Two nice little things I’ve found hanging out on the web: the Brilliant Weblog Prize awarded to Mondine 2.0, “our” film’s blog (almost finished now: just a little more patience) and this video, shot at last year’s  Globalquerque Festival . It’s summer yet!

L’idea è venuta a Roberta Bartoletti, sociologa all’università di Urbino. Il progetto del Museo delle mondine ha lasciato una bellissima eredità, cioè un gruppo coeso, veloce e tecnicamente molto preparato che lavora bene in Second Life e che tiene molto a certe tradizioni. Perché non impegnarlo in una nuova sfida, la prima Festa dell’Unità di Second Life? Secondo me è un’idea vincente: le persone con cui ne ho parlato hanno tutte capito immediatamente la sua forza comunicativa.

Ho aderito immediatamente. In qualche senso molto indiretto, la Festa è figlia del Museo, e il Museo è figlio della campagna “25 aprile, 355 bloggers” che ho contribuito a lanciare da mondine.it e a cui ho partecipato con Contrordine compagni. Insomma, sento di entrarci. Contribuirò come posso, cioè portando i Fiamma Fumana per un concerto. La festa si terrà a Genesi Italia, giusto sotto il Museo delle Mondine, nel periodo 15-25 giugno. Se qualcuno vuole entrare nel gruppo organizzatore (tutto funziona tramite un wiki) o proporre qualcosa, scriva pure a Roberta, Elena o anche a me.

Lady J and I are working a lot on the finishing touch to the music for the film about Mondine and to preparing the summer tour (that includes a three-week North American tour in September and October, two of which with mondine! You’ll find a calendar in Fiamma Fumana’s website). Meanwhile, though, we are also thinking about the future.

One thing I would like to be part of my future - and of FF’s - is a “shared space for Emilia’s music and culture”, which we started phantasizing about at the now-famous Fuori Orario dinner, with Franco Bassi, Cisco, Giovanni, our friend at Bonifica Emiliana Veneta and Pive nel sacco, Ezio Bonicelli (former Ustmamò fiddler) an others. I think about it as an annual gathering - a festival? - with the spirit of the Liberation Day concert, to which the remarkable energy surrounding these matters could be channeled; there is a lot of it, also on the internet, as we found out when we launched the “100 Bloggers for Liberation Day” campaign (they ended up being 355) launched by www.mondine.it. A good example of what we could do together is the Mondine Museum in Second Life, conceived and built within
a week by a self-organized group (names and roles here) spearheaded by Velas: a place of great suggestion and intensity, reflecting the values and the culture shared by the group. Have a look at the video below (shot by Alexander Amro, music by Fiamma Fumana e Coro delle Mondine di Novi) and tell me that the “shared space” festival would not be great!

(lo slogan “dalla resistenza al contrattacco” è suo)The Liberation day gathering at Casa Cervi was great. Daniele and Franco of Fuori Orario told us that we broke every record of attendance (ten thousand estimated) and food and drink sold, and from the stage we could only see a sea of people of all ages and all colors, happy to be there together. The internet campaign was also a resounding success. We started off with the aim to get 100 bloggers involved: on April 24th we had 330 participants, which yesterday had risen to 347 and counting. If you look on Flickr or Youtube you find lots of photos and videos. A Second Life Mondine Museum has been started and has started to stimulate mondine-related inworld cultural activities. Casa Cervi also hosted a spontaneous meeting of the analogic network of partisan associations, mondine, Fiamma Fumana and Fuori Orario and the the digital network, the internet of the Resistance and Italy’s collective memory. Some influential bloggers turned up: Alberto, riding his motorbike and obviously happy (he created the slogan “from Resistence to counterstrike”); Antonio, smiling and optimistic (he created the slogan “from Resistence to counterstrike”); Marco; Fabio and Roberta, in representation of the Second Life mondine group; Franca, who posted a lovely chronicle-cum-photos; the invaluable Valeria and Freddy for Mondine 2.0 (Freddy even had to replace me for a radio interview).

At the end of our set, everyone, really really every single person, sang Bella ciao together with mondine, and the emotion melted into a very long applause. I was seized by a sense of gratitude and belonging. We really had this sitting right in front of us for a long time before I actually saw it: the “no spectator allowed, only participants” logic of social networks is the same as that of democratic participation. Which means: build relationships of respect and affection with people you share ideals with. Then work with them to “do stuff” (create a mondine choir, organize a music festival, paint the walls of a Casa del Popolo, whatever), and this “stuff” are building blocks of the world that those ideals depict. This building together is the most powerful force I know, a lot more powerful than just casting your vote once every five years. The counterstrike Antonio talks about, for me, starts here.

