Classical Slavery

“History is written by the victors” is a well-known quote often attributed to Winston Churchill. In war, that certainly is true, as the victors almost always write the history. In societal struggles, what seems to happen is that those who “come out on top” get to choose what is taught as history. With respect to racial matters in the United States, that decidedly has been the situation, as the struggles of people of color (whether Native Americans, Asian Americans, Latin Americans, or African Americans) have, more often than not, simply not been a significant part of historical studies in American schools. This is true, whether it is the story of The Trail of Tears, the oncelegalized discrimination against Asian immigrants, the history of slavery from 1619 through the end of the Civil War, or further, in the case of all Black people, the struggles precipitated by the immense failures of Reconstruction and the imposition of Jim Crow. It is this last cataclysm that is most pertinent to the retelling of Easter, 1906.

Bologna and San Petronio, patron saint and protector of the city, represent an inseparable union, a spiritual and civil unity that goes beyond the only meaning linked to religion. The Basilica named after him, symbol of the city, wants to revive the spirit of reconstruction promoted by the saint, when he found it devastated by the barbarian invasions and was the main protagonist of both material and intellectual rebirth, going as far as laying the foundations of what would be the first university in the world. A celebratory event organized by the 'Messa in Musica' Association that with the same spirit involved the major institutions of the city, the Municipality, the Basilica and the Teatro Comunale, led to the commissioning to the composer Marco Taralli (already on Tactus’, Requiem - In Memoriam, tc.950006) a great mass for solos, choir, children's choir and orchestra, to honor the patron saint of Bologna. The texts of the mass are completed by inserts from Liber Paradisus, the famous Bolognese 1256 text with which slavery was abolished for the first time in history.

The career of Swedish progressive rockers Beardfish has been steadily gaining in momentum throughout the 2000s, and, notwithstanding small inconveniences like record label bankruptcies, widespread recognition could finally be at hand via 2012's consistently daring and ever unpredictable The Void. The band's seventh album sculpts its genre- and time-bending material with no care for conventional compositional rules nor even chronological synchronicity (as usual), which makes it that much more remarkable that songs should prove so immediately appealing throughout, arguably like never before…