War Requiem

(I wrote this for The Missouri Humanities Council Passages on November 1, 2005)

In the religious tradition I know best, today is All Saints' Day.  It is a good time to remember people who have illuminated the life of humanity, with good example, with inspiration or vision, or with self-sacrifice, or with any other good thing given beyond the usual measure that is within each of us to expend, or not, depending on our power to express something that I will call "the energy from God."

I am studying two requiems this fall with the St. Louis Symphony Chorus.  One is the Brahms German Requiem, completed in 1869 when he was thirty-six.  It is my favorite piece in all of classical music. I have performed it twice in the past six years and will perform it next in St. Louis at the end of March and again on April 1 in Carnegie Hall.  Aside from the beauty of the music, I find the Brahms German Requiem to be, literally, a sacrament of healing in which each member of the ensemble is a celebrant.  I don't think a listener can get inside this music as the performer must, and so we who sing or play this work are the high priests of a divine energy of healing that Brahms bestowed on humanity.  Today I thank God for the gift of Johannes Brahms.

Johannes Brahms in 1872, three years after he completed his German Requiem, and his draft of the first chorus.

We are also performing in the same concert a 25-minute piece by John Adams titled, On The Transmigration of Souls.  The piece was commissioned to memorialize the many lives that were destroyed on September 11, 2001. 

 Our chorus has spent eight hours studying this work so far and we just about have it down.  The better we know it, the more difficult it is to sing it, because we empathize with the voices of survivors who are trying to deal with sudden grief and horror.  "I wanted to dig him out...I know just where he is!"  "He was tall, extremely good-looking.  The girls never looked at me when he was around."  "She was so full of life."  "I loved him from the start." A recorded tape plays sounds of street traffic, footfalls on sidewalk, a recitation of the names of the dead as we sing.  The text is presented in broken fragments, typical of John Adams's style, but so appropriate to the destruction of sky-scrapers.  In the final minute our voices become the souls of the dead, I think, as they approach heaven and say, over and over again, "Light!"

I have sung many requiems.  When I hear a section of a Fauré Requiem where the women sing about a chorus of angels, tears usually begin to form.  But I have never sung the War Requiem of Benjamin Britten (pictured below).

I remember the night I first heard it.  I was home from college for Christmas vacation, my junior or senior year, 1965 or 1966, and the Vietnam War was still in its early stage.  The fall of Saigon was ten years in the unseen future.  Our government was not yet speaking about "light at the end of the tunnel," or "not coming home until we nail the coonskin to the side of the barn."  (My high school classmate, Lee, a wiry little wrestler, is still alive in my memory.  His name is carved into the Vietnam Memorial in Washington.  I found it there.) I was reading a new biography of Handel, listening to my FM radio, when on came a live broadcast from a church in Philadelphia, a piece I had never heard of, the War Requiem.  I was transfixed by that experience.

Several years later I bought the recording with Britten conducting, his friend Peter Pears singing the tenor part that Britten wrote just for his voice, and the incomparable German baritone, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.  I ordered an orchestral score to follow and a vocal score to learn.  The War Requiem includes poetry by Wilfred Owen, a minor English poet whose brief experience in The Great War transformed him into a major literary voice.  He was killed in that war, a candle snuffed out, another saint to remember today.  I recall bits and pieces of the poems in the War Requiem.

"The pity of war, the pity war distilled*," spoken by a ghost who meets the ghost of his enemy in a poem that begins, "It seemed that out of battle I escaped/Down some profound dull tunnel long since scooped."  The two ghosts meet and one says to the other, "I am the enemy you killed, my friend."  Pity is, perhaps, a word that Owen found after a lengthy search.  "Hell" would have been obvious, but "pity" carries weightier meaning, and "distilled" combined with "pity" creates a sense of the density of sobbing for the reality of violent, life-sucking conflict.  

Almost every night the News Hour concludes with a silent memorial to the U.S. soldiers who recently perished in Iraq.  Their photographs are displayed, their names, their home towns, and their ages.  We grieve for them and for their families.  "Neither wrong nor right," I think of this war (and all wars), remembering a poem by Robert Frost, out walking through his dark night of the soul..."And further still at an unearthly height/One luminary clock against the sky/Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right./I have been one acquainted with the night." ** 

I am not writing about U.S. foreign policy.  I don't know if our government was wrong or right to start the current war.  I can wish it hadn't happened, but I can also wish that we lived in a world where there was no need for soldiers, no fierce competition for the world's resources, no terrorists, no vainglorious pride, and no foolhardiness.  I harbor a long list of wishes.  If they all came true, there would be no people in this wished-for world, including the one who wishes. 

