Last night I attended an incredibly beautiful chamber music concert, the first of the Knoxville Symphony's Concertmaster series for this year and was stunned by the skill, harmony, and emotional weight of the performance. I also allowed my mind to wander, as the minds of humans are won't to do, enjoying the music, experiencing the place, and allowing my thoughts to attempt to integrate the feelings of the now with the history that has led up to the now. It became a tangled mass of branching thoughts, which also seems to me to be a very human phenomenon. It is only when we cling too tightly to simplicity that we can be led astray.
The program consisted mostly of music of the baroque era, and mostly music of great emotional depth and weight. The exceptions are important here, as was the layout of the program, as the contrast added necessary tension, a tension that served to expand the listeners response, inspite of, or perhaps because of, the interruption in flow. This is harder to do than one might assume, this contrasting of what I will call style and substance, in a way that actually enhances all of the components, making something that felt whole out of disparate, but thematically related, pieces.
The basic format was along these lines: style, substance, style, substance.
But how did that take shape? First there was Corelli, with "La Folia for Violin, Harpsichord, and Continuo", a light vibrant piece that set the tone, a musical amuse-bouche of sorts. Corelli is important for shaping the tone of the baroque, but also because he insisted on a consistency in technique that changed the way music was performed, opening the way, perhaps, for modern orchestral performance. Corelli also, at least to this listener, seems to be incredibly balanced, lyrical, crisp, happy music, but a music of surfaces only, the depth held tightly at bay. The Corelli was followed by a longer work by Handel, the Sonata #4 in D Major for Violin and Harpsichord, which was richly resonant, imbued with an emotional sense that played harmoniously with the setting in the Knoxville museum of art. The lighter movements seeming to bounce playfully off the glass sculpture overhead, to dance through the texture of the cloud-filled sky seen just beyond the musicians, the contrast of baroque music and modern city in the moments before dusk. And then just that, dusk and the passion of the Scherzando, eternal, and yet also extremely specific to this communal experience in this time and space.
Then we began the second style-substance rotation. The Handel was followed by Martinu, by the "Promenades for Flute Violin and Harpsichord". It seems like an interesting choice on the surface, Martinu a very 20th-Century composer, a composer whose music seems perfectly in tune to his milieu between the wars that eternally changed human consciousness concerning who and what humans are and could become. Martinu was also attracted to the baroque, an interesting choice, but perhaps not surprising, an attempt to find a path forward while looking backward, looking for something in human history that softened the weight of the emotional moment. In this sense Martinu reminded me of Corelli — perhaps less formally polished and reserved, but also all style — except this was music for the jazz age, music of the 20's, music that was intentionally avoiding the inescapable emotional weight of the recent past.
I suspect that many in the audience did not love the Martinu as much as the Handel. I could say that I too might prefer to drift into Handel than Martinu, although I found it both shocking, and it is strange to say that about music that is over 80 years old, and charming in a way that had me considering Martinu differently than I had previously, probably mostly because I am only familiar with his symphonic output. But the Martinu also served to pull my thoughts together in a way that would have been different had the music not been included. I think placement was critical here, just before the intermission. If I were to maintain the food analogy, I would say it was a bit of a tart sorbet or palate cleanser, allowing our ears and minds to reset between two too-rich courses.
And the second half was rich. We were treated to two of the Brandenburg Concerti, and due to the considerations of the space, the audience and the larger group of musicians, the space itself began to feel as if we were all participating cells in a single body as the music unfolded, musicians and listeners as one. There was a very relational sense to this performance, one that is not always captured both between the musicians, and between the musicians and the audience, one where the listeners feel as if they are a part of the music surrounding them. It was a powerful and beautiful evening.
But this leads me to the other part of this performance, the places the music led my mind to wander, and my own questioning of history, experience, and humanity. These thoughts are my own, of course, and yet, much as we like to think ourselves unique, this is but a shadow truth. I am but a speck after all, and music reminds us of this, of the way we are transported into some common place even though our individual experiences of that place are different. We are all just cells in one giant living tree, twisted and overgrown perhaps, but an inexorably connected piece of the whole. It seems interesting, therefore, that though we live in a time when we prefer to think of ourselves as unique, we still thrill to music written in a time when the uniqueness of the individual was not a priority. This very dichotomy seems to connect us even more deeply. Even though we cannot experience anything in the same way as that previous cell did, its existence informs our existence.
As I listened to the Corelli, I was transported back to my 17- and 18- year old self, to the girl who loved Corelli, the girl would sit in her dorm room and lose herself in this music. I wondered what a young girl saw in Corelli and I am not surprised: the joy of it, yes, but also the harmony and cohesiveness. Perhaps it was that very lack of emotional weight that drew me in. At that age all I wanted was an escape from the burden of emotional strife, and as I listened to the music again, I reconnected with that sense last night, the was reminded of the way we yearn for peace today, yearn for escape from the sense of strife hammered into us every time we look at the news.
Corelli and Martinu, Handel and Bach. Baroque music connects us to some essential yearning. But we cannot have it, not in the way we think anyway. The way we listen to this music today is shaped by the way the world has been altered over the course of the last 120 years. It is in our DNA. The music we heard last night was unique to a particular time and place. We the listeners, and the musicians playing the music, are each completely who we are, and we are products world entirely different from the one in which Handel lived. That Handel could write music that transcended time and place is art. That is something unique to us, we humans, art and awareness — not just that we are aware, but that we are aware that we are aware, and this awareness changes us throughout subsequent generations, even, and oh the injustice of it, without our being aware that we are changed.
The music by Martinu reminded me of this, of my adolescent self loving Corelli, of the way we, the collective audience, loved the Handel, and that sense of universal yearning. The Martinu struck me because it made me think about the way many audiences of classical music today struggle with this period, struggle more I think with this "modern" period that occurred between the wars, the music where one world, one social structure, had been torn asunder and yet there was no stability, where another war was going to change our very understanding of humanity. We struggle because we cannot recapture that feeling experienced by generations before us, by people who were transformed into a different kind of awareness following WWII. We are inheritors of a different kind of world, but, in a way, like Martinu, we seek a more distant history, one less imbedded in our more recent DNA. Perhaps we too attempt to integrate old with new, dreams with the reality of the world in which we live, yearnings with experience.
I don't think we think of music, or art, in this way very often, and perhaps my own meandering reflections are shaped by new understandings, or misunderstandings, from recent readings. But it seems like something worth exploring. Or not.
This perhaps is just a beginning, an incoherent beginning at that.