[Music]

Sara Marinelli (00:05):

I am Sara Marinelli, and this is Letters to Italy.  In this series, I speak with Italian expats in the Bay Area at the time of Coronavirus. How has the pandemic reshaped our lives here and our relationship to Italy? If there has ever been a time to look back on our choices and ask the question “Where is home?" It is now.

In this sixth episode, I'm speaking with composer and musician Laura Inserra. Laura was born in Lentini, near Catania in Sicily, and moved to the Bay Area in 2006. 
A worldly-known hang musician, trained in classical orchestral percussions, Laura plays a large variety of ancient and modern instruments from different cultures. And her music crosses several boundaries.
[Music by Laura Inserra]

Laura Inserra (01:17):
I describe my work,  my music as a bridge between ancient music with modern music and modern technology, meaning computers and keyboards and different things that allow me to augment the music itself or to enrich the acoustic world. So it spans from classical music to ethnic music, to functional music like sound therapy and using sound as tools for healing eventually. I've been exploring all my life instruments that are coming from different traditions and bringing those kinds of languages and sounds to my composition. 
I started with the frame drum, which we call tamorra, which is this vertical frame drum with different cymbals around when I was five. I've been mainly all my life, a percussionist as a natural approach to music. And then I, I started to play all these different wind instruments, strings, and so forth, but I applied the technique of the Camorra into other kinds of instruments, like the jambe, eventually the hang. So my technique, a lot of the traditions from Sicily is still in my hands, even if I've been studying different other techniques and classical music, the classical percussions, but my style, uh, it's clearly coming from those triplets, tacta tacta…

(03:11): [SFX: sounds of different instruments]

Sara Marinelli (03:13):

Before relocating to Berkeley, Laura spent many years in Rome working successfully as a soundtrack composer for film and TV starting in her early twenties. 
I'm curious to know what made her decide to move to the Bay Area.

Laura Inserra (03:31):

Here the sense of freedom is so beautiful. You can be whoever you want. There is no judgment. And I come from Sicily where there, you know, the culture itself is so judgmental. We have a lot of limitations in allowing everybody to be exactly who that person is. I was doing a lot of soundtracks back then working with big companies and in Italy, anyway, even in a soundtrack for movies, still, we have a sense of a classical approach, there is not a lot of room for new answers, for new directions. So that was the first thing. 
And then of course we know the Bay Area is the one place in the world where all of the innovations happen: here is the home of technology. For me, technology has been also something always present. I've been using computers and composing since I was 12 with a Commodore 64. So this other aspect, this freedom, innovation and possibilities to express yourself and finally bring something that you value, it was really powerful for me. 
And so when I was visiting here, I thought maybe I will try for one year to see how it feels. 
And here I am, 13, 14 years later I'm still here.

Sara Marinelli (05:00):

In these many unexpected years in California, Laura has expanded her work and art and the range of instruments and musical styles. She has also founded and produced art festivals, music workshops, and performances, and has become a beloved music teacher and sound therapist. Naturally, her work has been directly impacted by the pandemic. She resorted to music as her way to stay connected with her community here and her family in Italy during such a crisis.

Laura Inserra (05:36):