We live at a time when the idealism that resides within the idea of America is challenged by what some might call "urgent realities," where a U.S. Senator who experienced torture as a prisoner-of-war has to argue, persistently and against resistance, that the idea of America goes down the tube if our government sanctions its own use of brutality and torture for whatever reasons. 

I don't know if there is a more urgent national question than this "idea of America."  Societies live and die by the myths they internalize about themselves.  By "myth" I don't mean "lie."  The United States is united by many things....the same TV shows, same music, same money, same fast food, same stuff in Wal-Mart, same national laws, and by a constellation of national myths...equal opportunity, equal justice, land of the free, "this land is your land/this land is my land," duty to country, nation of laws, exporter of democracy and freedom, exporter of civic ideals.  At issue is whether the myths we live by can endure if we officially permit acts of brutality on our prisoners.  On both sides of this debate, people are talking about results and possible consequences. 

I think this battle is over a myth of nobility, argued by knights, a myth that one side finds unrealistic and impractical and the other side finds indispensable to our national sense of honor.  If we abandon that myth, what sort of "We the People" will we become, and what sort of soldiers will we send abroad to export American values?  We must be noble in our practice of horror, says one side.  We must match the enemy's brutality, says the other.  I think we have imagined ourselves as the senders-forth of white knights, "a few good men."  What sort of people would send forth soldiers cast in the image of Darth Vader?  Our movies mirror our myths.

Wet, cold, hungry, scared, stricken with grief, Wilfred Owen conjured a revision of the story of Abraham and Isaac, where Abraham has a notion that his duty is to offer his son as a sacrifice to God.  The original myth has God speak to Abraham at the crucial moment, having tested his faith, and tell him to spare the child.  In Owen's revision, an angel says, "Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him." The poem concludes, "But the old man would not so, but slew his son,/And half the seed of Europe, one by one.***"  In Britten's music, the baritone and tenor soloists repeat, and repeat, and repeat "half the seed of Europe" and "one by one."  The phrase "one by one" is staggered, one soloist overlapping the other's iteration, as if the echoes of sorrow and pity were never-ending.

For those in the way of harm, it may seem as if the sorrow, pity, and confusion is never-ending, and they would be right.  They are staring at the face of the Pity of War.  The History of Peace is a smallish volume.  Civilization is so very fragile.  It is an idea, actually, civilization, another myth we live by.

Hundreds of us who sing are about to brush up our performance of Handel's Messiah for the holiday season.  We will hear the Biblical question that echoes down the ages from the most ancient of times, "Why do the nations so furiously rage together?  Why do the people imagine a vain thing?" 

I think of those bright faces at the end of the News Hour, candles extinguished in the service of country; some "tall and extremely good-looking," some not;  most of them younger than my own children; all mourned, grieved, missed terribly, remembered on a day like this and on any other day. They were rays of divine light from the beginning.  They are rays shining in memory now, rays united with

The original light,

With light,

Light!

*The full text of Owen's "Strange Meeting" is at
http://users.fulladsl.be/spb1667/cultural/owen/strange-meeting.html

**The full text of "Acquainted With the Night" is at
http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/robertfrost/12143

***The full text of "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young" is at
http://users.fulladsl.be/spb1667/cultural/owen/the-parable.html

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Postscript:  I finally sang Britten's War Requiem with the St. Louis Symphony in the spring of 2007. 

Watching Perlman's "Messiah"

(I published this piece in The Missouri Humanities Council's Passages, January 5, 2003)

Last month I had a wonderful experience singing Handel's Messiah with the St. Louis Symphony under the direction of Itzhak Perlman. I want to tell you about what made that experience so special, but to do so, I've got to tell you a little of my musical history.

I don't know how many times I've sung Messiah; probably fewer than a dozen, but it has been a part of my life for over forty years. The first time I heard it I was in the 8th grade. It was performed by the county choral society, and Mr. Fegly, the husband of my English teacher was the baritone soloist. All I remember about that evening was the pleasure of hearing a chorus and orchestra in an auditorium. Live music was absolute magic to me. That same year, Itzhak Perlman, who was my age, appeared on the Ed Sullivan TV show as a teen prodigy. He was already on his way to becoming an international superstar.
I didn't know about Perlman back then. I was more interested in Elvis, who had also been on the Ed Sullivan Show some years earlier. I spent most evenings in my room with my guitar and my sheet music. In school, we all took a music appreciation class from a teacher who was considered a freak because he'd graduated college with the skills and interests of a concert pianist. He made sure that we all knew about the American sensation, Van Cliburn.

