Pierangelo Sequeri
Qui dove tu ci chiami

A friend of mine has a wall full of vinyl records, and every time I look at it, I wonder how it's possible to gather there everything I would get rid of in an instant.

With yet another best of Brahms, the compilation of opera arias, and military marches, it’s like the basket from a highway rest stop, where Tutto Mozart, in a box set, is stacked on top of Nord Sud Ovest Est by 883.

Every time, I rummage through that wall, hoping to find a spark, an intriguing album, with all due respect for Vivaldi and all the greats who, arranged like that, remind me of “The giants of music” from Borotalco, when Verdone rambles about “Shostakovich and Debussy.”
That wall, to me, looks as if, instead of albums, there were Curcio encyclopedias on sewing.

“Would you like to pay in installments for the best of classical music?” A Dantean circle.

Maybe that's why when I came across “Qui dove tu ci chiami” by Pierangelo Sequeri, I sensed at least a hint of narrative.
Pierangelo Sequeri is a priest, theologian, aesthete, head of many things, and also the author of essays with seemingly interesting titles, especially those on Mozart, which I would read with eager curiosity. I recall the young Wolfgang being a Mazdiet Masonic. Probably, over time, he was liberated from his not exactly professed appreciation for Christianity excluding Zarathustra, and thus, regularly performed in the house of Christ, to dramatize Ilaria and Tony's exchange of faiths.

Sequeri is the author of a famous hit: “Credo in te Signore, nato da Maria, figlio eterno e santo, buono come noi morto per amore, vivo in mezzo a noi.” Which is the song that Guzzanti forces the slave intern in Boris to sing after his conversion following the encounter with Jesus on the Rome - L'Aquila road.

Qui dove tu ci chiami is a project born in Rho: a gray factory setting against the brownish-orange backdrop of the seventies, where young hopes risked being swallowed by the demon of workers' power and kidnapped by the godless communist tyrant.

Forget about Palestrina, Flemish composers, and complicated counterpoints that aren't easily digestible or understandable. The diktat of the Second Vatican Council was to simplify the grandiloquence, to save the young from the nightmare of peace&love.

First, the Beat Mass, with Angels & The Brain, then, even worse: Dio della mia lode, the songs of the Renewal in the Holy Spirit with keyboard arrangers. Meanwhile, the specter of communism, anarchy, and free thought (and other equally important things but assembled in a mishmash), continued to hover: the seventies, lead, Radio Alice, Ustica, and Pope Luciani.

I swear, sometimes I think that to prevent us from becoming communists, they created so much chaos that, in the end, the lesser evil would have been plummeting into a ravine onboard a Lada while the car radio played a Kino tape on loop.

Among the trash-garage of Beat Masses and the populist frenzy of the songs of Renewal, Sequeri's aesthetic finds itself in the middle, free from rock arrangements and far from that churchy aesthetic where Angels accompany Mary on earth to leave random messages of healings and wonders.

Funny, isn’t it? Italy, once a powerhouse of prestigious sacred compositions, reduced like this, while contemporary Eastern Europe was producing Arvo Pärt. In 1974, the year this work by Sequeri was published, Krzysztof Penderecki released The Awakening of Jacob.

Sequeri's album is composed of a choir of youngsters cleansed of the red dirt, accompanied by a graceless and off-tempo organ.

The album is carried by a famous hit, “Ti ringrazio mio Signore.”

Interesting also is Maestro Sequeri's note on the back of the album, highlighting the intent to create a simple compositional structure that is easy to perform, leaving conductors the freedom to fill in the arrangements as they see fit. Each piece is punctuated by hints of predictable dissonance that in an orchestral transposition could be dramatized with excellent results. Of course, it's all a jump of fifths and friendly tritones, like a sort of Zecchino D'oro airing after a nuclear war that left only a group of children miraculously saved by God, a one-armed organist, and an organ with 26 keys. Maybe Penderecki's works, for some, are frightening. They have never listened to this record. They do not know the fear.