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Dear Friends,

We welcome all of you to our first MUSICàNTICA Newsletter, a monthly appointment containing news about our activities, our music,
our directions, our contributions, and our experiences. This month we celebrate our 15th year of activity dedicated to the transmission
and translation of the Italian oral tradition in America. In terms of longevity we begin to feel akin to those great bands of the past such as
the Duke Ellington or Count Basie orchestras who were together for decades, and we are really pleased that we kept things going along
all these years.

We are entering a new phase of our “musical marriage” and as it happens in any marriage, we experienced a time of relaxation that has
prompted us to rethink about MUSICàNTICA’s purposes, goals, artistic direction, and the acceptance of new musical challenges.
We are pleased to announce that we will continue to find ways to bring to you more music of the oral tradition of our Italian south but that
at the same time our shows will be a bit more experimental as well as original. Currently, we have in store both new and revisited
compositions that we are looking forward to present to you in the months ahead in our live concerts as well as in our long due new recording.

The year 2009 has seen us perform and give workshops and seminars at several good events. We played at LACMA’s Family Festivals
and we returned to the World Music Concert Series at the Santa Fe Spring Public Library. We played at Cal Poly Pomona for the
Music Faculty Concert Series, at the Sunshine Brooks Theater in Oceanside for their Public Library World Music Series, and we returned
to the Getty Villa for their bi-annual Family Life Concert Series. We played the World Music Concert Series at San Diego State University
and we played in Las Vegas for the first time in occasion of the jointed Festival of Italian Folk Music and Dance and the Conference of the
Italian Folk Art Federation of America (IFAFA), to which program we contributed with four workshops. One of these was about teaching
how to play the jaw’s harp, an interesting addition to our existing workshops. As a corollary to this event twenty three musical instruments
from our respective collections were put on display for the whole month of October at the Sahara West Library. We are proud also to
announce that an article we co-wrote entitled “Simple Does Not Mean Easy: Oral Traditional Values, Music, and the MUSICàNTICA
Experience” on oral history, peasant culture and the experience of MUSICàNTICA has been published during the month of November
as part of the volume, Oral History, Oral Culture and Italian Americans (Selected Essays from the 2005 conference of the American
Italian Historical Association, "Speaking Memory: Oral History, Oral Culture and Italians in America). You will notice that MUSICàNTICA
is on the front cover! Anyone interested in Italian and Italian American culture should check this publication. 2009 has seen also our involvement
with several Los Angeles elementary schools working for the Music Center of Los Angeles, Educational Division for the fifth year in a row.

Plans for the future include, aside from the creation of the above-mentioned new music material, the recording project, concert and workshop
activity, our involvement as music collaborators with the Watts Tower Projects. Created by our friend and mentor Dr. Luisa Del Giudice
who came with the idea of a multimedia experiment with the goal to drastically increase the cultural and social value and visibility of the
Watts Towers and what they represent for the ethnic communities of the city of Watts, for Los Angeles as a whole, and for the Italian
community as well. In fact, the towers were built by Italian artist Sabato “Simon” Rodia with whom we feel sharing great affinity because
he too was born into the southern Italian peasant culture we love and sing and also for the way he conceived art as a service and use for
the community. We would like to communicate to all of you that we have new email addresses that you can use to contact us. They are
musicantica@musicantica.org, then roberto@musicantica.org and, enzo@musicantica.org.

2010 approaches at maddening speed but we will be ready to give you more great sounds with the renewed program and with all the goodies
that you, our friends, fans, and supporters deserve.

Happy Holidays and Happy Sounding New Year!

Musically,
MUSICàNTICA

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