 Hello everyone and welcome to the next in our series of the Friends Reading Room concerts. My name is Sally Mesh and I'm the Program Director for the Friends of the Robbins Library. When the pandemic hit in March last year, the Friends Sunday Afternoon Reading Room music series was brought to an abrupt halt by the closure of the library and I had to cancel the remainder of the season. I'm very happy to say that we've been able to rebook those performers, the duo Heartbeat, whom you'll hear today, and classical guitarist Aaron Laugier-Captain who'll be with us on Keeper 11th. As you may know, March is our item reads together month. This year's Community Read is the book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria by Beverly Daniel Tatum. As part of the library's programming, the Friends are sponsoring a performance by musician and poet Tim Hall on Sunday, March 28th. You can find information about all our events on our website, friendsofrobinslibrary.org, and there's a link on there to register for the Tim Hall event. Just click on what's new to find the posting. But back to today's concert. The duo Heartbeat comprises Shelley Otis on Celtic Harp and Fabio Pirozolo on percussion. They're two amazingly talented musicians whose work is cleaned from around the world. I think you're in for a real treat. Hello everybody. Thank you for joining us here today. We're very glad to be here and we're also very grateful to the Robbins Library for continuing this concert series despite the pandemic. My name is Shelley and I'm going to be joined today by percussionist Fabio Pirozolo. We've been playing together for about three years, a little over three years, and we've really enjoyed finding a repertoire that works with harp and percussion together. And we're here to share some of that today and I hope you enjoy. This song is called La Peta Quita and it's a traditional Chilean folk song and I learned this from a Chilean harpist named Daniela. I had the opportunity to travel to Chile several years ago. I went there specifically to learn more about the Chilean harp tradition and she taught me this song. Fabio is going to be playing the maracas which are, his maracas are from Venezuela and they're filled with a very, very, very lightweight seed which is what gives them that particular sound quality. So La Peta Quita. The next song we're going to play is an Irish slip jig called The Butterfly and I learned this many years ago. I had gone to a dancing workshop and specifically a dancing workshop for musicians on how to play music for dancing and this was one of the songs we did and I fell in love with it and I've paired that, we're going to pair that with another slip jig, another slip jig called The Baltorium. This song is called Tarantale di Sanicandro and it comes from the southern part of Italy. The Tarantale is a dance form that's usually in 6-8 and played very fast and it comes from a tradition where historically people, if they would get bitten by the tarantula spider, obviously it's a poisonous spider. So what do you do when you get bitten by a poisonous spider? You call musicians and traditionally in Italy the musicians would come and the person who was who had been bitten was supposed to dance to this music very fast and very frantically until all the poison had come out and the tradition goes. Sometimes the musicians would check in and with the person dancing, the person who was bitten they're like are you feeling better? Are you still okay? And they would say no no I need I need more music please keep playing. That's the tarantula tradition. So this is um but this tarantula is called Tarantale di Sanicandro. This song comes from the south part of Italy and the town called Carpino in Apulia which is if you think of Italy as a boot it's in the heel of the boot and it's called Carpinese which means from carpino and the song is about a person who wants to go see their lover but they tell their mother they're going to gather firewood and instead they go and meet their lover. The next song is called Within a Mile of Dublin and it's an Irish reel and our arrangement sort of combines traditional Celtic harping with a modern Celtic harp style that's that's become popular in the past several years. The next song we're going to play is called Cozumel. It's one that I had written after visiting the island of Cozumel in Mexico and I had encountered a mariachi band there which included a harpist. I think it was two guitars and a harp and I absolutely fell in love with the music and I came home with all these sounds in my head and I had to do something about it and so I wrote this song with that in mind. The island of Cozumel and the beautiful people there and the beautiful musical traditions they have there. The next one that we're going to do comes from Macedonia. It's called Giovano Giovanche and it has become popular throughout the Balkans. It's a song about two young lovers that have been separated because their parents don't approve of the union. For those of you who are interested in music theory this song is in seven eight a seven eight meter and it uses a scale called Hijaz or Phrygian dominant and there's other names for it as well. It's popular throughout the Middle East. The scale or the mode is popular throughout the Middle East and Central Asia and Eastern Europe and also it also occurs in Spanish flamenco music. Giovano Giovanche. This song is called Per una Vorta and I'm going to play it by myself but it was actually written by Fabio. He didn't write it for the harp but when I found it I thought it was absolutely beautiful and I thought it would work very well on the harp so I learned it and I'm here to share it with you today. We've got one more. We hope that you have enjoyed our music today. If you would like to hear more well you could we hope next time is in person. We hope to play again and Fabio also plays with a lot of bands in Boston so you can check his website for more information or you can also check mine. I have an album on Spotify so you can look us up if you'd like to hear more of our music. This song is called New Real. I wrote it with a traditional Irish reel in mind. I kind of took the elements of a traditional Irish reel and then added my own twist. What a beautiful concert. I'm so glad that we've been able to share their music with you. As Shelly mentioned you can learn more about them and their music on their websites. Shelly is at Shellyotus.com slash store and Fabio is at FabioPirazzolo.com. When we can we add links to our concert postings on our website so you can enjoy them again or find one that you missed. Remember details about all our concerts and other events are posted on our website friendsofrobinslibrary.org. Join us again on April 11th for the music of guitarist Aaron Marget Catlin. To receive advance notice of our events I encourage you to become a member of the friends. To join or simply donate please go to our website. Through your membership you'll be supporting our wonderful library and the community that is served. Thank you everyone for being with us today. We'll hope you'll be back next month.