Patty Pravo
I giorni dell'armonia

I still remember the days when I roamed the high school halls feeling like an ethereal and intangible creature. I would sing a song that invoked one's "gentle spirit," a bearer of harmonic convergences. My English teacher would pass by just as I was indulging in that poetic anarchy. My voice resonated through the whole hallway but, partly because I was the best in the school, and partly because I sang well, I didn’t get scolded. My teachers, after all, knew how redundant I was in talking and dreaming of Love.

"What a beautiful tune you're singing," my teacher simply told me.

I smiled at her, though a bit saddened by the fact she didn’t know it.

"The Days of Harmony," the song I championed through the halls of my school, is a single by Patty Pravo, left orphaned without a place in a completed album.

Unlike "E dimmi che non vuoi morire," also a work that found no place in an album of new releases, "The Days of Harmony" didn’t receive the recognition I believe it deserved.

Originally, the single in question was a romanza of a full 21 minutes, then reduced to 4 minutes to take the form of a traditional song.

The beginning of the piece is a bit more agitated, and the arrangement and voice underline the rhythms of daily life, frenetic and subjected to the yoke of the contingent. Four beats of the drum then introduce us to the metaphysical dimension of the song, dominated by strings.

The performer addresses an idealized companion:

"My gentle spirit, alone in this room while the world flies away, but we, we remain."

The naive and narcissistic idea of being able to build a niche of sweetness and stability amidst a world oxymoronically both anthropophagic and ephemeral, how much it can attract a teenager...I’m not surprised I was enchanted by this attack of idealism and violins.

"When love will play its sweet symphony, only then you'll find clear days of harmony"

That temporal subordinate was a promise that, sung, became an invocation.

"hoping for another age, irreducibly seeking our way and ready to risk even life, in respect still of the idea that the universe may be a clear concert of harmony"

Deep down, I still believe in all this.

Please: listen to this piece and...dream!