Angela's Horn Studio

“It is not a requiem to console the living. Sometimes it does not even help the dead to sleep soundly.” – The Times

There are some pieces in the classical repertoire that are truly monumental, and the chances to perform them are few and far between. Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem is one of those pieces. In 1940, the medieval cathedral of St. Michael in Coventry was bombed and all that remained was a shell. Britten was in the U.S. at the time, but returned to England in 1942, taking the risk of crossing the Atlantic during wartime to be in his own country again. When the time came for the opening of the new Coventry cathedral which stands adjacent to the old one, Britten was commissioned to write a new work.

As anyone who lived through war, Benjamin Britten had much to mourn, and much to protest, as did Wilfred Owen, the English poet whose poems are set, juxtaposed (and sometimes interspersed) with the Latin words of the Requiem, the mass for the dead. Wilfred Owen was a young soldier whose poetry was barely recognized during his short life – only four of his poems were published while he was alive – but since, he has become known as the foremost poet of the First World War. In a draft of the preface to a book he hoped would be published, he wrote:

This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.

He died in November of 1918 during battle, one week before the Armistice. His family heard the news one hour after peace was declared.

Wilfred Owen’s poems are set with chamber orchestra, while the Latin mass is accompanied by large orchestra. The poems and mass most often alternate in stark contrast, although at times, the poems and mass overlap, as in the Agnus Dei when Owen’s “At a Calvary Near the Ancre” is interspersed between lines of Latin. This poem references a scene of Golgotha at a crossroads in France. The first two lines: “One ever hangs where shelled roads part./ In this war He too lost a limb.”

The Times wrote about the piece before it was performed, “Any new requiem setting has to compete with Verdi’s and Faure’s and Mozart’s treatment of the same words. Britten has approached the task in his own fresh and deeply felt way. It is not a requiem to console the living. Sometimes it does not even help the dead to sleep soundly. It can only disturb every living soul. For it denounces the barbarism more or less awake in mankind with all the authority that a great composer can muster. There is no doubt at all, even before next Wednesday’s performance, that it is Britten’s masterpiece.”

If you are within reach of Philadelphia this week, take the opportunity to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Charles Dutoit this Thursday, Friday or Saturday at the Kimmel Center. Featuring Tatiana Pavlovskaya, soprano; Steve Davislim, tenor; Matthias Goerne, baritone; The Westminster Symphonic Choir and the American Boychoir. You won’t regret it!

While flipping through my most recent issue of Ploughshares (a journal I subscribe to), I saw the word “Breath” flash past. As someone who uses her breath for a living, I had to see what this was all about. In scanning the first page, I soon found the words “oboe,” “Mozart,” and “Vermont,” which sealed the deal for me, and I couldn’t help but dive in right away.

As it turns out, it was written by Mimi Dixon, maiden name Still, daughter of the late Ray Still, principal oboist of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for forty years (1953-1993). In this moving essay, she writes about her father, his last days (he died in 2014), the book they were writing together, and her own battle with leukemia. The breath itself is a point of meditation, as well as a device for exploring the powerful presence of her father. Wind and breath weave in and out of stories about her father’s approach to playing the oboe, her own struggles to breathe and stay calm during her illness, and her father’s dying breath.

She writes, “My father loves singers, absorbs their wisdom about the secrets of the breath, ways to achieve resonance, ease, head tones. The ways they’ve outwitted the body and its limits, so that technique becomes pure music.” She goes on to share how her father thought about oboe technique, and how he taught his oboe students to tell themselves “oboe lies,” tricking the body into being more comfortable. And she has certainly written the most poetic description of a gouging machine and other reed-making devices that one can ever hope to read! Dixon deftly links the relaying of that more technical information with lyrical passages, like one that describes the insects that arrive in her garden on the wind, and another that rubs up against John Donne’s Holy Sonnet. “At the end of this world, will we rise up, inspired and inspirited? But art is the the only true resurrection I know,” she says.

It’s a beautiful read for musicians and non-musician alike, and, fortunately, the entire essay is available on the Ploughshares website. Enjoy!

