Music is one of the oldest human art forms, if not the oldest human art form. We can never actually know which artform holds that distinction, but it seems darned likely that our ancient ancestors, sitting around their fires at night, realized they could bend their voices into pitches that sounded lovely together and turned those pitches into songs.
Watch: Quarantined Italians are singing their hearts out. It’s beautiful.
The resilience of the human spirit, evidenced by a bunch of Italians making music together on their balconies.
Emily St. James was a senior correspondent for Vox, covering American identities. Before she joined Vox in 2014, she was the first TV editor of the A.V. Club.
Which is all to say that music is one of the ways we feel connected. Singing and dancing are present at nearly every life celebration in some capacity or another, and whether you’re in the car or hanging out at the beach or just doing nothing, there’s no better way to make the time pass than listening to your favorite album. But even better than that is experiencing music with other people, whether at a concert or in a club.
The Covid-19 coronavirus — and the associated social distancing that nearly everyone on the planet is being encouraged to practice — will presumably hinder people from making and listening to music together, but tweets from all over Italy (which is under heavy lockdown) reveal a country where citizens are taking to their balconies and windows to enjoy music together.
They might be performing an impromptu song with instruments and multiple vocalists, as in this video from Sicily:
Or they might be singing a beloved anthem about their fair city of Siena:
Or they might just be dancing to “The Macarena”:
There are many more examples of Italians entertaining themselves and each other with balcony concerts in this thread. Looking through it just might make you remember there’s something beautiful about our ability to find silver linings even in very dark times. Stay safe, everybody. And if you have a balcony, sing.
