Singing Along the Journey

When I was waiting in line to make my train reservation the other day, I couldn't help but stair at the markings on the floor of the ticket lounge -- on the floor, between each line and the counter, was a big white line with these words printed in red:  "LINEA DE ESPERA".  With four years of Latin in college and recently 3 years devoted to the study of Italian, well, I couldn't help but see the amusement in the fact that the Spanish verb for "waiting" had the same root as the noun for hope, "esperanza".  And I couldn't help but think about the amount of time we all spend in our lives, standing in the "Line of Hope", while we wait for one thing or another to come true for us, and on our better days, for our world.

And so I rise again today, in a strange city, working with teachers and singers that I do not know, and I take my place on the Linea de Espera as I work to learn a new language and a new way of communicating through music.  May your day on the Line of Hope go well for you too...

My first morning in Seville, I chose to visit churches.

Is anyone who knows me surprised about that?  I think not.

So, today I started at the Cathedral of Seville.  In case you don’t know, this Cathedral is the 3^rd largest in the world (on St. Peter’s in Rome and St. Paul’s in London are larger), and the largest in Spain and was built on the site of a mosque destroyed during the Reconquista recovery of Seville by the Christian kings.  The famous tower, the Giralda, is the only part of the original mosque that was retained – kept as a souvenir of conquest.

Now, I have been in a lot of cathedrals and churches around the world (again, surprise…NOT) but this one was a completely different experience.   Frankly, I have never seen so much gilt and silver in any church, not even in Rome.  It was completely overwhelming – beautiful, but I have never seen a more over-the-top expression of the Baroque/Rococo period ever.  Not anywhere.

So I wandered and I wondered, and then I stopped in the middle of the space (I hesitate to call it a sanctuary, the proportions are so large)…and, as you so often see in a cathedral such as this, there was a huge tower of scaffolding.  Restoration in progress.  And on the famous carved choir of the Seville Cathedral, with its carved wooden seats made in the 15^th and 16^th centuries. 

I was completely entranced, because, as I peeked through the scaffolding, I saw twenty industrious souls cleaning and scrubbing every inch of wood carving. All I could think about was two weeks ago at Calvary, when people volunteered their Saturday to come and clean the woodwork in preparation for the American Guild of Organists event.  Now, I’m pretty certain that the people I saw this morning were not volunteers – they were most likely restoration specialists or at the very least, students the restoration sciences, but I couldn’t escape the parallel. 

I stood and watched the work as it continued, and then I moved on to see the rest of the Cathedral – the 30 chapels, the garden of orange trees, the tomb of Christopher Columbus…but I just couldn’t shake this image of all of these people working together to restore the choir.  We work so hard to maintain these buildings that we call our church and clearly the city of Seville devotes considerable time, money and effort to maintain this magnificent cathedral, and the Iglesia El Divino Salvador that I saw later in the morning.  And yet, in both of those buildings, I was surrounded with art and sculpture and an ostentatious show of wealth that had nothing to do with the spiritual, that in fact, was created by the hard work and probably the deaths of many indigenous peoples on the North American continent.

It was an unsettling reminder that, as we move on our journey of faith, we must continually question ourselves regarding our motives and our intent.  It is a particularly thorny question for those of us in the arts. I’m sure that some of the original builders and artists and artisans that were responsible for what I saw today genuinely believed that they were using their gifts for the glory of God.   For some, it was just a job -- another commission. 

Just something to ponder when it is 102 degrees outside, which it is here.

I thought that I would take advantage of the fact that I am awake and that this hotel has a great internet connection.  And so I sit on my balcony in Madrid and say, welcome to Day 30 and the end of my committment to contribute to the ever growing stream of bits and bites on the internet with my daily blog entry.  And I want to take a moment to thank Pastor Amy for the idea and for being a good and gentle guide to start me on a road that, well, I wouldn't have taken (like she has never done that before).

The only problem is, I don't think I'll quit.  I think that I will keep going.  My basic impulse is to commit to another 30 days, and then maybe another 30 days, and another.  After I pondered that idea for a few moments, I thought that I would like to see just how I continue if I don't have a committment and peer pressure to keep me going.

I think I'll keep going, without a boundary or an endpoint.  That's life, isn't it, anyway?  If I falter along the way, I know that I have good friends and community to pick me up and keep me going.

Today, after a short walk around part of Madrid that I haven't seen, I'm off to the train station and on to Seville.  For years, I've sung the aria from Carmen:  "Pres des Ramparts de Seville"...and I'm going to go see those ramparts.  And a few other things.