Some striking coincidences have occurred in my reading recently. First, back when I had just begun subscribing to literary journals, I received my first issue of the Alaska Quarterly Review in which I found a piece by Eva Saulitis exploring her Latvian heritage. It is a piece that struggles with itself and is not afraid to fragment. It embodies in words the effort to make sense of a complex and broken history. I was taken by the lyricism and beauty of it, even as it deals with the horrors Latvians experienced before and during WWII. Fast forward to last week when I received my most recent copy of The Sun Magazine, which always has an interview feature. This month’s interview was of Eva Saulitis, published posthumously, as she died this year of breast cancer. I began to read the introductory bio and discovered that she began her adult life thinking she would be a musician (an oboist). She attended Northwestern University on a music scholarship, however, a couple years into her degree, found her true calling and left to study marine biology, later becoming a writer and poet as well. As I read her biography, I couldn’t help but wonder, was there something in her writing that attracted my musical soul to hers through the written word? After her cancer diagnosis she, of course, continued to write, offering up the difficult and irreconcilable bits of her life and family history, turning them into art.

The next big coincidence: when I was in high school I chose Carson McCullers’ book The Heart is a Lonely Hunter as my subject for an English paper. I don’t know how or why I came to choose it, but I did. Again, fast forward. This month, AGNI, another journal I subscribe to, published a piece written by a Swiss writer, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, who wrote in 1940 about Carson McCullers, shortly after The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was published. They had recently met and had started corresponding. In a letter to Schwarzenbach, McCullers describes how she woke up thinking about the Brahms Violin Sonata in D Minor and how happy she had been feeling since then. (Incidentally, or maybe not so incidentally, I discovered while brushing up on Carson McCullers’ bio, that she initially had plans to become a pianist, and perhaps to study at Juilliard, but either illness or her desire to write got in the way – the details are unclear in my sources). She goes on to try to explain to Annemarie what she wants to accomplish in her future writing and then writes, “Maybe a decade from now all the good people will be dead.”

Schwarzenbach is struck by this statement, and how such a sense of despair could come from one living happily in New York after the resounding success of a book. But she understands the despair, this being 1940, with Schwarzenbach’s home continent in tatters. She writes, “a whole future generation of musicians, painters, poets, and inventors, an unknown number of young talents, an army of dead, are laid out on the battlefield.” She goes on to say that, in the time she spent with McCullers, it was clear they were of the same mind about “the endless struggle to express life fully while at the same time living it to the full, however one can.” Schwarzenbach concludes, “I spent five weeks in New York, far from the battlefront, among well-meaning people, with that enormous city of the future and its limitless potential at my feet. So why this paralyzing despair?… On the lush green bank of this great river, under fleeting clouds of June, I no longer know. And wonder if it’s worth taking up my pen, and yet I do.”

The coincidences of these authors’ musical biographies and references are what caught my attention at first, of course, but the real message that the serendipitous convergence of these voices brings to me goes much deeper. What inspires me is that, in the face of all that the world holds (success, illness, music, war, disasters), and in the midst of all our responses to what the world holds (delight, fear, love, despair, grief) these women, Eva Saulitis, Carson McCullers, and Annemarie Schwarzenbach, consciously chose to keep taking up their instrument of choice – the pen in their case – time and time again. Their lives and circumstances were complex, messy, and wildly imperfect, but their art served as a way to keep going forward, to try to express the fullness of existence. As writers, they could document, remember, and communicate in more exact ways than we musicians can, but in a certain way it is the same across all art forms, in that a space is being created where life can be more fully contemplated – and shared – imperfections and all. The simple fact of their words’ arrival into my life, in addition to the life-giving qualities that I see music (and other creative work) bringing to my life and others’ lives every day, confirms to me that continuing to pick up our instruments – whatever musical or non-musical instruments they may be – is what we must do, in whatever way we can.

The last two lines of that first piece I ever read by Eva Saulitis (“Third Person Displaced”) that I loved so much:

You must make something of this, however broken.

 And then you must tell them.

May we all follow their lead, making something from the fragments of whatever surrounds us – and share it.

