In these days of final exams you can hear it bouncing here and there, “Night before exams”, a 1984 song with which Antonello Venditti will probably have bought a couple of seaside villas thanks to the copyright.
We imagine you all know the song. Furthermore, this is not the place to tell you about its historical references or its harmonic and melodic evolution. Let's rather take a few minutes to ask ourselves why after more than forty years this song is still the one that young, beautiful high school graduates sing outside schools on the fateful “night before” of the first written test. And again, so that they choose it when they gather on the last day to say goodbye, or to animate the stories on social media that tell the typical mental worries of high school graduates.
For work-related reasons, I hear “Night before exams” sung by always different graduates, from year to year. Watching them, together, singing it reveals some things about why it is still chosen today. Meanwhile, they don't know it perfectly: the text is too complex, long, difficult to memorize, even incomprehensible in many passages. In today's schools, multicultural in a way that would have been impossible in 1984, and struggling even with the INVALSI Italian tests, it is more than predictable.
Instead, all the emotion arrives. The piano introduction is, as young people say today, iconicand the first verse imposes a touching nostalgia that vibrates in the chests of the graduates: “I remember”. Suddenly that more or less feared and awaited moment is about to become first present and then past. The fates of classmates will separate, i prof they will gradually become less and less clear in the memory. We certainly retain many memories, in fact, but even at nineteen we understood that we cannot remember them without a hint of melancholy.
Rather than identifying with the four boys from the Folkstudio in the first verses, the students see themselves in this small group of slightly unlucky dreamers, it is not clear whether they are teenagers or already adults. The night before is therefore a border, in which it is easy to feel lost in a very special way that is typical of that age. Friends to the rescue, perhaps a naive, sweet and slightly messy love that who knows if will survive. The graduates continue to identify with this particular state of mind, a combination of fear, hope, anxiety and instant nostalgia.
Schoolchildren are about to stop being schoolchildren, forever. Afterwards, most people see a big “who knows”: holidays in Mykonos, an option that doesn't convince us much or perhaps the possibility of going to an uncle's company or that family friend. Projects, with related choices to make. Another story, compared to the high school tracks, with the teachers acting as more or less ramshackle locomotives.
I was saying, the students don't know the text. However, there are exceptions, moments in which the discordant and somewhat embarrassed voices of the choir align, to underline the verses that they feel most belong to their own feelings. In addition to the initial ones already addressed, there is a good choral convergence for “Claudia don't tremble/ I can't hurt you/ If love is love” and above all for that glorious declaration of intent which is “Night of tears and prayers/ Mathematics will never be my profession”. They nudge each other, they laugh, at this point the more sensitive ones already have sparkles.
Said of the text and his moodsome other reflections can be made, without going into more detail than necessary. There's really no competition with other songs about high school exams. You can fall back on songs that adapt to the situation, such as the hopeful “Buon viaggio (Share The Love)” by Cesare Cremonini, another unmissable song from these “before” days, or opt for more theatrical and dramatic period choices such as “The best years of our life”. Even for use on social media, by inserting the keyword “exam” or “exams” there is very little competition.
Finally, the dimension of the collective and intergenerational ritual. The music that high school students listen to today is often very distant from what was trending twenty or thirty years ago. So different that many of us “older” people find it incomprehensible, all the same, without value and without a soul. They are a generation that has burned many bridges with the musical past, albeit with some exceptions (recently, Michael Jackson above all), but for the collective ritual something out of time is needed. A song distant from anything else on their Spotify playlists, recognizable even by parents, even grandparents.
They listen to it and even those who are double or triple their age, almost twenty, go back: it's an overview of faces, names, sensations to remember with sweet nostalgia. For us teachers, it is also a way to meet in the bittersweet emotion with our students, before they go elsewhere and we lead others to their, certainly unforgettable, “Night before the exams”.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
