“There are tiny secrets that invite you to play, and there are secrets so huge that they scare you.“.
Those are the first lines of “There are Secrets”, a song with an enormous emotional impact, which moves people to tears.
A lot of songs can do that, but this one is really something else.
It is a window through which society can question itself.
The song has even been used as evidence in a criminal trial.
Its composer is Ruth Hillar, who grew up and lives in Santo Tomé, a small town in central Argentina, where I visited her.
“I was born in a very musical home. Music was there before I arrived: my mom and dad met singing in the Santa Fe polyphonic choir. My dad had a humor music group.
“I started with the recorder, also singing, studying the rudiments of music, and I always enjoyed it very much.”
With his father on the violin, they played duets, and when they bought him a tape recorder, playing with music was “one of my favorite entertainments.”
Another thing that always fascinated him was reading.
“I spent many, many hours reading. At home there was a very nice library. And, in fact, when I saw that there were almost no books in the houses of my friends at school, I organized a library on the sidewalk.”
Despite how much she enjoyed music and literature, what she wanted to be when she grew up was a veterinarian or pediatrician, “I always like to heal someone, children or animals.”
That idea of caring for others, particularly children, would later become the center of her work as a composer..
“Neither simple nor easy”
Ruth studied literature for a year, then decided she didn’t like the way the course was run and returned to studying music, now as a college major.
At first he thought he would join an orchestra, the typical path academic musicians follow.
Over time, his interests expanded. He met other musicians and They decided to create a children’s music group: Canticuénticos.
After 17 years, they now have six members, six albums and have given hundreds of concerts.
In the beginning, thanks to their distribution strategy – which included making all the songs from their first album available on YouTube – and the nature of the songs, they were quickly discovered by teachers.
“Immediately the teachers here in Santa Fe took that repertoire to use in the classrooms, and the province edited some songs in a songbook to distribute in schools.
“That helped us a lot to want to start the project a little more seriously, because it is not easy.”
“We always looked for how to make songs accompany childhoods, not only in what is considered ‘childish’, because there is like the idea that what is childish is what is simple, what is easy.
“In reality, childhood life is neither simple nor easy.. It is very complex and sometimes it is very difficult, because in such a chaotic world, childhoods often bear the brunt, because they are more defenseless.
“Although we want to keep them in a kind of corral, safe from a lot of things, reality creeps in everywhere.
“So it seems to us that through songs we can accompany in many aspects.”
That is why, says Ruth, sometimes Canticuénticos’ songs deal with unusual themes in that genre.
And admit that, Sometimes, your desire is to generate some change.
“It seems like a lot to ask for a song, but many times they come out that way, as responses to something, so in that desire to want to respond I have to learn to look at that something more deeply so that that response serves or is connected to what I want.” dialogue.”
One of those songs is “There Are Secrets”, which speaks directly to the listener, to children, about being able to speak up when a secret is hurting them.
It was intended to play an important role in helping children and adults deal with painful events in their lives.
“The secrets that do harm”
The song says that there is “light secrets that make you fly”, but there is “secrets so heavy that they don’t let you breathe“.
In a particularly emotional passage, the song speaks directly to the listener and says: “If words are not enough for what needs to be told, let’s invent another language. I will always listen to you“.
“And it has a chorus that wants to be a mantra: ‘You don’t have to keep the secrets that do wrong‘.
“One of the choruses has only a very deep snare sound, with voices of girls, boys, and adults, women and men, as if representing a complete community that is singing together in favor of protecting from abuse.”
Regarding this scourge, Ruth emphasizes, adults have to be questioned, which is why the song is not only aimed at children, but also at adults.
“In reality, adults are responsible for the well-being of childhood, not only of our children, but of all boys and girls, so I believe that this song precisely means: pay attention, be attentive, be where you need to be, Look at those boys and girls with a sensitive and compassionate gaze.
“Much of this falls on teachers and in fact they are the great heroes in this feat.because in schools they are the ones who have the most access to those moments where boys and girls can open up, since many times the abuse is in their own homes, inter-family, intra-family.