My work was completely frozen. My work at that point was performing. It was seeing my students, and, uh, the instruments that we play at times, I need to see their hands closer to,, for me to look at their sound and through the hands. So we need to be in person. So it was a disaster. You know, the first months I was completely in a desert, I had different performance that were canceled. I had a beautiful retreat at Esalen and it was canceled. I had an amazing project with a choir. There were so many things that they were just being canceled. So absolutely disaster as an artist, a musician, a performer, I was in that category of those that, uh, you know, we lost our jobs somehow. For me, COVID-19, it was a, a shock, as for all of us. 
It was really hard.  
I still have chills in bringing myself into that moment, to not being able to say, “Let me go and see my family and maybe I can stay there.”  So that sense of limitation of trying to be present in a moment like that, and at the same time feeling that it was, for sure, a bad idea to travel, and that moment of uncertainty created within me a lot of fear and sadness. My first reaction, as it usually happens to me, was “What can I do? Okay. If this means that we are dying, what can I do to allow myself and my community, my family too.”  If we are dying how can we do it in a way that it has some peace within the drama, that has some strength. 
After having a few conversations with the family, I decided, of course, that music was a way for me to make a contribution and give some kind of peace, and release all of the tensions and fears by using those instruments and by creating sound journeys. It was also a way for me to react to all of these incredible shock that we received, and I call it “Shelter in music,” because we all needed to be sheltering in place. But instead of feeling the space as four walls and feeling the restrictions, for me Shelter in music was a way to provide a shelter that was open because music allow us to travel.  So by doing these online streamings, through my social media and so forth, I was able to reach not only my family, but the community at large.  And again, I did it like “I wanted to support my family.” And I was trying to guide them to understand how to use music as a shelter, not just as an entertainment, but I knew that if I was doing it in English, I was not reaching my mother, my brother and my friends.  Even in Rome, you know, I have only a few friends or members of my family that can speak English. So I decided to do it in English and Italian. So my first one was in English. This was my first time. I was so nervous. I did it in English and Italian so that everybody could follow.

(09:33): [SFX: Sound from recording of Shelter in Music]

“Today I'm going to speak in Italian and in English because it's Tuesday. And it's dedicated to  those that have been going through difficult times, those that lost loved ones.”

Laura Inserra (10:06):

So sound therapy, I called it, is not something well known in Italy as it is in the Bay Area.  So my first thought was like, oh my God, I'm going to deliver a part of my work that I never had. First of all, I was exposed to the wide community.  And again, I was thinking that they are not in that field of music, music as a tool for therapeutic reasons. So I thought I'm going to lose my family, my friends, they would be like, what's happened to you Laura? What? Have you become a shaman?  What is that? Like you were doing soundtrack for movies. You were playing so beautifully, what is it that?  It's so weird. 
So for me the most amazing part was that I was so afraid that by delivering this work in Italy, I was judged. And, I needed a lot of courage to open an aspect of my work that I've only opened to private clients or to private groups of people.
And instead they loved it. I had all these incredible emails of how it was helpful for people to do these sound journeys. I remember different people saying, “Thank you so much. It's the first time that I'm finally breathing and relaxing,” or  “You know, finally I was able to sleep last night.”  And I was shocked that my mother, when I decided to create a second series just once a week, my mother was waking up at 5:00 AM to hear Shelter in Music, to connect with me also in a place that she'd never done before. And it's my, my being strong, that is going to be what I can bring in, help my family with, even if I'm in the other side of the world as my mother says.  My mother calls America “The other world,” but still I was able to connect with her.

Sara Marinelli (12:01):

Laura hosted these immersive sound journeys from March to August, 2020, initially twice a week, in English and in Italian, and created two serious of 12 episodes each. She produced all of them for free as her contribution to whoever wanted to experience them.  And only later she edited them and made them available to purchase. Each Shelter in Music had an intention or a theme such as resilience, grief, change, belonging, in the darkest time of the pandemic. She also conceived a few sessions as a commemoration and honoring of the people who had passed

(12:47): [SFX: Sound from recording of Shelter in Music]

“Welcome to Shelter in Music,” a ceremony today for the souls of those who have departed."

Sara Marinelli (13:03):

Laura tells me that the awareness of mortality has been one of the red threads in her artistic and personal life. The sad predicament of uncountable losses around the world due to COVID, and the fear of experiencing a personal loss in Italy compelled her to establish a deeper connection with the Sicilian community she had left.  The pandemic, in all its drama, and its array of dramatic possibilities, offered her also the one to get to the heart of family relationships, to elevate the sometimes too hurtful dialogue between a traditional mother in Sicily, and her artist daughter in California; to say some of the unsaid; to fully express aspects of her present self; of the distant and foreign world she lives in now.

