Monthly Archives: April 2019

Livin’ Milano, “Pennsylvania Drums” edit

[NOTE: this video has Italian subtitles. To turn them on, click on the “CC” icon you will see when you move the mouse over the video once it is playing]

During our Easter rehearsals, while SImone and his slide guitar were tossing and turning over a huge family lunch in Montecastelli Pisano, we had the visit of a delegation from Maryland and Pennsylvania (“friends of a friend” from Torniella), in addition to some your folks from Tatti.

In the American team, it turned out that Blaise is an ex drummer (now into congas). Replacing the drum brushes with two actual painting brushes from Wolfgang’s toolkit as drum sticks, we had the first video version of Livin’ Milano. This requires some adjustments, but is good enough for a casual Easter afternoon at home, and is cool for the audience feedback, 41 days from the departure for the Politecnico di Milano + Germania mission.

The song was written by Jack O’Malley around 1991. At the time he was studying air pollution monitoring in Politecnico, and one of the considerations he heard was that, by using the then new car retrofit technologies there was the possibility of having the same level of air pollution with a larger number of cars circulating. Interestingly, you can still hear similar logic presented today in some events on sustainability. The lyrics were recently edited to reflect new things happening.

JBCM Duo (Dario & Jack), Massa Marittima, Tuscany, Apr. 6, 2019

On Apr. 6, 2019, Jack was invited to give a talk on buiometria partecipativa (participatory night sky quality modelling) for a group of high school students.

We decided to set up some sort of duo-operation, for a geomusical performance, combining Jack’s talk with a couple of songs, related to the topics of the talk, performed by Dario.

Here is the opening of the evening with “Il cielo è di tutti”. This is a poem by Gianni Rodari, from which Bobo Rondelli created a song some years back. The song is one of the candidate to be the main track for the BuioMetria Partecipativa project: