between prisoners in isolation and their families; and the children are afraid of opening up and trusting because they know separation is near.
At one point I stopped the music and said: “In my concerts I generally ask people not to speak, to give themselves over to listening; but not this time. Today I’d like to say that it would give us great pleasure if you were to talk quietly among yourselves while we play.”

The concert ended with a dance involving everyone – prisoners and not – with their children, to the rhythm of Shostakovich’s Waltz No. 2. I will never forget this experience. (Andrea Apostoli)