I’ve Got Music

December 15, 2011 by scillagrace

How to unwrap this truly spectacular gift? It pulsates and glows and pulls you in, as your heart resonates and your soul throbs. Music received and believed regenerates like faith. I cannot think that it is merely a human construct, yet I cannot prove the music of the heavenly spheres. Is it invented? Is it natural? Is it free? Perhaps it is everything.

All deep things are song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls! ~Thomas Carlyle

Without music life would be a mistake. ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life. ~Ludwig van Beethoven

My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us; the world is full of it, and you simply take as much as you require. ~Edward Elgar

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. ~Victor Hugo

Is there a culture on earth without music? Rhythm: sound and silence are as basic as biology. Heartbeat, breath. Melody is anything with a voice. Do animals make music? Do plants? Does the earth itself sing? Sound waves flood space. Is that music?

Does music have an important part in your life, in your living?

Steve has a mental invention: “the sound pack”. He imagines carrying around a device that would provide a soundtrack to your life as you live it, matching music to your moods and experiences. It differs from an iPod in that it is all original music. Of course, he hasn’t actually built a prototype. I have never gotten into the habit of wearing ear buds and listening to music constantly. My arachnoid cyst would probably explode if I did. It’s more comfortable for me to take my music in without other distractions, especially as the white noise in my head increases. Imagine that you lived 200 years ago, before recorded sound. What place would music have in your life then?

Chicago Master Singers publicity photo - Jim at upper left

I sing to myself when I drive, making up lines and verses as I go along, like the Spirituals of the south, especially if I’m anxious. Driving up to Steve’s house from Illinois, I’d get off the Interstate at Swan Blvd and hum, “Here I am on a street like a long-necked bird…”, the murmur of a bluesy minor key calming my nerves. I would sing to my little brother on the drive home from the beach when he was a boy. He’d be asleep by the time we reached the driveway, damp head on my shoulder. I loved singing to him. When he was an infant, I would reach into his crib and lift his sleeping body so that I could take him to the rocking chair and sing him back to sleep again.

Of course, I sang to my own children. And they sang back. Harmony is an amazing satisfaction. I am looking forward to my kids visiting me on Christmas Eve. I’m hoping we can take a stroll around the neighborhood and trot out some of our favorite carols….and maybe some Beetles. Have you ever heard people singing in the streets? Do you look up in delight? Wonder why they seem so happy? I do.

One morning, I awoke to the sound of my sweetheart singing beneath my window. “Michelle, ma belle, Sont des mots qui vont tres bien ensemble….” Instead of the melody, though, it was the baritone part of a barbershop arrangement. Didn’t matter. It was in French and warmed by a May breeze. I opened my window and drank it in.

I have not experienced oneness with an instrument except my own voice. I am truly impoverished by that fact, I think. I did buy a harmonica this year with high hopes, but I am just too impatient. My mother-in-law was a concert pianist. My mother is an accomplished accompanist as well. I wish that I had been more disciplined and practiced the piano more. I wish that I had spent more time with the guitar, too. I suppose having a good voice tempts you to be lazy in that way. If Jascha Heifetz could sing, would he have been the violinist that he was?

What if we required our politicians to be experienced ensemble musicians? Would they come to office with a better understanding of unity, of teamwork, of collaborative leadership? Imagine a string quartet of President, Vice-President, Speaker of the House, and Senate Majority Leader practicing long hours together on an Adagio by Schubert. Perhaps the entire country would be in better shape.

Christmas 1982

December 6, 2011 by scillagrace

Ever had a piece of music bring up a memory, a time and place from the past, with such clarity that you felt you were actually there? Last night it happened. I came home from my Memoirs class, having read my essay aloud with such a rush of nervous adrenaline that my heart was still pounding. I decided to have a glass of Chardonnay and listen to some of Steve’s recently acquired CDs with him. So, I was relaxing and in “memory mode” when he put on a CD of the Tallis Scholars singing a mass by John Taverner, written around the turn of the century – the 16th century. Oh, the flood of my heart!

