The Cry Before the Miracle
Marcelo Cesena - There is a cathedral in Sicily where golden light never fades. In Monreale, on the slopes above Palermo, Byzantine mosaics cover nearly seven thousand square meters of interior wall, their tessellated surfaces catching the Mediterranean sun that filters through narrow windows. Christ Pantocrator gazes down from the apse, his right hand raised in blessing. Around him, scene after scene unfolds: creation, fall, covenant, miracle. The gold background—neither sky nor ground but something beyond either—suspends each image in eternity.
It is before these mosaics that composer Marcelo Cesena stood, and something struck him. Not the grandeur, not the technical mastery, not even the theological architecture of the whole. What arrested him was a detail repeated in every depiction of Christ's miracles: the faces of those who came asking for healing. The desperation in their eyes. The tension in their bodies. The way they lean toward Jesus as if pulled by an invisible gravity stronger than their own exhaustion.
Behind every miracle, Cesena understood, there is a cry.
Where the Voice Becomes Whisper
Nota Dominante emerges from this recognition. The work—part of a cycle of fifteen compositions Cesena has created in response to Monreale—does not attempt to illustrate the mosaics musically. That would be too easy, too decorative. Instead, Cesena inhabits the space before the miracle: the threshold where human strength has failed, where the voice fades into something barely audible, where all that remains is the cry itself.
This is not a cry of despair. Despair cries to no one; it collapses into silence. The cry Cesena discerned in those mosaic faces is addressed. It reaches toward someone. Whoever cries out, cries out to someone. Whoever asks, asks someone. And in that reaching, faith already flickers into being—fragile, perhaps, but real.
The insight is both ancient and urgent. Those who came to Jesus in the Galilean hills were not theologians constructing systematic arguments. They were the sick, the bereaved, parents clutching fevered children. They had only their need and some fragile intuition that this man might answer it. Their cry, born at the limit of endurance, was itself an act of hope—a hand already stretching toward healing before healing came.
Cesena's music captures this precise moment: the instant when exhaustion transforms into surrender, when surrender opens into trust, when trust becomes—almost against its own logic—a form of reaching out.
The Grammar of the Heart
What Cesena has discovered in the mosaics of Monreale is something like a grammar of desperation. The twelfth-century craftsmen who laid those golden tesserae understood something essential about the human encounter with the divine. They did not depict the supplicants as composed petitioners, hands folded in decorous prayer. They depicted them as desperate: bodies contorted by suffering, faces marked by affliction, postures that communicate a need beyond words.
And yet—and this is the paradox Cesena's music explores—within that desperation lies the seed of something else entirely. The cry is not merely an expression of suffering. It is an address. It presupposes a listener. It contains, already, the embryonic form of faith.
Nota Dominante—the dominant note—suggests a musical term, but Cesena surely intends more. In the grammar of desperation, what is the dominant note? Perhaps it is the cry itself: the fundamental frequency of human existence when stripped of all pretense, all self-sufficiency, all illusion of control. We are creatures who cry out. This is not our weakness. It is our nature, and perhaps our dignity.
The Persistence of the Cry
What makes Cesena's work contemporary is not its musical language but its dedication. He offers Nota Dominante to all those who carry within them a cry today—for peace, for justice, for love—and who, even in their weariness, continue to believe that it is still worth asking, crying out, hoping.
We live in an age that has perfected the art of the surface. We scroll past atrocities. We consume suffering as content. The algorithm flattens every tragedy into equivalent data points, each as forgettable as the last. Our screens glow with the same golden light as Monreale's mosaics, but they illuminate nothing; they only dazzle and distract.
And yet the cry persists. In hospitals and prisons, in refugee camps and silent apartments, in the hearts of those who have lost everything except the stubborn conviction that their loss matters to someone—the cry continues. It is the dominant note of our era, mostly unheard beneath the digital chatter, but never silenced.
Cesena's music gives voice to this persistence. He refuses the easy cynicism that dismisses hope as naïveté, just as he refuses the sentimental optimism that ignores the depths of human suffering. Instead, he locates himself—and invites his listeners—at the precise point where the two meet: the threshold, the limit, the place where the cry is born.
Mystery as Binding Force
Perhaps this is what the mosaics of Monreale have preserved across nine centuries: not merely the image of miraculous healing but the posture of those who dared to ask for it. They stand before us in gold and glass, their desperation made luminous, their reaching hands frozen in the moment before touch.
There is a humility in asking. It requires acknowledging that we cannot heal ourselves, cannot save ourselves, cannot make ourselves whole. The figures in Monreale know this. They know that healing comes from beyond themselves. And so they ask.
As César Vallejo wrote, and as every golden tessera in Monreale seems to affirm: it is mystery that holds things together. Not explanation. Not resolution. Mystery. The mystery that whoever cries out, cries out to someone. The mystery that within the cry, hope is already present.
Marcelo Cesena's Nota Dominante translates this truth into sound. The music does not promise resolution. It offers something more honest: the dignity of the cry itself, the mystery of a faith that ignites precisely where strength ends. To listen is to be invited into that same posture—not as spectators of ancient miracles but as participants in the ongoing human drama of limit and longing.
The mosaics endure. The gold still gleams. And somewhere, in the space between the cry and its answer, hope already dwells.