In his leave-taking speech to his students, a professor from the university said that in Italy the culture is totally relegated to the television. This reflection rooted deeply into Lunardi’s imagination and originated the spark which lead to the vision represented in this work. The choir translates into images the destruction of the civilisation of culture to the profit of the civilisation of entertainment or, better: of mass consumption. A twine of voices expands in the air, caressing the romanic architecture and the sacred images. Fastly a poliphonic quartet takes the scene up, but the singers’ head is a monitor which broadcasts their recorded image. Each of them holds a monitor because their performance exists only if mediated by the television media. Whatever is not television does not exist because, nowadays, the monitor represents the only interface through which what remains of culture can be broadcast. The world of the cathod ray tube has overcome the world of books, of theatre, of cultural places and of all those means which convey knowledge. The television has become a step-mother that cannibalizes everything while everything which is not broadcast simply does not exist anymore. The universities and the schools surrendered to the television barkers and to those who spread false myths. The culture is sold together with advertisement like in talk shows. The advertisement, which determines and rules everything, burst into the singing, breaks the performance, alters the tale and mixes up with the performance dimming the faces and deforming the harmonies. The Choir becomes thus the emblem of a decadence where a whole heritage surrenders to the necessities of a system, that is television, which has completely re-defined the fruition of culture. The integration of advertising extracts in the harmonic composition suggests that the commercialization is a force which destroys culture, which thus melts into a flattening mixture that chokes all identities. The Choir tries to underline a contrast which is rarely noticed, provided that one listens to the complex language hues. On the one side, there is the painful awareness of a declining world and on the other the manipulative superficiality of the market show, which dulls the audience with the calculated futility of gingles. This work, combining depth and superficiality, displays the current obscenity: the king is naked, and as the beautiful clothes disappear, there only remains the grotesque reality of fiction.

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