captain, oh my captain!

I’ve been thinking, over the past several days, about the purpose of the arts.  Sure, they stimulate the economy to a greater extent than almost any other entertainment form in proportion to dollars spent.  But, there is much, much more to it than that.

I’ve been working on Kryzstof Penderecki’s Cadenza for solo viola over the last couple weeks, and it’s such a tragic piece of music.  It’s based upon the motivic cell of a descending minor second (two adjacent keys on the piano keyboard), a soft sigh, not of pleasure, but of almost unutterable pain.  I think of what Penderecki lived through in Communist Poland, of Shostakovich and Stalin, of those young students putting their lives on the line in Tehran.  I think of the relatives of Air France flight 447, who may never be able to bring the remains of their loved ones home.  It makes me profoundly sad.  But working on something like the Cadenza helps me.  I know that in my sadness, however far in magnitude it lies from those who are enduring unimaginable pain, I am not alone, and that there are artists sensing the mood of their times and expressing it through their music.  And other artists are recreating their utterances and making them whole again.  And audiences are going to the concert hall and experiencing the collective catharsis that makes mankind ultimately still redeemable.

Then, I turn to the Clarinet Trio of Johannes Brahms.  What sublime, autumnal, easy, profound music this is.  There is melancholy in it, of course, Brahms’ great love was unrequited, and his life was often a lonely one.  But his music is so deep.  I want to fall into it and be lost in his beautiful, long melodic lines on the one hand, and in his sometimes frustrating harmonic figuration posing as melody that still manage to express so much despite their abstract nature.  In late Brahms, I see a man who is looking back and the entirety of his life, taking stock, and saying that in the end, everything is ok.  Beauty conquers all.

If we let it.