Feniarco, during Singing Weeks, Congresses and Courses, is often in contact with the choirs and their conductors. These meetings are useful for training and updating, but also to compare with the Italian choral reality, to understand the needs and the aims of this important movement represented by our Federation.

The second volume of the collection Melos sums up all the demands of choirs and conductors, and gives to many Italian composers the opportunity to make their work known to a very wide audience.

The ferment that Feniarco’s editorial initiatives created both in the choral world and among composers lets us think that the meeting between composers and performers is going as we hoped when we created the first publishing projects.

The suggestions collected after Melos 1 helped us to apply more specifically to the different Italian choral groups in order to offer them a series of valid musical proposals they will use to begin different training paths and to enrich or make their programs more interesting.

Knowing the different experience levels obtained by the different choral groups in the field of contemporary music, we selected a series of useful pieces for a gradual growth of all choirs in this field. The most curious conductors that look for new music will find in this volume interesting pieces with difficulties according to the background of every single choir. The work of harmonization will be gratifying for all singers and the performances will be of sure effect.

We want to thank a lot all the composers for their efforts and the professionalism they showed with the wish that all these compositions will become part of the repertoire of Italian choirs and that they will provoke the interest of singers and the enthusiasm of the present audience.

COMPOSITIONS

FOREWORD
by Mauro Zuccante

A collection of choral compositions is also an anthology of literary texts: so, a proposal that goes beyond the music field and arouses a wider cultural interest.

Even if the overall artistic value is the datum that most of all qualifies a music piece, the content of the sung text and the expressive parallelism of the music with it are aspects of the same relevance. Without going into ancient esthetical matters (i.e. if "oration is the owner of harmony and not its servant", or vice versa), I want to consider more pragmatically how the genre set by the literary text (sacred, secular, folkloristic, for children or other) influences the repertoire choices of choir conductors. Moreover, the places in which we can “do music” (churches, concert rooms, theatres, open spaces) and the criteria to formulate programs (historical, monographic, monothematic, according to geographic areas, to the time of the year or miscellaneous) force to find “ad hoc” pieces.

However, it is not worthy to introduce superficially and offhanded any “Ave Maria” to complete a sacred-music program, or an any “Ninna nanna”, with the result of having a slow piece inserted inside a series of other lively pieces.

Among the many good compositions of same genre, or character, or historic period, or style, those who offer an interesting, studied, innovative, poetically elevated text, add more value to the proposed repertoire.

In “Melos” the collection of new compositions comes after the section that presents the literary texts in music, in order to stimulate a meditation also about the content of the sung words.

It’s not my duty to judge the literary choices of the composers that collaborated to Melos project. I can limit myself to sum up briefly the picture of the sung texts that emerges from the publication of the 48 pieces of the 2 “Melos” volumes actually published.

Italian composers choose to frequent a sacred or liturgical text: about half of the compositions of “Melos” are of sacred genre, in Italian or Latin language.

Instead, when there are songs of other genre, they prefer the “solidity” of classical authors’ verses of our literature (Dante, Leopardi, Pascoli – to mention some of the most present and famous); or they prefer the more actual language of lyrics of modern authors (Saba, Quasimodo, Rodari).

It’s not rare do use texts (in dialect and not) of anonymous authors, or coming from regional folkloristic heritage.

There is also the choice to set to music verses wrote by the composers themselves.

Finally, I found a rare exception: in “Melos” there is only one piece in foreign language; I don’t think it’s a curious datum, rather a cue to make some reflections.