Associazione Culturale Darshan

Associazione culturale Darshan is an organisation active from 1998 in the cultural and creative sector. In fact, its main purpose is the development and diffusion of cultivated music and musical traditions of Sicily compared to others European cultures. To pursue this aim, it organises workshops and education activities targeted to young people and to the public in general; meetings at the University of Catania, Department of Sciences Humanities, addressed to students of History and Aesthetics of Music, meetings in middle and elementary schools. The meetings are often accompanied by demonstrative-popular musical performances, rendered in the form of lecture-concerts. Our programming is also accompanied by permanent exhibitions on musical instruments of popular extraction. For the organisation workshops represent a fundamental piece compared to the pursuing its objectives, as it accepts the dissemination of contents, knowledge, quality and mastery that otherwise is lost forever, with immense damage to the cultural heritage of our island. It also organises some festivals of classical music and of international folk and world music: 

• Classica & Dintorni; 
• Tarantafest; 
• Meltin'Folk; 
• Alkantara Fest; 
• Raizes; 
• IblaFolk. 

It has also made numerous musical productions and it organizes national and international tours of some Sicilian folk groups. Our primary objective is also to underline the relationship between the phenomenon music and the worlds of culture and art and to support an analytical approach towards the musical work in order to address the issues related to the cultural framework of each era. This experience tries to fill the strong need of young people to know, to understand and acquire critical skills, as well as to satisfy the will to become active and thinking subjects within a musical market that often, instead, makes them pawns of dubious quality companies. In particular, we approach the students to the knowledge and analysis of the chamber music repertoire, in the diversity of the various formations, emphasizing the artistic value and the social function that it has covered in every age. Moreover, the analysis of the popular repertoire is often highlighting its characteristics and tools related to the territory, and then focuses on the evolution of musical language and on the proposals of the new avant-gardes.