Laura Inserra (13:58):

In the moments when COVID was really afflicting Italy that badly, the way to be connected for me was by doing a Zoom call with my mother every day. And I still do. And I was organizing, for example, for Easter, for Pasqua, the cenone di Pasqua, the Easter dinner, which doesn't exist, usually we do it for Christmas, but I was creating occasions for my family through Zoom to come together and still to have a meal together.  So I was asking them that each of us would cook something special, and  “I don't want to see you in pajama and just, you know, change your clothes, so that we have a sense that we are doing something different." 
My mother, my family, is not a really technological family. So it was not an easy transition from phone calls to Zoom because I had to train them. I had to send them an iPad so that they could do Zoom videos and so forth.  So it was a production itself.

(15:19): [ SFX: family call]

Laura Inserra (15:19):

And that was for me a way to keep not only myself connected to them, but to keep them connected to each other.

(15:39): [ SFX: family call]

Laura Inserra (15:41):

And then Shelter in Music, again, these sound journeys, which I was saying to them that they  were music therapy. Some of the family members were taking my sound journeys and told me, “Ah, this was amazing. I remember this and that,” and I was helping them, you know, going through those difficult times by using music as a place of conversation, which is better than say, “How are you, how is the news?”  
There's a side of me that I had this trust that, if this is happening and we are going to die, what is that? What can we do right now in order that if we die, we are kind of okay, such as “I don’t have regrets. And if you do have regrets, what is that? What do you need to change in your life?”  Because maybe we are not dying.  So there is a possibility.  And with them I started to have these conversations, even with my mother.  I keep mentioning my mother because my mother is the classical Sicilian mother: she believes only in what she eats, not even what she says, whatever tastes s good . So to see a person like that, and this is also what I love of my work: I want to connect and communicate with people like my grandmother, my mother, they have no idea of all of these modern terms or technologies, but still I can reach them and I can be connected to them.
So that was my way. And in those conversations, there were from laughs to moments of tears, because you know, now you are looking at things and fears, but then you build connections that are more real because, you know, maybe this is the last time we are seeing each other, so what do we want to talk about? Really about pasta?  Or maybe you want to talk about something deeper.  And so memories of my father when he passed away or things like that. 
So definitely for me too, not being able to be there physically, it was not easy, but again, by all of this other ways to connect with them there, way more authentic, way more profound and deep, I felt I was there helping even more than how I could help if I was physically there. But the human side in me was not happy because there was a moment when I felt I want to be there just in case something happened. And then you think, but the risk of traveling as well, it was so dangerous at the time, maybe I'm risking their life. So it was surely not a good idea. Did I miss it? Of course, even if I was there with Zoom or FaceTime, it's not the same.  So that pain of separation was there.  And my way, again, to transform that was to create music, to create, to be creative, through creativity, through another way of sending them a present or sending to my mother different things like flowers, you know, things that can still be part of my daily
Of course you want to be there, but I don't think that it’s a good reason to doubt my choices. And I tell you, it was a great opportunity for me for a true connection with my family, which till that point it was not there.

Sara Marinelli (19:28):

I admire Laura’s ability and desire to bridge the gap with her culture and family of origin. 
The immigrant in fact must be a bridge builder.  At first, you put aside your language, your stories and your moments of nostalgia to gain ground on the new territory. Later, you end up doing the same with your home country because you inhabit a new culture and you speak another language that gives you another identity, and your new language expands your borders, but draws one with your original land.  Most of my family can't read any of the stories I wrote in English. Neither can understand what I am saying now. 
Yet in our conversation, Laura points out how, somehow, thanks to the moment of crisis brought by COVID-19, she was able to reconnect to Italy and the community she left through the universal language of music. 
And music was exactly one of the ways in which Italians connected to each other., and the world, during the time of isolation. 
Of course, I had to ask Laura how she reacted when she heard the music performed on Italian balconies in the first wave of the pandemic.

Laura Inserra (20:45):

When I heard through Facebook the first clip of this singing on the balconies, I had tears in my throat, not only in my eyes, but in my throat, because that sense of lament of singing was clearly a way to release, what we say “Uno sfogo dell’anima”, in English is “a ventilation of the soul”:  giving voice to your soul.