For those of you who have been following my husband’s work with Baset, a young trumpet player from Afghanistan, I wanted to share the link to the story which aired nationally this past week. We’ve been amazed again and again at the persistence and vision of Baset, the skills of those who have helped him (and continue to help him) through all the bureaucratic/logistical practicalities of coming to the U.S. to study (most notably Robin Korevaar), and the generosity of all those who gave of their money and other resources to make this all come to pass. Baset’s journey is just beginning, and there are many challenges ahead, but it’s good to take a moment to celebrate how far he has come – both geographically and musically – and, maybe most importantly, to celebrate possibility.

Perhaps this is why Baset’s story speaks to so many people. It is all too easy to feel impotent and ineffectual in the world today, with its large problems that seem to have no answer. Yet somehow, because of courage and vision and generosity on the part of many people, we have this overwhelming example of all-that-could-be right in the middle of our chaos.

Steve Hartman of “On the Road with Steve Hartman” did a beautiful job with this story.  The segment aired on CBS Evening News this past Friday and again on CBS Sunday Morning.

Here it is:

CBS News

YouTube

I have read a fair amount of musicians’ biographies and memoirs over the years, though not so many recently, as my curiosities and interests often take me far from music. A couple months ago, however, someone recommended to me a memoir by Glenn Kurtz called Practicing: A Musician’s Return to Music. It is different than any other memoir I have read in that is by someone who chose not to become a professional musician after having spent his life in pursuit of that goal.

His memoir, anchored by a single practice session stretched throughout the book, details the early years of his fascination with the guitar, his increasing success as a budding musician, and his studies at New England Conservatory. He then goes on to tell of his “quitting” the guitar and his journey to picking up the guitar again after ten years.

One of the things that makes this book so compelling to me is Kurtz’ ability to look very deeply into the act of practicing, the quest to improve, and learning to perform. There is part of me that wonders if the fact that he chose not to continue a life in music gives him a distance that is so crucial to being able to expose one’s own processes and path so completely. The gaze with which he meets his obstacles (and his successes) is unflinching, so much so that at times while I was reading it, I wondered if I wanted to keep on reading. I generally try to avoid thinking about the process too much.

But the truth is, there is a time and place for that scrutiny, and his ability to put his struggles, and the pathway through those struggles, into words kept pulling me back in. He also navigates the pitfalls of writing about music with such skill. It is an easy subject to sensationalize or sentimentalize, but he keeps it real.

One of my favorite passages of the book is about a masterclass with Pepe Romero in which he played. Romero guides the young guitarist through a piece by playing along with him, highlighting where he is holding onto the music rather than letting it go, showing him where he physically tightens when what is needed is to relax. Reflecting upon the experience he writes, “So I held on to the notes instead of releasing them, trying to control them after they’d sounded, to shape how the audience heard me…. The tension in my elbow was just a cover, a defensive pose against the fear of giving music away and having nothing left for myself, the fear of being nothing….Everything that practicing accumulates and protects, performing releases. It is a squandering of ability, the opposite of striving, the opposite of pretending….to really perform it, I had to be willing to let it go.”

This passage and others on practice and performance dig ever deeper to get to the truth of his experience. It is a book that can be read and enjoyed by musicians (pros, amateurs, students) or non-musicians. All will find something of value. I can also imagine that many family members of young aspiring musicians would gain a valuable peak into the world of their loved one through this book. Check it out!

I just wanted to give my readers a quick update regarding my last post about Baset, a young trumpet player from Afghanistan. His story hit the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer today, and will be featured on WHYY soon.

Here is the link to the story: Philadelphia Orchestra Trumpeter Seeks To Help Afghan Teen Musician

We’re getting closer and closer to reaching the amount of funds he will need to attend Interlochen, but still need several thousand more dollars to get there. Please consider helping if you can. No donation is too small! Click here to donate: Help Baset Go To Interlochen

A few years ago, I posted about the helplessness I often feel as a musician in the face of world events. I remember feeling it keenly for the first time as a student in New York.  I don’t remember the circumstances of my despondent state of mind, but at a lesson one week with Jerome Ashby, whatever had been brewing came to the surface. It’s just a piece of metal, I said. His response, in his ever thoughtful way, was I think you know it’s more than that. And of course, it is more than that. Far more.

