Voicing new belongings. Composing Songs in Italy's Refugee Reception Centers

Music and Encounter at the Mediterranean Crossroads: A Sea of Voices explores the musical practices that circulate the Mediterranean Sea. Collectively, the authors relate this musical flow to broader transnational flows of people and power that generate complex encounters, bringing the diverse cultures of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East into new and challenging forms of contact. My chapter deals with the experience my students and I had with asylym seekers in Cremona. In 2015, I started an action research project with my Ethnomusicology students in the Department of Musicology and Cultural Heritage at the University of Pavia. My premise was that every kind of musical engagement helps people to model and reflect upon their cultural, social, and religious identifications (Stokes 1994; Turino 2008; Lewis 2015). Our aim was to understand formations of transnational cultural identity among asylum seekers in the area around Cremona, where the Department is located, while “giving something back” to the people we were engaged with. Our project was concerned, in particular, with questions of cultural capital and the role that music could play in expressing belonging or even in constituting a form of political action (Baily 2015; Martiniello and La Fleur 2008). Specifically this chapter is based on a workshops that we conducted with asylum seekers at an overflow reception center near Vigolzone, Piacenza, from 2015 to 2017. The workshop started from participatory listening and led to the composition of new songs. It showed how musical bondings are no more necessarily linked to the place of origin; African multilingualism emerged as crucial in the listening and became crucial also in the compositions of new songs. This is demonstrated in the chapter through the composition of the song Ligei, that using words of the various traditions of asylum seekers speaks about the desires asylum seekers have for their future. It demonstrates how language is deeply rooted in emotions of every person and is crucial to compose significant texts. Moreover, the tonal languages of Africa became a tool to create the melody of the song. Thanks to this workshop participants learnt to move form music as a tool for isolation to that of hope for the future.