Education or Inspiration

Recently I attended a play that was supposed to be "ground-breaking" and awesome. But I was disappointed to see that it was instead an historical diatribe about a political point of view. I left early, bored and restless.

Later that weekend, I attended the West Bay Opera production of La Forza del Destino. It was a three and one half hour production, so I expected to find it difficult to sit for so long. Of course the presence of Ragazzi singers was an enticing incentive and I was looking forward to seeing and hearing them.

Imagine my surprise when at the end of the opera I found my eyes watering up. I had been moved to tears by the beauty of the story and the powerful acting and music.

This led to my thoughts about art and what we at Ragazzi are trying to do. Yes, we are educating boys in the mores of different historical times, languages and cultures. Yes, we are learning to sing with correct technique. And yes, we are learning to read music, an almost forgotten language.

But fundamentally we are making connections. We want to feel what people who sang Latin chants felt. We want to understand the impetus for the rhythms of the great Latino songs. We want to understand the mysterious chants of the cathedral. We want to learn how music in the Renaissance played with words and melodies and rhythms. and then we want to communicate that to you. We want to connect with you, to share with you.

At the end of a Ragazzi concert, we want you to feel happy, sad, moved, amazed; we want you to feel something. We don't want you to only think, "My, they must have worked hard on this music. As Jon Carroll, after attending a performance in the East Bay, wrote in his column in the San Francisco Chronicle November 4, "...the music was beautiful; I still felt a lump in my throat. That's real art, I think--when the emotional moment transcends the plot..."

To this end we are working to help the boys connect to the texts, even when they sing in foreign languages. We are exploring different ways to showing the feelings of the text through our faces and bodies. We are reaching out to you, our audience, and asking you to connect with us to other times and places and to share our journey of exploration and excitement. We want to inspire you to experience a moment of transcendence, even if for just an hour.