Lunar voices

Larry Schwartz  
NEVIA CALCI remembers the songs her mother, Romana Tomininovi, once sang. Songs like Bella Ciao, a favorite in the Italian Resistance in World War II, in which a soldier is farewelling his beloved as he marches off to war. They brightened Calci’s childhood. And then one day Tomininovi’s own mother died, and the singing stopped.

A few years ago, Calci persuaded Tomininovi to join a choir with her. “I thought it was a way of getting her to sing again,” Calci says, “because she used to be happier when she was younger.”

The two set out in Calci’s car for a first rehearsal. The younger woman soon had her misgivings. “I found myself in turmoil,” Calci says. “Mum couldn’t actually bring the voice out. She was crying. She actually had tears and the voice would not come out…”
And then at last it did – and Tomininovi has been singing ever since.

Why the years of silence? Tomininovi, 65, explains that her mother had been in hospital with cancer. “I was singing all that day, and late in the afternoon they brought us bad news. She died. After that day I was scared to sing a song.”

Monday night in Preston. Mother and daughter are among more than 30 women to have turned up at a salmon-pink building for a weekly rehearsal. They are among 45 “roaming members”, as Kavisha Mazzella puts it, of Melbourne’s three-generation Italian choir La Voce Della Luna. “Voices of the moon,” says Mazzella, ARIA award-winning singer-songwriter and musical director of the choir, who helped Tomininovi regain the confidence to sing.

“It’s the name of (Federico) Fellini’s last movie. I was looking for a name that would give a feeling of women. The archetypal feminine … The kind of music that we sing is huge in range. It’s 500 years of Italian music and there’s just so much depth in it. So we have to have a big name.”

Lights are on at the corner of High and Showers Streets.

“It’s not only hearing you,” a woman who helps organise events at the building tells the choristers after rehearsal, “It’s the expression on your faces. It’s singing that comes from the guts. It’s really the whole body that is speaking from the voice.”

“Fa li la li la.” The choristers stand in a circle, facing Mazzella. Now she plays an accordion; later she’ll strum a steel-string.

“It has to be an autocracy because we’ve got 40 ideas,” says Katrina Pavone, 33, a teacher of Sicilian descent. “So Kavisha leads.”

The choir is unique. Not even in Italy, where men usually sing and rarely do traditional songs, is there one like it. Pavone remembers a visiting men’s choir from Sicily laughing at them. “I think they thought we were odd … But we don’t care. A lot of the time, we’re singing for ourselves anyway.”

“Fa li la li la”. They are practising a 17th-century folk song called Ricciulina (The Curly Headed Girl). They are gossiping villagers. A local teenager is pregnant. Ah, the scandal in Abruzzi!

The choristers are rehearsing for Graham Pitt’s play Emma, based on a book on the life of a Western Australian woman, Emma Ciccotosto, who migrated from a small town in the Abruzzi region, east of Rome, in 1939.

At one point in the play, Emma confronts her mother-in-law, who has shunned her since she fell pregnant at 17. The choir sings her defiance in a song sometimes known for its first line, Sebben Che Fiamo Donne (“Although we are women, we have no fear”).

“Millions of women have sung it before,” says one of the singers, “and we feel power and strength together in this group …”

What about the menfolk? “They’re waiting,” says a chorister. “They’re having dinner and they’re washing the dishes and they’re putting the children to bed. There are a few things that we make them do.”

“Fa li la li la”. Mazzella strums the guitar. “We’ll just give it our best shot,” she encourages her choristers. “It doesn’t matter if it’s rough. I just want to get you familiar with it.”

Mazzella, whose album Fisherman’s Daughter was judged best folk/world/traditional release at the 1998 ARIA awards, was born to an Italian father and Irish-Scottish-Burmese mother. She was three when the family migrated to Perth from London. Her mother tried to persuade her father to speak to their children in Italian. But he feared it would disadvantage them. “And so I lost my language,” Mazzella says. “My father felt I would be made fun of at school if I was too Italian. Already I looked strange and was the wrong color, whatever.

“In some ways, I still feel a stranger to Italian culture,” she says, “even though I’ve done whatever I could to immerse myself, in whatever way I could.”

Mazzella was 12 when she received her first guitar and in her early 20s when a friend introduced her to recordings of Sicilian and Neopolitan street music. She formed the trio I Papaveri (The Poppies) with her brother and a friend, and by the late 1980s had also put together Le Gioie Delle Donne (The Joys Of Women), a choir of first- and second-generation Italian migrants that was the subject of an ABC documentary.

She shifted to Melbourne a few years later. Then Playbox approached her to create another choir, for a production of Emma.

“I said, `I don’t really want to do it, but I’ll do it for two months while the show’s on’. And that was five years ago.”

Her involvement in the choir has helped make her grandmother’s Arabic-influenced Neapolitan dialect less forbidding. “There’s something very powerful about singing something that you know that your ancestors could have sung. All of a sudden the things that break a family up like migration, whatever, just disappear … It’s quite an incredible feeling. It helped me with the … wog-shame of growing up in the ’60s in Australia. The feeling that people came here and they had to fit in …

“When we get together and sing and everything’s really clicking in, it totally absorbs you and you no longer are a stranger … You no longer are in exile.”

Graham Pitts adapted Emma from an autobiography Emma Ciccotosto co-wrote with historian Michal Bosworth after retiring from a biscuit factory where she had worked for 32 years. She told of her childhood in Casalbordino in the Abruzzi, and migrating with her mother to join her father near Waroona, south of Perth.

Emma, A Translated Life was first published by Fremantle Arts Centre Press in 1990 (Emma, A Recipe For Life with Ciccotosto’s recipes and narrative has subsequently appeared), and first adapted for stage two years later, by Le Gioie Delle Donne. La Voce Della Luna was formed by Playbox to reprise it in Melbourne in early 1996.

About 50 women responded to advertising in Il Globo in late 1995 to set up a choir. Some have joined since, others moved on. Each has gained in some way or other.

“Fa li la li la,” they sing. La Voce Della Luna has given Romana Tomininovi the ability to sing again. She gestures at her throat. “I sort of closed my voice,” she says. “So here, I open up a little bit.”

The Age 18-Mar-2000