My Invisible Objects

Yesterday I drove an hour to a house on Frenchman's Bay. Rae's house has a beautiful view, her baby grand Steinway is honored with it's own room. The small jazz group chooses not to have a drummer, which is disconcerting to me, but musically kind of interesting(certainly a challenge when playing Latin tunes). The players are piano, acoustic bass, vocal, trombone and I play flute and alto. In order to partake in this musical buffet, I first drove my husband to Old Town, then took my kids to a friend's house, then made the hour and fifteen minute drive out to Lamoine. As I was driving I was thinking, "am I crazy? All the time and money my "hobby" has cost over the years." As the mother of two small children and the wife of a seriously ill husband, I have been completely overwhelmed by the everyday tasks of life for the last couple of years. Music seems to fall way down my "to do" list.

I was reading about the view the Greeks had of music in an address given by Karl Paulnack, a director at Boston Conservatory:. "...music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

(Given)life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture-why would anyone bother with music? And yet-from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn't just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, "I am alive, and my life has meaning."

Mr. Paulnack talked about a gig at a nursing home with a violinist. They began as they often did, with Aaron Copland's Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland's, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. "Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man... was clearly a soldier-even in his 70's, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military...

(They then discussed) both the first and second pieces, and described the circumstances in which the Copland piece was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium...he (later came) backstage, tears and all, to explain himself."

He told them: "During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team's planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute chords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn't understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?" Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects.

The Judeo-Christian scriptures offer examples of God using music to help find the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and help us figure out the position of things inside us. David was the chief musician for King Saul's court. According to I Samuel 16: 23, “it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took a harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him.” Saul was ‘refreshed’ by the beautiful melodies flowing from the harp’s strings. Psalm 147: 3 and 7 read, “He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds…. Sing unto the Lord with thanksgiving; sing praise upon the harp unto our God.”

So Maslow's hierarchy might not be quite accurate. I think I'll go play some blues.