Music through History

Nowadays Italian artists’ music is replaced by foreign music. Discussing this together we have seen that the music we usually listen to is rock like Ac/Dc or Guns’n’Roses, pop like Katy Perry or Britney Spears, house like David Guetta or Martin Solveig, blues like Michael Bublé and metal like Metallica.

We have also discovered that we listen to music from the countries we’re working with thanks to the Comenius Project like, for example, Rammstein (a very popular German group), Sonata Arctica (Finnish), Blue Café (Polish) and Xutos & Pontarés (Portoguese)and Apollo Papathanasio (Greek).

Town Bands In the biggest villages in our valley, there are some bands in which many students are enthusiastically involved. For example the town bands in Chiavenna, Gordona, Samolaco and Villa di Chiavenna. They were founded more than a century ago. Their first performances were for religious purposes and then secular,

Some bands of the past broke up, but others have grown, such as Gordona’s, that played during a national soccer match and will shortly play in Rome.

Our school, unfortunately, has never had its own band but,over the years, it has tried several times to create one. Early in the eighties, some students tried to create a singing group. They met in the afternoon, after school lessons. They made some attempts, but after few months, they gave up the project because there wasn’t a good director able to lead the group.

Some years ago, the idea to create a new school band was reconsidered. In fact some students, thanks to the help of a music teacher,performed by playing instruments like the violin, the guitar,the piano, the accordion, flute and the trumpet. They played different kinds of music: from Bach to the Beatles and also the tune of the school performance “Romeo and Juliet”in 2008.

Nonetheless, music in our school has not been forgotten. In fact, this year, in February, there was a musical concert that involved many talented students who wanted to display their musical skills in front of hundreds of their peers for a magical and original initiative sponsored by our school. The whole concert was directed and organized by the students that, despite of a difficult beginning, concluded with exceptional performances. The concert was repeated for the families the same evening.

The show was also animated by the choreography created and directed by the same dancers, who danced not only recent songs among young people, but also to the famous songs from the musical Grease.