No Song is Safe From Us
No Song Is Safe From Us - The NYFOS Blog
 |  Jack Gulielmetti

While the other songs have been chosen for their objective beauty and ability to touch anyones heart regardless of musical ability, I selfishly chose this one because it titilates my ears as a musician. I find this piece to be a testament to the power of the human voice, and the depth of color that can be created when many people sing together.



 |  Jack Gulielmetti

This was a hard decision. I knew that with any piece on my favorite songs and songwriters of all time I would have to put in a Stevie Wonder song (because, um, duh? He’s only one of the greatest songwriters of all time), but picking one was extremely difficult. Ultimately I chose this song because of its beauty and simplicity in context with the rest of his music.



 |  Jack Gulielmetti

This is going to be a relatively eclectic list. While Mahler is not someone who I would always list among my favorite composers of all (he’s absolutely phenomenal, don’t get me wrong, just not someone who I always think to listen to) but this piece, and this movement in particular, always gets to me. Mahler’s incredible orchestration combined with the Rückert’s heart wrenching poetry creates an absolutely unforgettable aural experience.



 |  Jack Gulielmetti

Nina Simone is simply one of the greatest artists of our time. Trained at Juilliard in classical piano, only starting to sing later in life, she embodies a true renaissance musician to me: someone who loves all genres of music and is interested in being a part of all aspects of it.



 |  Hudson Hall

“I never died, says he”—and thus Paul Robeson sings of the union organizer Joe Hill, a man who did die for his cause. Perhaps today, as so much is said about dark times we live in, it is critical to remember there were much darker. And the society grew through such struggles, and eventually grew that much stronger.



 |  Hudson Hall

For me, this is a woman exploring the joy and trauma of love, existence, being with a man, and her voice within the universe. The emotions are just as base, raw, and conflicted as any masculine rocker but she asks you to contemplate, think, stare, hold a snowflake. She speaks of the sorrow and loneliness that settles into a soul after protest making the anger feel flawed yet delicate.



 |  Hudson Hall

It was the winter of 1993 and I was in my grandmother’s kitchen nervously attempting to tell her that I was gay. I had grown up hearing the word faggot so regularly that the idea of confessing that I was one of “those people” was a threat to everything I held dear, especially my relationship […]



 |  Hudson Hall

Adolfo Bella was a legendary heroic partigiano (Partisan). He was born, one of five children, in 1916 in Positano, Italy. He loved to sing, as did his Sicilian father who died young.

In late 30’s, to survive, he joined Mussolini’s military and was stationed in Crete. The Germans took Crete in 1943. Adolfo escaped the German’s camp in the melee and was hidden by a man named Manoli and his family until he could escape in a small aircraft to Albania. There, he joined the Resistance Movement.