The dinner at Fuori Orario was a watershed moment in the history of the From mother to daughter project. It’s the same old story, the one I tried to tell with Modena City Ramblers for a while: it’s not true that music is something musicians do. Music points to roots, and music and roots are too important to leave to musicians. Music is something everyone does, or should do, and that embodies, or should embody, an element of finding one’s place in the shared history of a community. Franco of FO says that what drove home so powerfully the dinner was the idea of singing at the dinner table: it’s not showbiz, is something we all do together. And he launched the slogan: “seven thousand people singing” ot the Liberation Day show (April 25th 1945 is the date we kicked the Nazi out of the country, so we made it into a major holiday). It reminds me of Barcamps: no spectators, only participants.

I’m thinking pretty hard at how to render this feeling in the context of a several thousand people open air gig. Franco launched the idea of printing some booklets with the most important lyrics (everybody knows Bella Ciao in Italy, but that shows people we mean business) and handing them out everywhere on the venue, We are going to record the show to make a live album out of it, so we will have a high quality recording of the seven thousand singing their heads off (I think of Bella Ciao and get the goosebumps as I type). But it would be nice to do something social on the web too.. some YouTube/Flickr/Twitter… anyone has an idea and some time to put on it?

Meanwhile a piece of good news: the Mondine di Novi choir will appear on Fabio Fazio’s show on national TV next Saturday night… It’s Women’s day as well

UPD 2 marzo - mi segnalano che la conferma ufficiale della partecipazione delle mondine alla trasmissione non è ancora confermata. Aspettiamo con fiducia.

UPD 6 marzo - partecipazione delle mondine NON confermata. Si cerca un’altra occasione

As we FF were in Holland to perform at Fidder Folk Festival, Valeria and Freddy were having their first-ever Barcamp experience at Torino BarCamp 2008 The From mother to daughter project, as my readers know well, has its own blog, Mondine 2.0. We would like this blog to help a community that is not self-aware yet to perceive itself: the community we feel gathering around mondine and their values. The net is swarming with lore about communities (just now I am reading Howard Rheingold’s seminal book); the characteristic peculiar to this one community is that only one of its two wings, the “new” one, uses the net at all, whereas the “traditional” one, stemming from villages like Novi. The Mondine di Novi Choir itself communicates with the net mainly through us Fiamma Fumana and our people: Valeria and Freddy themselves come from this side.

V&F came back fron the BarCamp feeling satisfied and hyperstimulated (see their nice post). In the best Internet tradition - geared towards knowledge sharing and mutual support - the net people offered them encouragement and useful advice: their presentation was followed by a numerous and attentive audience. The most frequently quoted BarCampers were Elena “Brezzadilago”, Roberta Milano, Marco and Susan, but already before Torino BarCamp some friends and high-ranking bloggers like had offered Alberto D’Ottavi and Mondine 2.0’s guru, Vanz had helped us a lot. I am very happy about this, bringing our roots into the net and drawing some of the net’s attention to our roots seems to me a goal worth investing some energy in.

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The From mother to daughter dinner at Fuori Orario was GREAT. No one expected it: the venue was practically stormed, and it set a record: 250 people eating dinner! Franco and his crew had to set every table available and bar counters upstairs, too. Mondine were in top condition: they sang a lot while sitting at a dinner table, which is probably their favourite situation for delivering a song. But the nicest thing was to see the community gathering to celebrate them: there was Cisco with Giovanni, there was a delegation of Modena City Ramblers, there were Maurizio, Davide and Walter of Gruppo Padano di Piadena, there was Graziano “Monduja” Magagnoli with Luciano Gaetani for Paulem, there was Marco Mainini representing Bonifica Emiliana Veneta but also - together with “the two Fabio”, Bonvicini and Vetro - of the Emilian pipers orchestra Pive nel Sacco, there was the Casalecchio Partisans Association, there was La Grande Famiglia headed by Checco, there were Valeria and Freddy of the mondine’s blog, there were the kids of Correggio Mon Amour and Rock in Rolo, there were the lady major of Gattatico and Beniamino Grandi, Head of Culture in the Modena provincial administration, and both had come as private citizens. Roberta and I represented Fiamma Fumana. Everyone sang: musicians strummed guitars and pumped air into accordions and bagpipes. Everyone found it natural to sing folksongs, speak and sing in dialect, play traditional tunes.

This is weird, I thought. Twenty years ago I would travel to Ireland and really really long for precisely this: that they gathered in the pub to sing songs and play tunes that everyone knew, that belonged equally to grandparents and their grandchildren, and that grandparents and grandchildren could sing together; I was experiencing something that felt very similar, except that there were a lot more people eating a great deal better, and that it took place in Emilia Romagna, in my home. Young and old people recognizing themselves as characters in the same story, with mondine acting as a powerful living symbol of the joy and the courage of our people. A twenty year old dream, come true.

