For Valentina Black, the experiences that music has given her have always left a mark she describes as indelible. She was eight years old, sitting in her darkened living room, when the sound of an orchestra suddenly reached her from the television. The set was on, and the film playing that evening was The Secret of the Sahara, the 1988 Italian television miniseries known in Italy as Il Segreto del Sahara.
The music was "Saharan Dream," the miniseries' main theme, composed by Ennio Morricone with lyrics by Leonie Gane and performed by the singer Amii Stewart. It is a song whose magic, Valentina says, anyone can hear. For her, that evening, it was something closer to a devout illumination than an ordinary night of television. She could no longer separate the room she was sitting in from the dimension the sound seemed to be opening around her.
A Sound That Could Move Things
From that moment on, as a small child, she became convinced that objects could be moved by the sheer power of sound. She was certain, in the way only a child can be certain of something impossible, that she had travelled somewhere else entirely while that music played. The reality of what she had just lived through felt so inexplicable that she found her own face wet with tears.
Not tears of sorrow, and not tears of joy — but of something, she says, that only music is capable of producing.
Something Only Music Can Do
It is a feeling, Valentina says, that cannot be given a verbal definition. It can only be lived, with an open heart — and it is only with that same openness, she believes, that the true scale of this universe can ever be felt.
"Saharan Dream" is the main theme of the 1988 television miniseries The Secret of the Sahara (Il Segreto del Sahara in Italian), composed by Ennio Morricone, with lyrics by Leonie Gane, performed by Amii Stewart.