As far as I knew, only one person in my school was studying singing, and I didn't know about this until one memorable assembly. Out walked Bill, age 15, and delivered the blustery recitative, "Thus Saith the Lord," from Messiah. His performance was quite Martian in the general context of student life. I still remember the impressions of it: the most prominent larynx of anyone I knew; nerdy glasses; a particularly bland tone the color of mushroom mousse; and extraordinary guts to get up there and be "laughed to scorn." His performance did reveal, though, that people our age were aspiring to become artists as adults, and this was no small revelation.

When my dad installed a modern stereo system in our home that year, Messiah became one of the staples of our family repertoire. This was the Philadelphia Orchestra recording, Ormandy conducting. I gave it a lot of play.

During the 60s something of a revolution was going on in musicology. The manner of performing Baroque music was reconsidered in ever-widening circles, and the "fat sound" of that Philadelphia Orchestra recording was supplanted by a completely different tonal palette. Several schools of interpretation developed in the ensuing years, but I remember the shock and surprise of hearing for the first time that "new" Baroque sound on the Messiah recording of Charles Mackeras. I was in grad school studying voice and choral conducting when it was released and I nearly wore it out! One of the main differences in the sound was accomplished by using oboes to double violin parts and reducing the number of violins, so that the sonority was quite reedy. That recording also featured phenomenal ornamentation of the solo voice parts, in the manner of a real Baroque performance. The Mackeras recording, and another by Nikolaus Harnoncourt that same year, redefined how Messiah should sound. I couldn't wait to become part of that world!

I got to sing those Messiah bass solos for the first time in a Christmas concert of the Symphonic Choir at the State University College in Oswego, New York. I was there in my first job after grad school, working as a sabbatical replacement, which meant full-time for half-pay! The faculty trumpter developed a cold sore on his lip the day before the performance, so I had the rare experience of singing "The Trumpet Shall Sound" with the trumpet part played an octave lower, in the range of a trombone. This novelty, I hope, distracted the listeners from my unsuitability to sing that repertoire! I had not yet understood that one's voice is not defined solely by its range, but also by its size and tonal quality. I was, unknown to me, a light lyric baritone.

In 1972 I conducted a full Messiah with the Durango Choral Society at Fort Lewis College. We used a new edition by Watkins Shaw that featured the results of the latest scholarship. Good people were in that ensemble, and I think we did a creditable job. I conducted for five more years at the College of Santa Fe before moving to Vermont to work for the state humanities council. For the next few years I performed the bass solos in several Messiah concerts, some of them conducted by my wife at Johnson State College. No, my voice had not grown larger and richer, but I was plausibly musical and very available. When she quit that job to concentrate on her performing career my singing took a ten-year break.

Messiah was the second St. Louis Symphony concert I attended when I moved to St. Louis in 1995. The chorus was prepared by its new director, Amy Kaiser, who had moved from New York, where she was highly regarded as an orchestral and choral conductor. I joined the Symphony Chorus in 1998 and have performed three or four Messiahs since then. They have all been different. When it was announced last spring that Itzhak Perlman would conduct Messiah this year, we were filled with anticipation, for this would be a unique opportunity.

Perlman has been a violinist of international renown since his early teens. Born in 1945, he made an appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show on TV in 1958 and was a super-star by the age of 20. He recently branched out into conducting (see his bio at Sony Classical), so we singers knew that we would be a part of the formation of a major talent in a relatively new role. In our four chorus rehearsals before we met Perlman, Amy Kaiser prepared us to be, above all, flexible. We had no idea how Perlman would approach the work, so we rehearsed within the range of the likely.

Our first meeting with any conductor is always a "piano rehearsal" with no orchestra. This is where the conductor gets to know what sort of "choral instrument" is available for the concert. It's where he or she teaches the chorus how a piece is supposed to sound. The first impression of Perlman is his warmth. He took the stage in the unassuming manner of a person still learning a new job but confident of his aptitude. We in the ensemble were in a position to watch a towering musical intelligence at work in a new role. That personal warmth established instant trust in the labor that would follow.

At one point he told a story about a chamber music rehearsal in which one of his colleagues kept insisting that they go back over and "correct" a movement that seemed perfectly fine. He realized after a while that his colleague was simply indulging his own pleasure in that movement, but couldn't say so directly. So Perlman told us, "you'll understand now why I must find a lot of fault with the way you sing The Lord Gave the Word." For him, the busy hubbub Handel writes for the chorus on the words "great was the company of the preachers" is one of the most delightful strokes of genius in the whole work. What a surprise when he demonstrated in his own rich baritone voice how he wanted the passage sung! We came to anticipate his pleasure in those passages and to make that pleasure our own.

