"One way to look at it," he told me one day as I sawed through scales to make muscle for flying, "is that we are all lost, we were already lost the day we were born. In music, we can become tragically and beautifully lost ... and found again."
Joy Harjo
Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings
Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee Nation. She served three terms as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2019-2022 and has a host of other honors. I recently read her book of poems titled An American Sunrise, which was listed in a recommended reading article at The Atlantic. I frequently go from lists like that to the local library's online search page. A couple of clicks and the book's on hold. And, unless it's a recent book that many people want to read, it takes only a couple of days for the book to make its way from another suburban library 10 or 15 miles away to the pick-up shelf at the branch library just blocks from my home. This library service goes a long way to explaining the pile of books on the table next to my chair in the living room.
I searched and placed a hold on Harjo's Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings last week and opened it up yesterday and again this morning. Harjo's musical world is a long way from mine. Her poems use images of the all-night circle dance with its singing. Others call on the saxophone and recreate the whirl and tension of jazz improvisation.
This prose story quoted above brought me up short yesterday morning. What does that phrase mean exactly? I stopped and noticed and thought about it. Could I find myself in "tragically and beautifully"?
I've never been much for writing trails of adverbs and adjectives to describe music. This is because music does things that words can't -- so why use words? The words come out looking weak and insufficient. (Note: words also do things that music can't.) A critic can analyze forms, progressions, describe how a piece of music does what it does. A listener can describe the images a piece of music conjures in the mind — all those angels floating around singing "Holy, holy" in settings of the Sanctus, for example. A publicist will pile up the adjectives to promote a concert or musical event; these might include glorious, transcendent, hopeful — marketing words currently on display in promotional material I'm working on for an upcoming City Voices concert I'm involved in. (It's on October 18 and 19. More info here.)
But "tragically and beautifully lost" was a new idea for me. I understand being lost in the music, cares and worries abandoned in the discipline of performing or in the immersive experience of listening. I was chatting with a fellow chorister recently during a break in rehearsal; he said that the thing he enjoyed about choral singing was that you could go to rehearsal and not think about anything else for a while. I had to agree. The mental and physical work of reading, counting, and singing well leaves little room in my brain for anything other than did I get that right and what's coming up next.
That's rehearsal —mental work, uncertainty, vulnerability, eventual success. Getting lost in the bigger picture of the metaphysics of performance, of musicians and live audience traveling through musical time together -- that's something else. My most recent reference point is, as it often is here at the Perverse Lutheran, a Bach Cantata Vespers service. Last Sunday's was the first cantata in the 55th season, the first cantata in my 47th season of singing in the choir. (Yikes, this is a serious rut I'm in.)
The cantata was based on my favorite hymn to sing as a ten-year-old, "Praise to the Lord the Almighty." Back in the day it was sung in the key of G, and that short "Let the Amen" phrase went up to an E, the top space on the treble staff, the note where a child's vocal apparatus pops into head voice, on the third of a brilliant major subdominant chord. In Bach's setting, in C major, with the tune sung a fourth higher, the melody is altered and the note is the third of a minor chord based on the second degree of the scale; Bach is pushing the phrase forward into the next one and through a more complicated harmonic progression (because he's Bach). (
Here's the hymn sung more recently in F major. Cantata chorale
here.)
The
whole cantata is brilliant, with trumpets and oboes and all the things. And there was a lot of other very big music in the service, with a very big orchestra and a big Samuel Barber concerto for organ as a prelude.
The Epistle lesson that was read in the service (the one appointed for this cantata's day in the church year in Bach's time) was 2 Corinthians 3:4-11, a bit of a puzzle that used the word glory a lot. The final hymn was "When in Our Music God Is Glorified." Glory be, I walked out of the service happy and exalted, the hatred and conflicts of the outside world abandoned for a while. Soli deo gloria amidst all the negativity of these days in history.
And then yesterday, on another beautiful September morning, I found myself nodding along to "tragically and beautifully lost." Not the glorious trumpets, drums and organ of the day before. Joy Harjo writes about the pain of Indian nations decimated and made homeless by Europeans arriving in America. Jazz is rooted in the Black experience, with its own themes of pain and struggle against injustice. We are all lost, says the speaker, lost from the day we're born. But when we're lost in music that condition is transformed -- not necessarily into happiness, but into tragedy and beauty. We're not just pounding along, practicing our scales because we must. We're something else. The disciplines of music (and art, poetry, drama) help us to see it.
Soli deo gloria. ;-)
