Recently, courtesy of some new friends, I've been overwhelmed with appreciation for the power of non-programatic music. It has been a trip to say the least. Early on, I overheard someone at lunch say "Of course, I think good music doesn't need text."Now I have always been a text girl. I began singing while in the throes of exultant crushes on Blake, Dostoyevky and Virginia Woolf. My hypothetical non-music job has always been reclusive poet/high school English teacher. But I'm new here and these people seem to know what they're doing, so I let this amazing statement slide, thinking "What does that even mean!?"
I have since rehearsed and performed with a these fine folk. Their sense of emotion- its pacing, drama and specificity- has matched any of the lovely theater geeks I've ever worked with even when they had no idea of the texts' meaning. They think in terms of gesture, change, timing and direction... I don't know what or if they think, but most of the time they're right on. Quite often, they're hitting it out of the park. Richard Goode's Diary of One Who Vanished was one of the most amazing, sexy, sad, vivid musical experiences of my life and I was bowled over by the priviledge of performing in such a real emotional landscape.
Further into the summer, the gorgeous quality of an elder statesman cellist's sound had caught me off guard and and I couldn't decide why I loved it so much. Then a friend said, "It's like his notes have text." And that does describe this man's playing. He plays with an intention so pure that you strain to understand concrete meaning in his music.
The text vs music question is boringly old/constant and important/irrelevant. Which is better? ... Yes. They say you should never lose the text and I don't think I could if I wanted to. To quote an awesome colleague, "Actors read text, but we get to make out with it." Too true. Nothing I love more than making out with text. But through this month's baptism in non-programmatic chamber music, I felt a defensive need to preserve some old emotional attitudes toward music. Text can be so damn exhilarating, but it allows you to say "This means this." and put the piece away somewhere safe. When you let music wash over you, it's dangerous. We don't want to pay attention to some of this music because it is so powerful that it demands life changes.
As a girl, my mother, herself a one time English teacher, traveled more than once with her own grandmother from New Orleans to the Bethlehem Bach Festival. As I grew up, my beautiful, intelligent, always mysterious mother would talk about Bach's music having saved her life. I didn't think much about this at the time.
In response to some non-music related events, I've been listening to the Hilary Hahn recording of the Chacconne from Partita 2 every day. I feel not so much that this music is saving my life as that it is making, renewing and organizing my self. That the music- its gestures and changes, its struggle and its exultation- is writing my life in a way that words never could- my past and my future- even the endless minutiae of my present as it ticks by. And I'm so grateful.