And last night, I had the opportunity to remember that I am not totally invisible.  It has been a long time since three different men have tried to pick me up.  Apparently Spain was not a good country to visit without me "leave me alone, I'm taken" ring to wear.

So, for the next few weeks, you may hear more about Spain and my travel adventures than you will the deep evaluation of the relationship between music and theology (although one never knows what travel will bring to me--I have a lot of time to think without too much disturbance).  And, I promise to keep writing.  Until I don't.

Okay, today is a strange day.  It is not a strange day because I am leaving on a trip, I do that often enough.  It is not strange because the bed is currently full of clothing that will probably never all fit into the suitcase.  That is way too normal.

It is strange first because, well, I am weirdly calm.  I was pretty wound up the past few days and I thought that it was because I was nervous about the trip.  But, once I finished my paper yesterday, this unusual sense of calm settled upon me. 

The second, and truly most monumental reason that today is strange is -- I was just ironing.

Okay, my iron isn't THAT old...

Oh, laugh if you will, but my hands have not touched an iron since I gave up seamstressing.  Yes, seamstressing.  Ever since that day when I gave away the sewing machine that I had been given as a highschool graduation present, no ironing has taken place by these hands.  I had to dig in the closet to find the iron and the miniature iron board (which I kept just in case, when I gave away all my other seamstressing paraphanalia).  To date, if something needed ironing, it went straight to the cleaners.  After all, they have the professional equipment, right?  Who am I to interfere with the practice of a craft...

But this morning I rose early to pack, took my newly acquired bottle of spray starch and carefully sprayed and rolled each skirt as my mother taught me so many years ago, and then, just a few minutes ago, I carefully (okay, not carefully, quickly) pressed each skirt so that the wrinkles would be minimal when I arrive at my destination.

I hardly know what to say....am I calm because I'm ironing, or did I take time to iron because I am finally calm? 

I know that many new adventures await. I simply can't wait to tell you about them...

As promised, today we talk about the perspective from the view of the performer and of the audience...

The performer’s job is to combine the work of the librettist and the composer, add to it their own humanity, and bring that work and the character they are assigned to life on the stage. The performer’s perspective is something that I can speak to from my own personal experience.  But it is a difficult thing to describe to someone who is not a performer. 

As a performer, we pick up the score of an opera and we begin to study.  And that study requires all of our very being:  you need your intellect to deal with the mechanics of the music, the mechanics of what is most likely a foreign language (which hopefully you speak at least a little).  Your body must engage to actually learn the music, to memorize the text, and eventually (if you are lucky enough to be performing a fully staged version of the work) to learn blocking and physical gestures needed to bring the work to life on the stage.  And in the midst of all that, you must be able to access your soul and your spirit, so that you can find the humanity in the characters you portray – so that you can empathize, and feel—all the while counting to 12 before you walk stage right and pick up the hat. In short, as a performer, you are in a completely prepared state to receive the message of the text and be influenced by it, as you are completely open to the work during the preparation time.

There is a word used in opera circles to describe a great performance, a performance that supersedes the physical limitations of all the parts of the opera production, a performance that is that creates the kind of magic which communicates that which cannot be communicated through words and music:  that word is “demented”.  A demented performance is a transcendent performance, and changes the listener and the performer by their very participation in the moment.  Now that is the ability to create social change.

And what about the audience?  You might think that the audience perspective is a passive one, but it is not.  First, without an audience, even if it is only one person, there is no performance and therefore there is no communication and no sharing.  Saliers points out that Christianity is a faith that must be heard, that the experience of God is

…in sound and image—voices, instruments, the dance.  Early on in Hebrew Scripture God calls:  “Hear, O Israel…” (Deut. 6:4)…In the Christian Testament:  “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God (Romans 10:17).  And the Psalms constantly evoke singing: “Sing to the Lord a new song” (Psalms 96 and 98).  Luke can barely make it through two chapters of his gospel without breaking into song four times:  the great canticles of Mary, of Zechariah, and of old Simeon commingle with the angels’ spontaneous Gloria in excelsis….From the beginning the gospel takes on human form and is proclaimed and celebrated in the human idioms of ordered sound (Music and Theology, pg. 11).

