A beautiful singing voice is alchemic—you pull a lungful of air through the human machine and it leaves, like magic, as music on the exhale. I was first introduced to the vocal group A Filetta by a listener at one of my own concerts, a poorly attended show in Germany. Afterward I received an email from a man named Christian: In a very, very quiet moment, please watch this.
A link led to a video in which a man wearing a gold chain and a black dress shirt, open at the collar, held a tuning fork to his right ear before dropping it into his breast pocket.
Gray-haired and trim, he moved with a relaxed, animal athleticism. When his mouth opened, his eyes shut, as if wired on a shared circuit. The melody was both mournful and urgent, like a funeral song for someone not quite dead. After the first phrase, half a dozen other male voices joined in; the camera panned across their faces, dark lashes edging their closed eyes.
Some sang in close harmony, some sang long vowels, like a bed of strings. This was not a church pew prayer. This was a bathroom floor prayer. I played it again and again. I checked the band website , hoping to find U. I checked again the next summer—no luck. I bought a plane ticket. From above, it looks like any other island: a patch of green against the blue. The truth of the place is visible only in profile. I arrive in Ajaccio a few days before the show with plans to meet a Corsican filmmaker named Nico de Susini—the friend of a cousin of a friend who graciously agreed to orient me to the island.
Nico is tall and lean with silver curls, a French accent, and almost always a cigarette—lit or unlit—in his right hand. Toddling Corsicans are instructed to respect mothers, fathers, siblings, neighbors, the elderly. They may work on the coasts, but all have ties to a family village in the interior. The proprietor sets down a plate of bread and meat.