The next night we got together with the orchestra, and of course we couldn't wait to see how he would work with the violin section. He immediately addressed three fundamentals that would color the entire performance. First, he wanted sectional agreement on the amount of vibrato to use. In some Baroque performances the strings use very little vibrato. Perlman wanted enough to "warm up" the sound without getting into the Romantic sound of fifty years ago.

Second, he paid careful attention to tempo. It was obvious from the start that he had a clear idea of the tempo of each piece, and he was remarkably consistent in establishing the right speed in a work lasting three hours. He actually changed several of his tempo ideas when he realized that the chorus would sound more effective at a slightly slower or slightly quicker pace.

Third, he paid attention to degrees of energy. A lifetime of solo experience at the highest level had taught him that a player's inputs of energy are sensed by a listener as transmitting interpretive meaning. He singled out for attention the orchestral introduction to the bass aria, "Why do the nations so furiously rage together?" This is a brisk aria with a lot of flash in the violins before the singer enters. In the five seconds before that entrance the violins play a repeated pattern of very fast notes, and it was in that pattern that Perlman crystalized how he wanted a total commitment to "bow energy." What he heard was an energetic beginning to the passage, and then a sense of "coasting." What he asked for was an input of equal energy on every single note from the beginning of the passage until the entrance of the singer. What he got was the most exciting moment in the concert!

When a world-class violin soloist works with a world-class violin section, you see and hear the sort of suggestions and responses that are well outside the usual scope of rehearsal talk. This is what we all were hoping to observe. On the night of that first orchestra rehearsal, during our break, a number of the violinists approached Perlman and asked if he would try out their violins. He cordially took each instrument in turn and demonstrated some bravura passage or other to show what the instrument sounded like in his impressively large hands. What a wonderful moment!

On each succeeding rehearsal and performance I watched our conductor make adjustments based on what had happened the previous night. A different baton gesture here, a different form of encouragement there. In one performance it seemed that one of his gestures had brought out a bit more violin sound than he wanted. In the next performance I saw him make the same gesture half as big, and he got about half the response as the night before. Seeing this kind of responsiveness has been a veritable banquet of experience during my tenure in the ensemble.

There on the stage it struck me as never before that we're being "played." I felt as if I was a part of a great musical intelligence, to the degree to which I could be an instrument worthy of his mind. I think that's the essence of being in a conducted ensemble. You're in the service of the great mind who wrote the piece, and you're also in the service of the great mind who's trying to bring the piece to life. For me, these experiences on the stage of Powell Hall, five or six times a year, have woven together all the threads of my life as a musician.

Lines from Ulysses: "In sleep the wet sign calls her hour"

She was born for water, I for tides;
               To make a seed, you first must grow a flower
She became the second of my brides.
               In sleep the wet sign calls her hour.

And now I have a third, I call her Keb;
               To make a seed, you first must grow a flower
A Saggitarius to a Cancer wed...
               In sleep the wet sign calls her hour.

Lines from Ulysses: "There all the time without you"

Today I begin what I think will be a series of short poems inspired by lines or phrases that catch my attention as I read James Joyce's Ulysses for the first time.

Can it be? Were you
There all the time without you?
And are you?  Am I?

Sunday Morning at Lago Segretto

I'm having a slow start, listening to "All Night Long" by Lionel Ritchie, feeling some, but not a lot of, nostalgia for the seventies.

There....had enough nostalgia?  Kathy and I are still watching episodes of The Rockford Files with James Garner.  Remember them, the files, I mean?  I've got them all on DVD.  A few minutes ago I looked up a version of "Little Drummer Boy" that I remember seeing on TV in the seventies, a Bing Crosby Christmas Special.  He sang a version that had a duet part written for David Bowie.  That rendition was far from the worst of Bing Crosby.  I suspect that distinction goes to his recording of "Hey Jude."

But I'm not dissing the seventies, truly I'm not.  When I was roughing my way through them, they were so very "here and now."  They were as up to date as anything could be at the time, and I only felt mildly ridiculous (and clammy) in a polyester double-knit shirt.  I did not own a Leisure Suit.

Now the seventies are so far away, blessedly stored away with the eighties.  Today feels "here and now" more than yesterday, although memory is here and now, too, isn't it.  So in a manner of speaking, yesterday is no more unreal than the memory of five minutes ago.

I will close with a Haiku.

Dreamed I was holy,

Ghost-ridin' a papal bull

Way up in the sky.