The poet Li-Young Lee wrote an essay in which he says this: “I felt that they [great poems] saved my life. Am I stupid? Am I one of those idiots who goes around saying that poetry saved my life? His poems, I can say this, saved my life. And I bet they saved his life.”

Many of us, probably most of us, could substitute the word “music” into this statement of Li-Young Lee’s. If music didn’t save us from a literal or even emotional death, maybe it gave meaning and shape to a young life that would have otherwise been spent listlessly, which is a kind of death. Or maybe it gave life to a special voice that has saved others.

There is a young trumpet student in Kabul at ANIM (Afghan National Institute of Music) by the name of AhmadBaset Azizi (he goes by Baset). The school has received quite a bit of press after its U.S. tour several years ago, and again, after a suicide bomber attack during a concert. The Taliban’s target was the head of school, who survived, though a German concertgoer did not. After tireless efforts on his own part, and some guidance from others, Baset has been accepted at Interlochen with a scholarship, but has no financial means to attain the rest of his tuition and fees there.

I can’t help but think about the times I feel utterly ineffectual as a citizen of this war-torn, crazy world. And here is a chance to make a difference to at least one young Afghani at the brink of a future in music, and at the brink of a new life in a peaceful country. With our help, music can save his life, and perhaps many more lives through him. Please consider joining me to help him pursue his dreams. Click here to donate.

Sidobre, France is the location of Europe’s largest granite plateau and the site of Peyro Clabado – a place where a large boulder seems to defy gravity in the way it is perched atop a smaller stone. Sidobre was also the location of a piece of art that can be seen now only through photographs –  because it ceased to exist long ago. The British artist Andy Goldsworthy found a stone wedged between larger boulders and adhered poppy petals onto its surface with water. In the photographs, the stone glows among the gray mammoths that surround it. It looks molten, alive, almost heart-shaped. I do not know how long it remained in this completed state, but can only imagine it would have been washed away with the next rain, or perhaps it didn’t even last that long. Goldsworthy has other compelling ephemeral art: a spiral of ice sculpted around a tree made from icicles found on a cold morning that would melt in the afternoon sun; a wave-like bridge of branches that would soon succumb to the current of a river.

I came across a radio interview of Goldsworthy by Terry Gross during a week when I was playing music by Sibelius. The descriptions of his icy creations seemed to emphasize what I heard in Sibelius – a sort of minimalist, frozen world, but one that contained a love for what can be found in the soul of a particular landscape.

But as I’ve contemplated these images over a longer period of time, and as world events continue to unfold in ways that constantly challenge my hope in our collective future, my connection to his work has deepened. It feels like a reminder of the ever-present potential within a person: resourcefulness; awareness; the ability to see possibility and beauty in seemingly mundane surroundings; the ability to create from whatever the day contains. I feel my own very ephemeral life could be enriched if only I could live the way his art is created.

As a member of modern American society, there is a sense of needing to actively combat the inundation of distraction and noise if I do not want myself or my family to be consumed by it. Life is always in motion. Amplification, flashing lights, video screens, constant blips of information are everywhere. How does one make space for something meaningful to be created, or for the events of life to be metabolized? How does a modern person do something other than get from one moment to the next, each day a series of obstacles to overcome?

Andy Goldsworthy’s sculptures feel like an antidote to the noise around me, and I feel the possibility of my own profession to be an antidote as well. Classical music, which organizes nature sonically, offers a place of expression and connection for those who create it and those who hear it. Goldsworthy’s sculptures or a musical performance may only last for a period of time, but the effect of deeply experiencing something skillfully done, beautifully organized, created from awareness and connection to life, echoes far beyond the fleeting moment.

Here is a great page for looking at more of his work.

Passion is work/ that retrieves us/ lost stitches. It makes a pattern of us,/ it fastens us/ to sturdier stuff/ no doubt. – Jorie Graham

There are some lines of poetry that stop me in my tracks. They feel shot through with truth and continue to echo around inside me for days, months, and sometimes years. These lines are from “I Watched A Snake” by Jorie Graham (from her book Erosion). The image is that of a snake catching flies, moving so slowly at its work that the movement can scarcely be detected between the blades of grass as the snake imperceptibly vanishes and reappears. This must be perfect progress where/ movement appears/ to be a vanishing, a mending/ of the visible/ by the invisible. The snake goes where it must, driven by a desire and hunger for “small things.”

