Still.
It’s so still.
Sunday morning. The sky is overcast, a solid grey. Nothing is moving. There’s a soft, formless, quality to this moment.I sit and sip my tea, gazing out at the garden. No flitting birds, no scampering squirrel. It seems everyone’s sleeping in, even the wind. Nothing is quite awake yet or sure of what to do, where to go, how to be. Gentleness is required. No reason to hurry.
I see a leaf begin to quiver on the bamboo by the fence. And then, I can see some of the branches on the oaks across the street begin to gently sway. I hear a dog bark, a bird chirp. Everything is beginning to remember what it’s supposed to do.
I know I’ve said it many times after concerts, but last night was truly extraordinary. What happens in a concert is NOT ordinary. What goes on behind the scenes in the months before a concert is still not all that ordinary, but for musicians it’s the nuts and bolts. For me it has been 5 hours a week over the last three months, mastering the taxing, unmetered rhythms of Rachmaninoff’s “Vespers”, and learning to pronounce the mouthful of unfamiliar guttural vowels and consonants that’s known as Slavonic. Unfamiliar, unsetting, hard to grasp the form.
Choir rehearsals can sometimes be so unsatisfying because you never get to sing the thing all the way through. Phrases must corrected and repeated and honed. Before every performance, a choir is uncertain whether all their individual and collective work will coalesce, and do justice to the work, conveying what the composer imagined. If the fates allow, what follows is a co-creation, taking place in a space that transcends the material plane. What’s required is the composer’s vision; the conductor’s imagination, intention, power and respect; the choir’s skill, trust, flexibility; the audience’s willing attention; the space to bring the sound alive; and the time. So many aspects must come together. Will they?
Peter, our conductor, stood in front of us as we faced the audience. He gathered himself, and us, energetically. This pregnant moment was palpable. And then, in no hurry, a low, deep sound rose out of the bass section. Our young (almost 7 foot tall!) soloist began the sung prayer in full voice, deeper and lower than I knew anyone could make a noise. It was shockingly beautiful, and it rumbled the floorboards. Seconds later, or maybe minutes, the choir followed, riding the energetic wave for the next hour.
Now, what had seemed so incomprehensible became scrutable, not through study but through the singing of it. Peter transformed from conductor to artist, and we truly became his living sculpture, as he shaped us continually for the next hour, submitting to his sometimes gentle and sometimes forceful touch. The rhythm and sound and text became real through us. And then there was silence, and then I softly cried.
And the day is still beginning.
SEE with a WHY 