(21:34): [ SFX: Music from balconies]

Laura Inserra (21:35):

Those voices that joined together on the balconies were singing all of the emotions we had, sublimated by music. It was letting out our pain, and receiving in those emotions, the sensation that  “We are together, no matter what, we are together, I will be there for you. You know, grandmother on the balcony.”

(22:10): [ SFX: Music from balconies]

Laura Inserra (22:13):

At the same time, it reminded me of how Italians, we still have roots in traditions. We know that singing has been a way to connect come un popolo.  We celebrate pain. And that's why in our culture as well, we have the lament when someone dies and the women, they come together and do the lament to help the family of the departed, to release that pain. And that's what I felt. It was not only hearing the song itself, but hearing people lamenting, whatever they needed to let out in order to feel better, and to find the strength and say, "I'm not alone, I'm not alone.” This is what I heard in that singing: “We are together. We are connected.”

Sara Marinelli (23:04):

We felt that togetherness from afar. And I know for sure that any Italian immigrant wanted to join in, in that sfogo dell’anima, the “ventilation of the soul,” that choral expression rekindled our sense of belonging.  And we somehow felt more free to express some of the emotions that we often keep inside in our new place, more confident to bridge the cultural gaps. and perhaps it made us miss home even more. 
I asked Laura how she feels about home and where home is for her.

Laura Inserra (23:40):

I feel lucky to live in the Bay Area.  Because when you are an immigrant, it depends on where you go. Here, when I say I'm Italian or Sicilian, people are like, wow, that's so cool. So for me, the experience of being an Italian woman expressing exactly who you are and no judgment, no nothing, has been so supportive, really a privilege. There is the other side, though, that longing of the land. I'm from Sicily, and for me, when you ask me, Where is home? It's Sicily, it's not California. It's not Berkeley. I miss my home. I miss my land.
Personally, thanks to art, that longing becomes a piece of music. It becomes my new project. It becomes a plate of lasagna so that I can taste, you know what, is there. I feel that to have the courage to step out from Italy, becoming who you are, and then going back to Italy and then act from that place of strength as a woman, that's when we can really change what we need to change in order to be who we are, to create a better life for next generation.

Sara Marinelli (24:58):

What I hear in Laura's words resonates with the conversations I had with other Italian expats. It's probably a feeling of an unconfessed, unconscious desire that any immigrant shares that of one day to return.  A real return or a symbolic one. You uproot yourself, you transplant and grow somewhere else. You become someone else. But then you look for ways to give something back, and yourself back , to the place you come from.
To conclude our conversation, I invite Laura to imagine writing a letter to Italy.

Laura Inserra (25:39):

If I had to write a letter to Italy, I would say, “Cara, Bella Italia,  how beautiful you are, how you can transform any difficulty in a way that a dramatic situation like COVID-19 can be lived as one of the most touching experience that we can share. I am so proud of the courage that you've been going through and the way in which people know how to support each other."
 And even if this drama has been happening, we were all connected either through singing on the balconies, either through jokes about how many pounds we were getting because of COVID when we were eating three times more than usual.  You know, that irony, and the same time, the rage that we were living, it was there as well: in our tears, in our posts on Facebook, as well as the courage to denounce our condition and be honest of how painful it was.  So, I am proud of you, and we are still here, you know, together.
And I trust any sacrifice we've been doing so that we know that the future is going to be way better than what we have been living so far.  And I trust that that's a possibility for us.

Sara Marinelli (27:11):

The two series of Shelter in Music are now available online, at Laura’s website, as well as her current workshops. Laura has continued to teach music workshops online, and her latest modular program on a variety of instruments is called metamusic course. Visit her website: www.laurainserra.com. 

In the next episode, I'm speaking with Elisabetta Ghisini, entrepreneur and president of COMITES San Francisco. Elisabetta shares how after the first moment of crisis, she reshaped her career and professional path, left the world of academia, and embraced new adventures. Join me.

“Letters to Italy” is produced, edited, and hosted by me, Sara Marinelli.
This series was made possible thanks to the support of COMITES of San Francisco and the Italian Consulate of San Francisco with funding from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation. I am grateful for their support. 
Thanks for listening.

© Sara Marinelli