CL Life
our singing

For Whom Do We Sing?
It is “the highest expression of the heart of man,” said Fr. Giussani, and it is a decisive part of our education. With this issue,Traces is beginning a journey to discover a great travelling companion in the history of the Movement, as far back as that first Mass in Milan...

by Paola Ronconi

The hidden harmony is more powerful than the manifest harmony, said Heraclitis. But there are moments in which it seems that heaven and earth touch for an instant. How often is song the thing that best accompanies the soul toward its Creator!
“No expression of human sentiments is greater than music,” said Fr. Giussani in 1994, to some musicians around a convivial table. “Who is not touched by a string concerto? How can one be unfeeling before the colors of a piano sonata? It seems like the maximum, and yet when I hear the human voice... I don’t know if it also happens to you, but it’s even more, you can’t get any greater than that.”
For Fr. Giussani, the voice has always been a fundamental factor in the life of the Christian community. “Ten minutes before the beginning of the first Mass of the Movement, there, song in the Movement was born,” he always said. “We were gathered in the Milanese church of San Gottardo al Palazzo, and ten minutes before Mass I started teaching Vero amor è Gesù and O cor soave... The Movement was born, and born singing.”
Today, over 50 years later, the notes of Et incarnatus est of Mozart’s Great Mass introduced the presentation of School of Community held by Fr. Julián Carrón, who, with Fr. Giussani’s words, commented, “Song in its pure state... is contemplation and prayer at the same time, a gush of peace and joy born of the wonder of the heart when it is placed before the fulfillment of its expectation... the most powerful and most convincing, the simplest and greatest expression of a man who acknowledges Christ.” It challenges us: “Song for you is almost the easiest door to the nature of the Christian event,” he said some time ago to those responsible for songs for the CL communities, “because it involves you most, because it makes you feel more in your flesh what it means.”
So then, we said to ourselves, let’s investigate how this great travelling companion takes form in our friendship today. But be forewarned: one article is not enough. For now, we’ll start with choirs, and then we’ll meet those who compose the songs.

Who are these people? “It was the 1960s, and I was in the second year of high school. I was invited to the Spiritual Exercises in Varigotti, and I entered the hall while the choir was practicing. I said to myself, who are these people? The song was guided and attentively cared for. They sang in a way I had never heard before.” The speaker is Pippo Molino, a musician, composer, and “doyen” of song in the Movement. “Every time there is a true experience of the Movement, this aspect evokes amazement; maybe those participating for the first time don’t remember well what was said, but they are struck by the songs, no matter what the level of technical capacity.” Pippo has directed the choir of the Movement in Milan since 1986. “Don’t let yourselves be dragged along. Tenors, ebb out,” he tells the choir members as they rehearse the Responsorials of De Victoria: “Pronounce the words, con-ci-li-um, don’t leave out the syllables.” There are about 80 members, crowded into the pews of the Martinengo chapel in Piazzale Corvetto. They practice for almost two hours on their feet, repeating the same lines over and over, the same notes, in order to finally do it well, that Eram quasi agnus, to feel it under their skin. “It’s a tragedy! You’re saying, ‘Venite, mittamus lignum,’ ‘Come, let’s put poison in His bread.’ They want to kill Jesus, understand? Not, ‘What did you do this afternoon?’” “Song is the point in which one most easily sees the contemporaneousness of Christ,” Carrón always said. “One sees immediately when the song is intense, when the ‘I’ vibrates, when the ‘I’ coincides with what you say.” Thus, the choir is “the principal instrument of the education of a community.” “It’s the ‘singing for’ that makes the difference,” explains Pippo. “And the awareness you have of what you sing helps those listening to identify with it. “Serving” then becomes being open to the greatest thing we have in life, and being able to deepen that Encounter that changed it.” Staying on your feet two hours a week... “We have no merit. The only thing that is important is being an instrument of an education that Fr. Giussani began and that Fr. Carrón is continuing,” explains Pippo. “Through the way of being a choir for the Movement, the concrete ways of singing the songs as they have been taught to us, it is that education to song that continues today, that we experience as the greatest for us. It is called a choir, but a different type of choir is lived out, in an act of following.”
“It means following and responding to what the community asks,” says Simona, a music teacher and guitarist, as well as director of the choir of the community of Pesaro, which has 65 members, and includes adults and GS high school students. “Accompanying the weekly Mass, the Via Crucis, or the living nativity scene through the city streets, song helps grasp the meaning of that moment if you do it as an offering and not as a performance.”