Ruth composed the song in 2017, and says that there were many paths that led her to do it.
“The issue of abuse was more in the public sphere and I thought: what can we do? My weapon, my way of acting is music, I don’t know any others. Or at least better ones don’t work for me. But I was left as if in an impossibility.
“I remember that we were filming the video for the lullaby ‘Noni Noni’, looking for the most tender, sheltering images that we could think of, and looking at a scene from the outside I thought that many childhoods were outside the sphere of that song, that there was another song that is more urgent“.
He decided that he had to try, “even though it was so difficult, even though the words and sounds didn’t seem to be enough… how to talk about it without hurting someone who is already hurt?”
At that moment he received an email from Sabrina Medina, a social work graduate from Paraná, a neighboring city, saying that she worked on abuse prevention programs and that there were very few artistic resources.
“He shared the main ideas with me: the theme of secrecy, fear, trust, offering help. That’s how I knew the song had already started. I wrote a verse and sent it to him so he could tell me if there was anything that could hurt.
“I always sought to reference without naming, so that whoever was going through a situation of abuse could recognize themselves, and whoever was not, could understand something else.a theme of stronger, or lighter, secrets.
“I immediately thought it would be a Vidala, a very introspective, very reflective Argentine folk rhythm, so that it would communicate in a calm way what it wanted to communicate.”
“There are secrets” appeared on the album “Por qué?, por qué?”, in 2018, and soon Canticuénticos began receiving messages from mothers, teachers, and social workers showing that their message was being received.
“Many girls and boys, and even many adults, had been able to talk about abuse in childhood.
“It was difficult for us to face all that because, beyond the company of a hug from a distance, we can’t do much, because we are not professionals.”
“There are always tears”
It was also difficult to play the song live, because they didn’t know if they could sing it without crying, or how the audience would react.
“What happened from the first moment was that, that In some phrases our voices broke, not only because of what we were singing, but because of what we saw in the room..
“There are always tears, there are always very tight hugs to their boys, to their girls. There are always those faces that are a mixture of gratitude and pain, sometimes with retroactive pain.”
“So, it’s something that we don’t want to stop singing, because we want it to be a necessary song and, above all, generate that moment in which the audience sings along with that chorus, because just like on the album, at one point we let the audience singing alone
“I think that challenges a lot, because there we do perceive that it is a human, heterogeneous group, that comes from different families, from different places, but that at that moment they come together in this kind of prayer or mantra, and that is wonderful, It is very strong.
“Little by little, we learned to be able to sing the entire song, without crying and without breaking down, but that doesn’t mean we stop getting emotional with every tear we see in the audience, because There is no concert in which something strong and beautiful does not happen.“.
Silences in other languages
The song has even reached the Argentine justice system.
In March 2021, a judge from the city of Zapala, in Argentine Patagonia, played “There are Secrets” in the courtroom.
He did so to highlight the song’s role in the discovery of the abuse case that was being tried and for which a man was convicted.
What had happened was that a music teacher had introduced the song to the primary school students. One of those students shared it with her family at home and one of her sisters, moved, revealed that she had been sexually abused by a neighbor.
Other neighborhood children came forward and shared their own stories of abuse by the same man.
“Actually the hero there was the teacher who knew how to choose that song within the framework of Comprehensive Sexual Education (ESI), so he was actually the maker of this, right?
“But what happened with the song reconfirms for me that art has enormous power.”
And it reverberates beyond the Argentine border.
“A Brazilian musician and anthropologist contacted me and told me: ‘I want this song to be in Portuguese, I’m going to help you make a translation,’ so we did it.
“We also have a version in Italian that we are about to record, and they wrote to us from Korea to ask us for authorization to make a translation of the text… they have written to us from many different places.
“In Argentina it entered the ESI as a resource, as well as in Uruguay and I know that in other countries as well.”
Now, Ruth and Canticuénticos are working on an English version of the song, to d tell even more children…
“Here I am, I want to help you. I know you tell the truth. There will no longer be any need to walk in fear because I will take care of you.“.
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