I was 20 years old. Jim and I had become engaged on my birthday over the summer. I went back down to So. Cal. to school, to continue with my bachelor’s degree in Vocal Performance. Jim and my mother were in a Bay Area singing group together, called Renascense (or some archaic spelling pronounced ren-NAY-sense). I came home for Christmas and was invited to one of their concerts. I close my eyes and picture them: Jim in his black tuxedo, ginger mustache, the smatterings of a beard he’s grown for Rigoletto. He is 22, teddy bear-like with twinkling blue eyes, blonde hair and a killer Italian grin. But while he’s singing, he is an angel, mouth perfectly forming straight vowels, eyebrows imploring heaven. He is a tenor. His voice melts butter. My mother is dressed in a mail order catalog nightgown, polyester, rust-colored, that has been trimmed with gold & black cord around the waist and across her bosom in an X. Only women who have sung in choirs can imagine how absolutely ludicrous these outfits can be. No woman looks good in a choir uniform, let alone one that has been made to look “period” on the cheap. It is ridiculously embarrassing, but I forgive her. She sings alto in a hooty voice that blends well. Her quality is not stellar, but her musicianship is indispensable.

I have been so homesick away from school. I have been staring at my diamond ring, counting the days until break. I sit in the concert hall and look at these two people whom I love more than any others on the face of the earth, and I am so proud of them. I’m proud of their dedication to music and their fond relationship to each other. I admire them completely, and I am jealous. I want to be with them; I want to be them. I want to feel the music in my breast float to the clerestory of the church and entwine in that beautiful polyphony. I ache for this memory. And then the tenor line soars above the rest, and it is Jim himself, singing to me. The recording is perfection. I can tell that it isn’t Jim, but there are moments when it definitely could be. My will takes over and I make it him, in my mind. I am there, in that sanctuary, and Jim is singing to me, alive, young, vibrant with love and mystery and warmth.

Jim before his Carnegie performance - 2001?

Music folds time in patterns that defy chronology. I sail far away on its transcendent waves. It is a grace to travel toward those we love without limits.

If Music Be the Food…Play On!

November 22, 2011 by scillagrace

Steve purchased 32 CDs through an e-Bay auction last week. Beethoven, Bruckner, Handel, Haydn and Schubert, mostly. I think he’s trying to collect at least one recording of every Schubert piece…and there are more than 900 compositions cataloged. Last night, he put on Beethoven’s first symphony when I got home from class. I poured myself a glass of Cupcake Red Velvet and settled in under the blanket on the squishy couch with him. Closing my eyes, I got an immediate visual memory of my father in his brown chair with the matching ottoman sitting next to the stereo cabinet, reading glasses and a glass of Kirigin Cellars Vino de Mocha in a wooden coaster beside him on the redwood burl table. My mother is in the red rocking chair, knitting away on another warm pastel hat for a preemie at the hospital. There’s a fire in the fireplace, and I imagine myself and Steve lying in front of it on the oriental rug. We are all enjoying early Beethoven together, eyes closing in pleasure, warm and satisfied against the chill of a dark November.

I wish that this were possible. I even imagine Jim lying on the tan sofa opposite the fireplace and wish I could picture Steve’s dad there as well. It comforts me to think that music bringing us all together. Music has been at the foundation of all of our lives in different ways. My father and mother courted by going to concerts in college. Jim’s mother, my mother-in-law, was a concert pianist. Steve and his dad would listen to records in their den, shutting out all distractions. My dad, Steve’s dad, and Jim are dead, but they seem to keep resonating music nevertheless. We listen to music intently, we feel it and breathe it. There is no TV in the room. We haven’t got headphones or ear buds. We let the music fill the space available. In this way, we live with music and it nourishes us. That is something we share in common, something sacred, I think.

Of course, there are other ways to relate and other kinds of music. My kids and I crank up Beetles tunes and sing along or belt out show tunes together. I’m introducing my youngest to opera now, and wondering how much they choose to listen to “Classical” music on their own. I know that my oldest cherishes the music she sang with her father when they were in Chicago Master Singers together. Now, she’s the lead vocalist in a punk band.

But it’s all good. If we’d lived 150 years ago before recorded music was available, I’m sure we’d be picking up instruments and singing to ourselves all the live long day. It’s impossible for me to imagine our life without music. And something about the darkness of the season makes the music seem all the more life-giving.