Vitaliano Zambon was born in Biella on the 7th October 1962. He began his musical career at the age of 12 taking part in the musical band of Cossato (BI) as clarinettist.
When he was 16 years old he founded, with a group of friends, a dance-band, that has been quite successful in our province.
In the same period he starts, almost for fun, to conduct a little church choir that, in 1994, became the Chorus "Noi Cantando".
Throughout the years he entered the big band of Biella, conducted during the concerts by M. Tatone coming from Turin (at that time president of ANBIMA).
He took part in the TV show Caccia al Campione presented by Dino Crocco gaining the 12th place among 250 competitors.
He joined a show band as tenor and contralto clarinettist and saxophonist.
During the military service he played the tenor saxophone in the military band Brigata Alpina Taurinense.
When he ended the military service he left the career as a musician in order to concentrate more on the chorus conducting that he had always followed.
He is attending a course of harmonization given by Maestro Giulio Monaco and he devotes himself to the harmonization of some pop music songs arranging them for a chorus performance.
Furthermore he gives a very personal imprint also to the folk songs marking them out from classical interpretations.
Over the last years he attended several workshops:
- In the year 2000 workshop " The choral jazz"given by Nehemiah H. Brown
- In the year 2001 workshop about "Gospel music and Spirituals" made by Maestro Jonathan Rathbone
- In the year 2002 workshop "Pop music "a cappella" in the "King's Singer style" given by Simon Carrington
- In the year 2003 workshop " The rhythm of the words" given by Ciro, Diego, Gonzalo, Mario, Massimo and Mimì, the "Neri per caso" group
- In the year 2004 refresher course for chorusmasters promoted by A.C.P. (Piedmontese Chorus Association) given by Maestro Giulio Monaco
- In the year 2004 workshop "Vocal Popo-Jazz: analysis of choral pop music" given by Jens Johansen
- In the year 2005 workshop "World's sounds" given by Francisco Nuñez
- In the year 2006 workshop "Canti di Natale" given by Bob Chilcott (King Singers)
- In the year 2007 workshop "Black Gospel Music" given by Barbara Baker
- In the year 2008 workshop "The Real Workshop" given by The Real Group
- In the year 2009 workshop "Disney a Cappella" given by David Lawrence
- In the year 2010 workshop "Voice Camp" given by The Swingle Singers
- In the year 2011 workshop "Stouxingers th a-cappella groove" given by the group Stouxingers
Here follows my opinion on a recurring question: why do we pop music sing?
The particulary of the chorus "Noi cantando" is its repertory, that is an uninterrupted search of songs that belong to pop music. I'd like to explain in a few words the reason of this choice.
If we analyse the reperetory of the most "folk choirs", we can note that their songs belong to the far past. These songs tell real-life stories; they describe landscapes, feelings, love stories and infidelities.
So the next question could be: what is folk song?
"It's hard to define"
The rule says: "Every song which author is not a well-known composer"
Bepi De Marzi, Gianni Malatesta, Angelo Rondon and many others are composers of folk songs, aren't they?
I would say the best definition of folk song is "what people sing".
What people sang in the past is history and what people sing now is pop music.
Pop music tells stories of today, isn't it? It describes landscapes and it tells love songs or infidelities as folk song, isn't it?
The chorus "Noi cantando" expresses folk song, a modern folk song. The chorus looks for and chooses a particular interpretation of a song (an adaptation for chorus) and makes it to assume the density and the involvement of folk song. In this way we try to bring the song nearer to the public.
This speech could last long thanks to quotations, documents, interpretations, etc. etc.
What I want to explain is that in our repertory there are several songs that are neither "classical" or sacred; but these songs tell the everyday life so as the folk song of the past.
We are worried to keep alive the memory of our origins, to carry out research into songs handed on from generation to generation_all this to find out through the song "who we are". But we don't realize that the art that now we play as history, many years ago was everyday life, it was pop music. Those songs made the feelings of people of another time true.
I want to close with this question: why we have to wait that a song of Lucio Battisti, De Andrè or many other italians and foreing composers becomes history, before to sing it?
And I allow myself the following statement: the music, both classical and folk, is always THE MUSIC.