And it does not end here. Because the Fuori Orario has a captain, and this captain is Franco Bassi, a true visionary. And Franco - who was moved seeing the venue full not only with young people, but with old people as well, flocking to the ancient call of “singing at the eating table” - is a man to dream a new dream as soon as he fulfills an old one. And what he dreamed last night was: “the April 25th show at Museo Cervi must be like tonight, only a hundred times bigger. Let’s bring there seven thousand people to sing together.!”

Seven thousand people singing. Hmmm. There’s something there. Who wants to join us - and mondine?

Voices of the World was the title of Thursday night’s show at Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall. It couldn’t have been more appropriate. After the Grace, Hewat and Polwarth trio (Corrina Hewat also acted as Mc), solo singer Mairi Smith, the Bulgarian women’s choir Angelite and the Aberfeldy Gaelic choir directed by Margaret Bennett it fell on to us, Fiamma Fumana and the Choir of Mondine di Novi, to finish it. The show has been good right from the start, thanks to the serene beauty of Gaelic singing, the mysterious harmonies of the Bulgarian girls and Margaret’s Elegiac notes (she touched my heart singing a slow song written for her son Martyn, very great piper and dj, our friend and our rather unorthodox muse: he would be 37 if Hodgkin’s lymphoma had not taken him away three years ago). But when the Mondine set foot on the stage something happened: firstly they sing loud, with a sonic pressure that comes straight from pre-microphonic times and makes them the Who of folk choirs (”volume is power”, indeed): and then we came onstage, with our drum grooves and our instruments, to get the people up and dancing. It ended up in a big party.

MUCH later in the evening, in the hotel’s club, the party was still raging on. The ladies stormed a circle of chairs and sofas and started singing like there was no tomorrow, and there was no way to get them to go to bed. Some fans gave them a copule of bottles of whisky, with they took in stride with the elàn that comes with experience (while getting Paolo, normally a good drinker, seriously drunk) between a rice weeding song and a partisan rebel one. Passers by would stop, clustering in a small crowd, and could not believe it. And neither could I, really: a glance at Diva’s wonderful 84 years, still the most powerful contralto in the choir, who was having the time of her life singing at 4 in the morning in a Glasgow hotel, was enough to tell me that something was happening here. I could feel the pride of being there, and the love that bonds us, grandmothers, mothers and daughters (and sons). And I realized that, depite all the limitations (mine especially, as a musician and composer) we have something to tell the world, we have a good story to pass on and our own little note to add to the great song of planet Earth. Forwards!

To dinner! To dinner! In the best Italian and Emilian tradition, the table is “the” place to meet, renew old friendships and kickoff new projects. And so Fiamma Fumana, Mondine di Novi, Cisco, Giovanni Rubbiani, Davide Ferrario, Andrea Zambelli, Gruppo padano di Piadena, Le pive nel sacco, Correggio Mon Amour, Luciano Gaetani and many others will meet at Fuori Orario for a dinner of (first quality, home made) gnocco fritto (don’t try this at home), Parma ham and Lambrusco. We will talk about ourselves, our common roots: we FF and mondine have tried to communicate them abroad, and found out that the epic of this mall and unimportant corner of the world can be fascinating and emotion-laden for a Mexican or a Canadian. There’s no scheduled concert, but we all will bring instruments along, and we will certainly make some music (dinner with mondine? Try and keep them from singing!). The dinner costs 10 euro, the music is donated by whoever wants to. Bring your own instrument along!

On the From mother to daughter blog there is a post in which we keep a more detailed track of who is coming. Please visit it to see who has confirmed and let us know that your coming and if you are going to make some music with us. YESSS! DINNER WITH MONDINE!!!

Hear, hear. Celtic Connection’s artistic director Donald Shaw wrote asking me to authorize BBC to shoot a video of our show of Wednesday 31st. Always the geenrous type, I granted it . Meanwhile the festival defined the night’s schedule:

7.30pm (20 mins) - Grace Hewat & Polwart (a trio of Scottish voices)
7.50pm (15 mins) - Mairi Smith (solo Gaelic singer from Isle of Lewis)
8.05pm (40 mins) - Bulgarian Women’s Choir, Angelite
8.45pm interval (25 mins)
9.10pm (20 mins) - the Aberfeldy Gaelic Choir (directed by Margaret Bennett)
9.30pm (45 mins) - Coro delle Mondine di Novi with band Fiamma Fumana
10.15pm - there is a thought that all the voices could come together for one song at the end of the night. this may not be possible due to time restraints, but if there is any songs which you think may work as a ‘together’ song, please let me know. But at the same time, please do not worry if there is nothing that comes to mind.

For the ending, we are planning a Bella Ciao led by us, with the insertion of other artists. We did some thing similar in Canada in 2004, with James Graham and Warsaw Village Band, which turned out really well… I have uploaded it onto Last.fm and you can hear it clicking on the “play” button below.

Fiamma Fumana – Bella ciao - Live with Warsaw Village Band and James Graham