EMAHO!
Emaho!, which in tibetan language is a sacred exclamation to express wonder, is a vocal research project on the power of the female voice, on the concept of the strength of the female body inspired by Italian philosopher Alessandra Chiricosta’s book “Another Kind of Strength” (Iacobelli Editore, 2019), on women’s direct relationship and desire for God as an infinite source of love. After a three-year research, it premiered in 2024 together with multinstrumentalist and composer Stefano Pilia.
Point of origin are the a cappella songs of black singers Vera Hall and Bessie Jones and black inmates that ethnomusicologists John Lomax and Alan Lomax recorded in the 1930s and 1940s in the Deep South of the United States. Here, in maximum-security prisons-which were also grueling labor camps, such as the infamous Parchman Farm in Mississippi-men and women used singing, as William Faulkner wrote of them, to “transport the mind beyond its misery,” as a tool of resistance “with which to speak from heart to heart through sung stanzas.”
Emaho! is then configured as a continuous song from heart to heart, where the voice and the body become a tool for reclaiming oneself and at the same time for pushing “beyond” and inhabiting, even if only for an instant, the quiet but also magmatic and wild ardor of mystery, thus opening a gateway to the impossible: is it possible today, in the 21st century, to live and reformulate transcendence by finally starting with women? Belgian psychoanalyst and philosopher Luce Irigaray writes: “Woman is led to recognize the transcendence of the other because such a gesture is part of the foundation of the development of her own relation to transcendence.But it is necessary for her to discover herself, and from herself, what guarantees her world a transcendental basis.”And again, “It will not be a male entity, even a divine one, that will be able, by itself, to grant woman a transcendental status. […] Woman must separate herself from the world imposed on her as unique, found a world of her own, and define ways of coexisting with a world irreducible to her own.”(from “Sharing the World,” Bollati Boringhieri, 2009).
Emaho! is thus an attempt to construct this same “transcendental basis,” an invocation that does not speak of God, but speaks to God, perhaps in the most immediate and direct way possible: that of music, which then becomes meditation, silence, prayer.
Alice Norma Lombardi | voice
Stefano Pilia | voice, electronics
