
How It Began...
My very first memory of having got into a magical world through music is related to the
afternoons I used to spend in my grandparents house. I had lunch with them more than
once a week, the sweetest humans in the world.
And then sat at the drawing table, and
listen: listen to these stories.
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In Italian they were called “Fiabe Sonore”. It means “Sonic Tales”.
It was a collection of 45rpm vynil records, each of them accompanied by huge and
amazingly hand illustrated albums. My grandmother had collected them in the 1960’s.
I didn’t realize at the time that most of those tales were traditional ones from Northern
Europe, mostly from the Celtic area.
All I wanted was to get sucked up in one of those books and live there forever.
There was everything I needed to escape and dream: visuals, music, a plot… princesses,
magic, villains, witches, sorrow, happy endings. “Il Cantastorie” (the Storyteller) was a
professional actor and all the arrangements, singing and backing vocals were written and
performed by celebrities of that time.
I could read and sing along the songs.
I was the happiest child in the world.
It is probable that I started singing on those 45rpm.
I still have and jealously treasure all of them. It’s the first thing I pack when I move.
Then the Spice Girls came. And pop, and rock music. I knew I wanted to be a singer
already. But “singer” was not enough at all. I knew that too.
Then College came, and jazz, and cultured music.
But when I discovered folk and world and traditional music… that was me. I could live in a
tale again, and sing it, and tell it, and entertain an audience with it.
With theatre and the discovery of archetypes and psyche, it was like connecting the dots.
Not only my vocal chords were telling a story now, but my whole body. I was in there, my
childhood dream. The untouchable, magical and secret world I wanted to be sucked up
into when I was 6 years old.
And the patchwork was done.
A “Sonic Tale” is all this.
It’s singing and storytelling, it's dramatizing. It's theatre and cinema. It’s a homage
to Primary Emotions through a celebration of Celtic stories and legends.
It’s giving life to the characters from the songs, which are tales themselves, and let the
audience witness their love, betrayal, loss, laugh, sorrow, death. There’s no fear of death
or sorrow in traditional music as well as in fairytales. Only the aim to freely get through it
and be purified by the chant; together with the audience, auditors around a fire.
The pagan sense of natural connection with death and the beyond, is one of the aspects
that I love the most and it intrinsically belongs to the Celts, to folk, to the human. Sing until
you lose your voice, sing as a phantom, as a drunk woman, as a mother. And every step in
life is celebrated with a chant, every Act a switch in the psyche of the character. A
celebration of the human through the representation of its archetypes.
So that we will be braver in life too.