We’re almost through the first week of IMFA. Our daily Italian lessons have expanded this year to include some choral warm-ups and some beautiful music–in this case, a madrigal, which we’re learning bit by bit:

In composition seminar, we listened to some wonderful music by Alex Umfleet and Grant Strom, then had a very useful lesson in Italian pronunciation and prosody. In addition to the electronic music pieces we are concocting for Monday’s concert, we are also writing art songs, in Italian, for an upcoming concert in Udine. Two students are setting poems by Umberto Saba, another is setting a poem by Alda Merini, and another discovered a poem by our own Stefano!

On the way to the Cernizza beach today, I had to take a photo of this odd looking Fiat, which is trying, desperately, to be a VW bug:

Close, but not quite…