Though I’ve not posted in quite awhile, I actually have been writing quite a bit – just not here. For many months, every time I sat down to write a post, I found myself wanting to write about so many things – but never music. So I decided to find a venue this fall where I could explore those topics. I wrote for weeks about all these other things churning in my mind, avoiding music as much as I could, but eventually hit a wall when I couldn’t tell one particular story I wanted to tell without writing about music. As it turns out, the group of people I was writing with (and for) seemed to respond most strongly to my work when I finally allowed music into it.
The act of writing itself, which I have come to think of, in part, as an exterior process of thinking, always seems to lead me back to something that has at least a tinge of music to it, or something that has somehow been made possible by this musical life of mine. It is like that carnival game where you try to beat down the pin and it keeps popping up somewhere else.
My musical schedule this fall was full and rich. It isn’t surprising that it managed to creep into my writing: Barber of Seville, Also Sprach Zarathustra, Mahler 2, Dvorak 8, Brahms 4. With Thanksgiving coming up, I feel as if I want to say how thankful I am for the opportunity to perform these works, and with such wonderful musicians.
While I am extremely grateful, the shortcoming of this kind of statement is that it fails to convey the whole picture. This Thanksgiving, one that is the first since a great loss for my family, I want to acknowledge what lies beneath all that I am thankful for. I don’t want to pretend that there are no shadows.
And when I write about music, I don’t want to romanticize it, pretending that it is love itself, or life itself. The truth is that, if I ever thought that music could change the world, I do not think that now.
I do, however, believe that it can change one moment in time, in this one life. I know that it can serve as a connection back to earth, back to the physical reality of the moment. It allows me to sit in a hall full of people who have come to be in that moment also, to listen to music that was written by someone who felt compelled to write, to create, to dig into themselves and the world around them and share how they experience (or hear) life – both light and darkness, joy and sorrow.
Over the course of time, music has been created and re-created by those who knew that music was not everything – that there is more to this life than music – but that it was something. It was one way – their way – to tell a story and to add a unique voice to a wonderful conversation.
For this, I am truly thankful.