This idea of passion and hunger and desire as things that delve into the material of life to retrieve us is a powerful and moving one for me. Suddenly, I see threads in my life, very necessary life-lines, where I hadn’t seen them before. It becomes clear – I was being guided. I was being retrieved as I slithered around on my belly following what I felt like I must follow.

Passion and desire can be misunderstood, with reputations as hedonistic no-holds-barred kind of energies that can destroy people and those around them. And this can be true sometimes (as in “fits of passion”). But Jorie Graham’s poem, I believe, points to this other face of passion. The speaker in the poem names this energy as a possible guide, allowing those forgotten, starved parts of a person to come to light again.

For me, music has been one of those guiding passions – something that, when I follow where it leads, when I quiet myself into it and find a place of absorption, it gives back to me. It fuels me and I become more of myself, and more than myself. There are other focal points that provide this in my life, of course, but music looms large.

There is a moment that I wish for all of my students to experience (and it is so hard to come by these distraction-filled days): the gift of complete immersion into this very beautiful pursuit, so that they may experience the gifts that come from it. But it’s like the Baptist’s version of baptism: you have to go all in. There’s something to be said for that symbol of new life that requires a complete dunking and soaking!

Immersion into experience requires stillness, the kind found in this poem – a stopping and watching of the snake following what it must follow, slowly, disappearing into the landscape. This is what music is. This is what poetry is. This is a way to live. It is something that we can do every morning as we sit down with the instrument, or as we go about our lives, wordless and watchful as the snake (and the one watching the snake). Allowing the invisible to re-stitch the visible, fragmented self back together, right into this moment.

Read the entire poem here: Jorie Graham’s “I Watched A Snake”.

Until recently, I had nearly forgotten to what extent poetry has been a part of my life, through every stage of my life. When I began to think about it, I realized that in my early childhood, there were the nursery rhymes my mother read to me. Later in childhood there were the English poetry collections that I would browse during my lazy summer days (so glad I had those!) and read Wordsworth, Tennyson, both Brownings, etc.  There were the poems I memorized in school (Robert Frost and some Shakespeare sonnets come to mind) and a book of Emily Dickinson which I loved and read for many years. Then there were Whitman, Thoreau and Emerson. Later, there were Rilke, Rumi and various ancient Chinese and Japanese poets. Then Mary Oliver and Billy Collins – which brings me to where I have been residing (poetically) recently – mostly among contemporary American poets.

I’ve been absorbing poems of Denise Levertov and Christian Wiman and discovering many other poets who are too many to name here. I am rediscovering the joys of reading and re-reading slowly and deeply, finding the layers of meanings and the music in the sounds of the words. It’s not unlike getting to know a piece of music.

Recently, while flipping through one of my anthologies, I happened upon a poem by Ellen Bryant Voigt called “Song and Story.”

The opening image is that of “a girl strapped in her mechanical crib,” presumably a baby in an incubator, whose pulse deepens and steadies as her mother sings to her. Later, Voigt moves into the world of ancient Greece with Orpheus and Eurydice, who was taken to the underworld.

She did not sing — you cannot sing in hell —
but in that viscous dark she heard the song
flung like a rope into the crater of hell,

Then soon comes the line,

The one who can sing sings to the one who can’t,
who waits in the pit…

I found this line to be so moving – and so timely, in thinking of those whose lives are in turmoil right now. It occurred to me that this is precisely what we do for each other when others are sitting in darkness. We sing for each other – whether by words expertly strung together in a beautifully crafted poem, or through our music, or through our loving actions. We sing so that those who cannot sing know that there is life and hope waiting for them. However faintly they may hear the song at the moment, it exists for them.

The poem ends with these lines, a reminder that the song (and hope) is always there:

the song, rising and falling, sings in the heartbeat,
sings in the seasons, sings in the daily round —
even at night, deep in the murmuring wood —
listen — one bird, full-throated, calls to another,
little sister, frantic little sparrow under the eaves.

You can read the entire poem here.