Let me sing well. Eugenio has been directing the choir of the community of Padua since 1982. “It’s a continual surprise: what you put in is your faithfulness to a commitment you have made, but what you get out is a thousand times more.” This is expressed in a brief message from Anna, a choir member: “Every time I start out for rehearsal, I find myself saying, let me sing well, not for me, but as a prayer pleasing to You.” “When the sopranos start out at the beginning of the second page of “Amicus meus,” I felt vibrating within me what Jesus experienced in that moment,” writes Eleonora.
Every March 25th, the Padua choir has the honor of being able to sing the only Mass celebrated in the Scrovegni chapel for the Annunciation of the Lord. And recently, when the body of Saint Anthony was shown to the public, they sang Si quaeris miracula, a prayer of praise to the Saint. “Once again, being part of the choir has made me understand that I was there not for my abilities, but because He wanted all of me,” writes Augusta. In fact, “one can do the most beautiful things without awareness, and so they lose gusto for you and merit before God,” said Fr. Giussani in 1987.
In the U.S., the tradition of singing for the community arrived with some Italian students of the Movement, who set out for New York in the 1980s with scholarships. “They proposed starting a choir,” says Chris Vath, a musician. “Five of us learned Ubi caritas by Duruflé. Soon, we began singing for the gatherings of the newborn New York community.” They continue today: the choir accompanies the annual Way of the Cross on the Brooklyn Bridge. One year, one of the “stations” was in front of City Hall, and the Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, was passing in his car. “He stopped. He, a Jew, told us that he was struck by the song. For me, directing the choir is the chance to introduce the beauty of music and to be an instrument for the unity that issues from that beauty.”
By its nature, music is a mystery, “a strange sequence of sounds capable of leading to an unknown joy,” concludes Chris. “But without Christian education, I would fall into the trap of an aesthetic interest left to itself.”
In 1981, Markus became cellist for the choir of the Cathedral of Limburg, Germany. “The director, a priest, was not technically perfect, but he lived what he directed. When I looked at him, I asked myself: what’s behind this Mass of Bach?” The question remained unanswered for years, until Markus met Andrea, a violinist with whom he plays chamber music. “The first time he invited me to a gathering of the Movement I said to myself, ‘I wonder if the answer is here?’” In fact, he continues, “Later, in Corvara, Fr. Giussani had us listen to Schubert’s Death and the Maiden or his Unfinished Symphony: that correspondence that I had perceived as a child became life, companionship.” Today Markus is the director of a music school in Grünwald, near Munich. He directs a choir of the German community that unites choir members from Düsseldorf, Berlin, Frankfurt, Freiberg, and Munich. “We meet to rehearse a few times to prepare for the Fraternity Spiritual Exercises or other particular moments. For me, a person who works in the field of music, having so few rehearsals is crazy, but identifying with what you sing enables you to reach more quickly what you want to communicate.” With his musician colleagues, probably there is more rhythmic intonation, “but I do not reach that level of depth with them. There is another dimension that you cannot create with professional means. It happens as you respond to the question: Whom do you sing for? What do you serve? And the song becomes testimony.” This is also what the “call” to direct the Memores Domini choir has caused him to experience more deeply. “If you sing ‘Ne timeas Maria’ by Da Victoria (the words of the angel to Mary), you cannot shout it, you need great tenderness, because the angel is delivering the greatest task in the world to a young woman. And the choir understands and responds.”