Open Circles Montreal: Mattia Pironti's Music Healing Ritual

On a Wednesday night in Montreal's Plateau neighborhood, twenty-three strangers sat in a perfect circle on the floor of a candlelit studio. No stage. No microphone stands. No barrier between performer and audience, because there was no audience—only participants.

A woman named Claire, sitting cross-legged in jeans and a wool sweater, was telling the circle about her mother's death three weeks earlier. Her voice caught on certain words. The room held its breath with her.

Mattia Pironti, a thirty-two-year-old singer-songwriter with dark curls and an easy smile, sat in the circle like everyone else. He held a guitar loosely across his lap and listened with the focused stillness of someone recording every word, every pause, every breath. When Claire finished speaking, he closed his eyes for a moment, then began to play.

The melody came first—something between a lullaby and a dirge. Then words, sung in a voice that seemed to be pulling Claire's story from the air and reshaping it: "She's not gone, she's in the morning light / In the coffee you make, in the dreams at night..."

By the second verse, a woman across the circle had started humming the refrain. By the third, half the room was singing with him, their voices braiding together into something that belonged to all of them and none of them.

This wasn't a concert. It was an Open Circle. And it was changing everything about what live music could be.

Mattia Pironti didn't set out to reinvent the concert format. He set out to survive as a working musician in Montreal, which meant playing wherever would have him. Street corners in the Old Port. Weddings. Bar mitzvahs. Studio sessions for other people's albums. He was good at it—good enough that his audition for "The Voice of Israel" got all four judges to turn their chairs, good enough to earn a scholarship to Berklee College of Music.

But somewhere in the middle of performing other people's songs at other people's celebrations, he realized he'd stopped making music that mattered. "I felt like a jukebox," he told me over coffee in the Mile End. "People would request songs, I'd play them, they'd clap, I'd pack up and leave. Nobody's life changed. Including mine."

The turning point came during a street performance outside Jean-Talon Market. He was playing an original song about his time volunteering with Inuit youth in northern Quebec—a genuinely meaningful piece of his life transformed into four minutes of folk-pop. People dropped toonies in his guitar case and kept walking. A woman stopped long enough to ask if he knew any Coldplay.

"I went home and didn't touch my guitar for a week," he said. "I kept thinking: what's the point? If music is just background noise for people's errands, why am I doing this?"

The answer came from an unexpected place: his grandmother's stories about the cantastorie, the traveling storytellers of southern Italy who would arrive in village squares and turn local gossip, tragedies, and triumphs into improvised ballads. They weren't performers standing apart from the community—they were weavers, taking the threads people gave them and making something that belonged to everyone.

What if he could do that here, now, in Montreal? What if instead of performing songs he'd written alone in his apartment, he could create songs in real-time from the stories people were already carrying?

The first Open Circle happened in his living room with eleven people he'd invited through Instagram. He'd prepared what he called a "Quest Book"—a small journal with prompts designed to help people access their own stories. Draw your mood as a color. Write down a moment this week when you felt completely yourself. What would your superhero name be?

The prompts started playful, almost silly, then gradually deepened. By the time everyone sat in a circle, they'd already been on a private journey. They'd touched something true in themselves.

Mattia explained the structure: people could share something from their lives—two or three minutes, something that felt alive right now—and he would try to turn it into a song. No pressure to share. No judgment about what was "significant" enough. A funny story about a disastrous Tinder date had equal weight to a confession about depression.

The first person to share was a graphic designer named Marc who talked about his father, recently diagnosed with Alzheimer's, forgetting his name. Mattia listened, asked one clarifying question, and then started playing. The song that emerged—something about names and memory and love that persists when language fails—made Marc cry. It made half the room cry.

"I'd never heard a song about my actual life before," Marc told me later. "Not a song I could relate to—a song that was literally about me, made in front of me, sung back to me by people who'd been strangers an hour before. It was like being seen in stereo."

By the end of that first night, Mattia had created eight songs. People stayed until two in the morning, even though the "official" Circle had ended at eleven. They exchanged phone numbers. They made plans to meet again. Three of them showed up at Mattia's next street performance, and when he started playing one of the songs from the Circle, they sang along. Passersby stopped, confused and intrigued by the strange intimacy of it.