    -- Cowboy Rodeo Haiku (Fusilli Press, 1997)

Gradus Ad Parnassum

How-To books in the Olden Dayes had the elevated title, "Gradus ad Parnassum," meaning steps to Parnassus.  In 1970s slang lingo, that would mean "Be all that you can be!"  I use it to express the state of incompletion of our expertly-built deck and paver patio beneath it.

We are so close, but yet so far!  Here's a picture of the crew leader, Steve Brandt, attaching a header for the second set of stairs yesterday before lunch.

When they quit the previous afternoon, I stained the three "stringers," the header boards, and as many step boards as Steve thought he'd need (all of them in the garage).  As Steve and Tim Yanko got to building the steps in the afternoon, Steve realized he hadn't bought enough cedar for the steps and would come up three steps short.

Steve's father, Carl Brandt, came in the afternoon to take over what Steve had been doing and got the job to this point by quitting time.

Construction is held up while the lumber yard awaits delivery of some new, non-warped, cedar railings for both sets of stairs.  Steve will bring those on Friday, I hope, with the extra boards for the steps, and they will complete the deck in another two or three days' work.

The new sod on the right of the picture was laid down two weeks ago today, before a series of good soaking rains.  The sod crew was all over themselves complimenting me on Steve's 5-star job of laying the patio pavers.  We'll have to put a bit of furniture down there, as the area is no longer "just a simple walk-out."

If you look through the stairs, you can make out the big set of wind chimes I hung up to celebrate the completion of that area.  The chimes were a retirement present to myself in 2010 and had hung on the old deck here until Steve tore it down in August.  Now we can enjoy them again.  I enjoyed them last night as I drifted off to sleep.  They weren't loud enough to keep me awake, nor so silent as to have no presence.

Songs, Plain and Simple

A little over two years ago while surfing iTunes for singer-songwriters, I discovered the Canadian, David Francey, and downloaded his song, Midway, for a playlist I was creating for Kathy.

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David's music reminds me a lot of Lyle Lovett, not so much in subject matter as a propensity for making the fifth of the major scale the center of gravity.  He doesn't have much of a vocal range, nor does he have any affectations or pretensions or any distracting mannerisms to take you out of the richness of his natural gift with words.  It doesn't hurt, either, that he is blessed with a rich baritone voice and the expert collaborator, Craig Werth, on guitar and back-up vocals.

David Francey sounds like your average Joe with a decent voice and an easy-going manner.  Listening to him sing, you wish he was in your neighborhood, maybe next door, a guy to invite over with his wife for a pot luck supper on the deck at the end of a beautiful weekend.

Well, he's not in my neighborhood, and I know him only by his recordings, which I can listen to for hours on end.  I told Kathy last night that there is something totally comforting in the sound of most of his recordings.  The acoustical space reminds me of the Ian and Sylvan records of the mid-60s.  Their recording engineers set up equipment in old hotels with big rooms to reflect the sound if the guitar and autoharp. They worked for a sound that didn't sound "engineered." Craig Werth's guitar work is right out of the 60s, too, the same finger-style patterns we all learned for coffee house work.  It is simple, clean, immaculate, and right for David Francey's manner of singing.

Last night I thought of Gordon Lightfoot, the "dean" of Canadian songwriters when David Francey was growing up.  Lightfoot's recordings in the 70s seem over-engineered when I enjoy them now.  There is more interest in the instrumental backup than in the vocal delivery.  Lightfoot had a problem of vocal tension above middle C that became a liability as he aged.  The "sweet spot" of his voice was in the middle of the bass clef, and what a beautiful baritone sound he had when singing there.

Here's Gordon Lightfoot in 1979 singing his 1971 hit, "If You Could Read My Mind."  The melody begins in his sweet spot and rises to the range where he adds vocal tension -- clenched jaw, tightening throat.  For the next thirty years the sound was still recognizably his, but it was less and less listenable.



Francey's singing has a different technical flaw, the "Dylan haze" that comes from a general self-strangulation.  Bruce Springsteen and many others picked up this affectation from early Bob Dylan records.  If you've ever heard Dylan's "Tangled Up in Blue," you know the hazy sound I'm talking about.



I can't listen to Bob Dylan hour after hour.  These days, we put on the David Francey CDs an hour before dinner and turn the sound back when we sit down to our meal, and just enjoy the feeling that a friend came over with his guitar and swapped songs with us around the fire place.

Here's David again with Craig Werth in a radio studio in London, singing "Broken Glass."



If you come over here for dinner some time, chances are we'll still have David's CDs in the player.  And if you play "Midway" again, I suspect you'll remember this haunting image: "And the girls in the house of mirrors/combing their hair."