In Ferrara I used to sing in Coro Polifonico “Santo Spirito”, where we performed mostly baroque sacred music. I was very proud of that hobby, that allowed me to sing in prestigious theaters together with famed orchestras and world-class directors. Unfortunately when I moved to Florence I had to give up on this activity and I missed it a lot.   I tried to look for something similar in my new location but couldn’t find anything that matched my time budget and my taste.

For three long years Caterina tried to have me join The Pilgrims, a gospel choir.  I went to see one of their concerts and I liked it but, you know, jumping from Mozart’s Requiem to Happy Days is a big leap and I didn’t feel like I could do it.  Luckily enough, a few months ago Caterina eventually convinced me to give it a try and… it’s great!  I ended up joining their group – so now I am a Pilgrim – and already performed in five concerts!

What makes The Pilgrims great is not the songs we sing, even if there are some really good.  It’s not the musical skills, even if we sing everything by heart and the soloists have amazing voices.  It’s not the red tunic and the choreography we make dancing on the stage.  What makes it great are the choir members.  They are very energetic, friendly, inclusive and I have lots of fun with them!  And when you have fun performing the attendance has fun as well, which by the way is the goal of our performances.

I’m very thankful to Caterina for all the fun and the emotions I got in the concerts and for everything else that will come!  Damn, if only I joined them three years ago…

[Stefano's comment deserved a longer answer, so here is a full post on the topic.]

What is Art? Something difficult to define. Most say art should convey an emotion and I do agree with Stefano on this. There’s no need of understanding for emotional communication is something that usually doesn’t happen at the rational level. Trying to define art is mostly useless. Art just feels.

There are styles and languages with immediate and universal emotional effect. Everybody get the same instant feeling of aesthetic beauty when listening to Bach, even if they don’t understand how fugues work. Beauty is something mostly instinctive and doesn’t even require an artist. You could get the same feeling watching a sunset or a landscape. But then, in order to understand why Bach is beautiful you have to analyze your own emotions, the effect that Bach wanted to evoke, get to the inner logical and symbolical structure, see the fabric. At that point you understand what the artist intentionally tried to do. That’s the magic in art: the ability to intentionally evoke emotions and ideas.

There are styles and languages a little harder to understand. That’s usually not because they want to hide, or select their elite audience. That’s because the “a-ha” effect is a powerful emotion-generating device. When meaning and structure suddenly emerge, after some thinking our brain springs emotions. Take for example Escher paintings, or hermetic poetry. Sometimes even math equations can have an artistic effect, if you get to see the harmonic symmetry behind them. If you believe, you can even think they’re what God intentionally tried to create; his signature.

The greatest artists can combine several layers of meaning and symbolic languages so that, when enjoying their work, you get instant feeling but, if you persist, you can also get to the deeper layers and enjoy even more. I guess it all depends on the way human cognition works.