Listening, listening when fully engaged is in its own way just like performing:  it focuses the listener physically by stimulating the senses; the rhythm and the pulse affect the listener’s nervous system. Again, Saliers:  “Ordered sound from ‘outside’ our bodies resonates and evokes the music ‘inside’ our bodies.  The inner music is constituted by the very make-up of the human body:  heartbeat, breathing, walking… (Music and Theology, pg. 13). “ 

Listening is as much a practice of music as is making music.  And it is only the listener who has the change to observe the work of opera as an whole…seeing the work of the visual design, listening to the story told by the librettist and the composer, sharing the story as embodied by the performers.

Sorry, gentle readers, I am somewhat obsessed with finishing my paper for my class today, so we are back to the topic of music and perspective.  I really can think of little else.  Today, I'll write about the librettist and the composer's perspective.  In tomorrow's entry, I'll write about the performer's and the audience's perspective.

Music is never a solitary act – except perhaps during practice times. Even in the recording studio, there are the other musicians, the engineers, and the hoped for audience – the listeners.  And each of these participants approaches the musical act from a different perspective. 

Perspective is something that is often discussed in the visual arts – the development of technical perspective during the renaissance, the deconstructed perspective of the Fauvists and the Cubists; but it is a seldom considered term in the musical world.  But, I think, an equally important one.

The importance of opera comes from the spontaneous combustion that comes when all of these varied perspectives meet in a single moment, in the theatre.

Opera as an art form, provides just such an intersection of perspective.  It combines the perspective of the librettist (the person who writes the text), the composer (the person who writes the music), the designer (the person who creates the look of the event), the performers (who must bring all of this to life)-- and, the very, very important perspective of the audience.

Opera usually begins first as the libretto.  Before the libretto may be a book, or in modern times, a play, a movie, even a newspaper article.  So today includes works such as Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking[1], from the book and the movie by the same name or John Adam’s The Death of Klinghoffer[2] and Nixon in China[3], even the recent Doctor Atomic[4].  And, if you believe that words are more powerful than music because they reach the intellect, then you will think that the librettist’s perspective may be the most important.  But I say that, like the blind men and the elephant, even the librettist only has a piece of the picture.

The librettist's job is to conceive the story and set the words down on paper.  And this job has changed over the centuries.  In the days of the famous librettist Metastasio, the librettist simply wrote was a long dramatic poem and then sold it to an opera house.  The opera house would then assign or offer the libretto to a composer in their employ, who would produce the music to libretto’s words, amending and cutting as necessary along the way. Librettos might be set more than once, by different composers, and in different times. 

By Verdi’s time, however, the process was changing.  Yes, if you were an unknown composer, you might still receive your libretto from the opera house and work much as in Metastasio’s day; but as Verdi’s fame grew, he often chose the original work for the libretto, and chose and worked directly with his librettist.  Today, a libretto may come from the composer, and in any case, the work of word crafting goes hand in hand with the work of musical composition.

To summarize, though, no matter what the process for the development of the work , the librettist’s perspective is that of storyteller.  And, without the words, there is no opera.

The composer’s job is to create music that adds a layer to the story-telling.  Particular since the time of Richard Wagner, the music is almost another character in the opera.  The music applied to the text of the librettist can move the action forward or pause it; the music can support the meaning of the words or conflict with it; the music can create comfort or tension.  So the composer can tell the same story as the librettist, or a different one. 

So the composer’s perspective is an important one.  The composer chooses the style of the music and the form of the opera, more so than does the librettist.  Some of that choice is dictated by the accepted musical and theatrical trends and styles of the day:  Mozart would not have created a through-composed[1] narrative opera, because, well, it was not conceived of stylistically until the late work of Giuseppe Verdi and the Ring Cycle of Richard Wagner: for Mozart, the style of recitative[2] and aria was, well, the only form that was possible.

The contemporary composer has this full palette of expression available, plus anything new that they can create.  And so, for the contemporary composer, the choice of form and musical style is often a reflection of their perspective on the text and the message of the theatre piece:  should the work be a through-composed narrative, should the style be tonal or atonal, or a mix, is there a reason to mix-in other musical elements and styles such as jazz or world music.  All of these are decisions that reflect the composer’s perspective on the text and the event or story portrayed in the opera. 

[1] A through-composed opera resembles more the dialog flow of a play; it does not separate itself into arias, trios, quartets, etc. as does the earlier forms of the Baroque and Classical periods.

[2] Recitative is dialogue set to music.  In Baroque and Classical opera, the recitative generally moves the action of the theatre piece forward, while arias and ensembles are expository moments on the emotions and feelings of the characters performing them.