The second Circle had a waiting list. By the sixth, he'd moved to a proper venue space and was turning people away.

The format evolved through trial and error. Early Circles sometimes went too long, with people sharing for ten or fifteen minutes, which exhausted both the speaker and the listeners. Mattia instituted a two-to-three-minute guideline. He added what he called "container rules"—no cross-talk, no trying to fix each other's problems, no advice-giving unless explicitly asked. Everyone was complete. The sharing wasn't therapy; it was witnessing.

He also discovered that the Quest Books were crucial. Without them, people arrived nervous and uncertain. With them, they arrived having already begun the journey inward. The playful prompts at the beginning—invent your superpower, describe your morning in colors—gave people permission to be silly, which lowered everyone's defenses. By the time they reached the deeper prompts, they were already in creative mode.

"The structure is what makes the spontaneity possible," Mattia explained. "People think structure kills magic, but it's the opposite. When everyone knows the container is safe, they can go deeper than they ever would in a normal conversation."

He was also learning to read the room's energy. Some Circles needed lightness—when someone shared a heavy story, he'd follow it with something upbeat and invite the next person to share something funny. Other times, the room wanted to stay in the depth, and he'd let the songs build on each other like waves.

The musicians who started showing up—a cellist, a percussionist, a woman who played the hang drum—learned to hide in the circle and join in when a song needed them. The improvisation became genuinely collective: Mattia would start a melody, the cellist would find a counterpoint, the percussionist would add a rhythm, and suddenly the song had architecture.

By the time I attended an Open Circle last fall, the format had been refined to something remarkable. The evening began when we arrived at a studio space in Mile End. At the door, we were each greeted by name—Mattia's team had our registrations—and handed a Quest Book with our name written on the cover in gold ink. Inside were prompts, some with small illustrations, some with blank pages for drawing or writing.

The first hour was a loose gathering. People sat at tables, worked through their Quest Books, got up to examine art on the walls or admire the string lights overhead. Soft music played. There was food—small pastries, fruit, tea. The atmosphere felt more like a friend's dinner party than a concert.

Then, gradually, Mattia invited everyone to form the circle. We pushed tables aside and sat on cushions on the floor, maybe thirty of us, in a shape that felt both ancient and intimate. He welcomed us with a short poem he'd written that week, explaining the structure and the "rules" of the space. Then he led a vocal warmup—nothing serious, just silly scales and sounds that got everyone laughing and loosened the self-consciousness that makes people afraid to sing in public.

The first person to share was a university student named Thomas who talked about changing his major for the third time and feeling lost. Mattia listened, nodded, smiled at something Thomas said, and then picked up his guitar. The song that emerged was about paths and crossroads, about how being lost was just another way of saying you had options. The refrain—"You're not lost, you're choosing"—was simple enough that we could all sing it by the second time through.

After Thomas, a woman in her fifties talked about her son moving across the country for work. Then a man in his twenties shared a story about his boyfriend proposing to him at a subway station. Then someone talked about getting fired and feeling relieved. Each story became a song. Each song invited us deeper into the container.

What struck me wasn't just the quality of Mattia's improvisations—though they were genuinely impressive, full of unexpected metaphors and melodic hooks—but the cumulative emotional arc. The Circle had rhythm: light, deep, light, deep. Funny stories balanced heartbreaking ones. The songs built on each other, themes emerging and returning. Loss. Change. Fear. Hope. The ordinary sublime of human life.

Around the tenth story, something shifted in the room. We'd stopped being strangers performing politeness. We'd become something else—a temporary community held together by mutual witnessing. When someone cried, no one looked away or tried to soothe them. When someone laughed, the whole circle laughed. We were learning each other's stories and singing them back to each other, and in the process, creating something that couldn't be recorded or reproduced, only experienced.

The final song, Mattia explained, was for everyone. He'd written it that afternoon, inspired by the collected energy of previous Circles. It was about circles themselves—how they have no beginning or end, how they hold space without hierarchy, how they require everyone's presence to stay intact. We sang it together, some of us harmonizing, some of us just humming, some of us crying and singing at the same time.

When it ended, no one moved for a long moment. Then we stood, stretched, hugged strangers who no longer felt like strangers, and drifted toward the food table where the team was setting out more substantial provisions—soup, bread, cheese, chocolate. People exchanged contact information. Made plans to meet for coffee. Asked when the next Circle would be.

I stayed until past midnight, talking with a couple in their sixties who'd driven down from Quebec City after hearing about Open Circles on a podcast. "We go to concerts all the time," the man said. "But this—this is different. This is what church used to feel like when we were kids, before it became boring. Everyone coming together, everyone contributing, everyone leaving changed."

The challenge now, Mattia told me, is figuring out how to grow without losing intimacy. He's been contacted by people in New York, Mexico City, Berlin, all wanting to bring Open Circles to their cities. The format is replicable—Quest Books, circle formation, improvised songs—but he's wary of franchising it into something commercial and hollow.

"The moment it becomes a product, it dies," he said. "This only works if it stays a ritual. If people come to consume an experience, we've lost it. They have to come to co-create."

He's experimenting with a hub-and-spoke model: Montreal remains the center where he continues to refine and experiment, while other cities start their own Circles with their own facilitators. He'll help train them, share the structure, but each Circle has to be authentic to its own community. A Circle in Brooklyn won't look exactly like a Circle in Montreal, and that's the point.

He's also thinking about sustainability. Open Circles can't be free—there's the space rental, the food, the Quest Books, the musicians who deserve to be paid. But he's committed to sliding-scale pricing so money isn't a barrier. Some people pay forty dollars. Some pay ten. Some trade their skills—one participant designed the Quest Books in exchange for admission.

The economics work because the format itself is efficient. No elaborate production. No expensive marketing. Just word of mouth and a mailing list. People come because they've heard what happens in the circle, and they want to be part of it.

On my way out that night, I stopped to talk with Claire, the woman who'd shared about her mother's death. I asked if having her grief turned into a song had been helpful or intrusive. She thought for a moment.

"Both," she said. "It was hard to share it. But once it became a song, once everyone sang it with me, it wasn't just my grief anymore. It was ours. And somehow that made it lighter. Like I wasn't carrying it alone."

That, maybe, is what Mattia Pironti has figured out: how to take the most private human experiences—loss, joy, confusion, love—and transform them into something collective without diminishing them. The songs don't solve anything. They don't offer answers or fix what's broken. They just make space for life to be exactly what it is, and then they give that life a melody people can sing together.

It's not a concert. It's not therapy. It's something older and newer at once—a ritual for people who don't quite know how to gather anymore but desperately want to. In a city full of performance venues and a culture saturated with recorded music, Mattia's creating something that can't be bottled or streamed. It only exists in those two hours, in that circle, with those specific people.

And maybe that's why it works. Because it's not trying to be anything other than what it is: a room full of strangers who, for a few hours, choose to stop being strangers and start being witnesses to each other's lives. The music is just the vehicle. The Circle is the destination.

Worlds To Watch: Open Circles

Founded: 2023
Location: Montreal, Quebec (expanding to NYC, Mexico City)
Format: Two-hour immersive ritual combining Quest Books, story-sharing, improvised song, and communal meal
Frequency: Monthly gatherings
Capacity: 20-40 participants

Follow: @mattiapironti on Instagram
Experience: mattiamusic.com

Why This World Matters:

Open Circles prove that the most powerful music isn't performed—it's co-created in real-time from the stories people dare to share. In a culture of consumption and isolation, Mattia Pironti built a format where strangers become community through the simple act of witnessing each other's lives and singing them back.

Want to experience an Open Circle?
→ Visit mattiamusic.com for upcoming gatherings
→ Follow @mattiapironti for Circle announcements

Interested in bringing this format to your city?
→ Read about the World President methodology
→ Learn how other worlds are building ritual: Trash Club | Dig Ferreira

This is part of Juicy Times' "Worlds To Watch" series—documenting creators who stop performing and start co-creating.