What is it that has the power to take you back to another time or place? Is it the aroma of a fresh apple pie baking in the oven, which transports you back to the kitchen of your grandmother – or the pungent smell of turpentine which in an instant evokes your dad’s basement workshop? Maybe it’s the sight of an old report card – or the feel of your favorite childhood blanket.
For many of us, nothing causes this sort of wondrous sense of displacement as powerfully as music. I’m sure you have experienced the power of music to transport you across the miles to other places and across the years to other times in your life: when one hears a certain special song on the radio that takes us back to our own youth – or a particular hymn which instantly hurdles us back to the funeral of a loved one. And for those of us who are musicians, it’s an even more acute experience – because a particular piece of music can also evoke very powerful memories of our own earlier performance(s) of the music in question. I may not be a fan of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, for instance, but whenever I hear that iconic “Joyful, Joyful” melodic theme from its finale, I am instantly transported to Sunday School at Good Shepherd- and to playing that melody in a very simple beginner’s arrangement (to the words “Bells are ringing, hearts are singing . . . “) while the offering was collected. If I live to be a hundred years ago, I think that famous Beethoven melody will always mean Sunday School offerings to me! And just yesterday, as I was introducing my voice student Nick Huff to a gorgeous tenor aria from Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow, I could remember the first time I heard John Brecknock sing that same aria on Dame Joan Sutherland’s recording of the operetta, which I first heard and fell in love with during college (thanks to my roommate, Marshall.) That’s more than 30 years ago, but that creamy melody sends me back with the ease of clicking a light switch.
Last night’s Tremper High School Spring Choir Concert was FULL of such moments for me – where part of me was very much in the moment but another part of me was reliving some moment in my past. For instance, the last song sung by the Treble Choir, Katherine Shaw’s arrangement of “The Rose,” had me thinking back to my cousin Sigri’s wedding, for which her older sister Sara – quite an expressive singer – sang “The Rose,” with me at the piano. I remember thinking of how badly I wanted to play that song really well, not only so my sophisticated cousin Sara would be impressed with me, but also because this was the first family wedding in which I was a participant, and it mattered …. A LOT. I cannot hear or play “The Rose” without thinking of that.
Likewise, the first song of the Concert Choir, Brian Tate’s “Gate, Gate,” brought back vivid yet an almost hard memory of doing a choral clinic up north for which this piece served as the climactic finale. My friend Leslie Langan-Gluck was the person who invited me, certain that I was up to the task despite my almost complete inexperience with such events . . . and for the most part everything went well. But this piece, with its constantly shifting meter, breakneck speed, and dense intricacy, was a supreme challenge for me. I feel like I never worked harder in my life than I did to master that piece and to conduct it with at least the vague appearance of having it under control. It ended up going well, but I sweated buckets doing it – – – and my sweat last night was not just from playing its finger-busting piano part, but also from reliving that steep challenge from a decade ago when I had to conduct this beast!
The finale of the Women’s Choir was the enchanting song “Bring Me Little Water, Sylvie” complete with body percussion. If you’ve never seen/heard this sung, you need to RUN to Youtube and look it up. It’s SO cool. Polly got the idea for singing this after seeing Peter Dennee’s Women Ensemble at Carthage perform it . . . but for me, this song will always “belong” to the first persons I saw do it – my sister Randi and her two daughters, Aidan and Anna, a number of years ago. For me, this song will always represent the sweet love of my sister and my nieces and how music itself has been one of their strongest and richest bonds.
But it was Polly’s top group, the Tremper Chorale, that served up the most numerous instances of displacement, where I was on the Tremper stage playing the piano, but a big part of me was elsewhere. Their set opened with two excerpts from one of my favorite operas, Aaron Copland’s The Tender Land … “Stomp Your Foot,” and “The Promise of Living.” I can never play or sing or conduct the latter piece (a Quintet) without remembering a night during my sophomore year of college when I brought back to my room from the college radio station an LP of highlights from The Tender Land. At that point, all I knew from the score was a tender soprano aria sung by the character Laurie about her impending graduation from high school. Hearing the aria on someone’s senior voice recital inspired me to check out the rest of the opera. I remember that Marshall was gone on orchestra tour, so I was all alone in my room – but I still had the headphones plugged into my stereo so I could crank up the volume and fully enjoy the rich voices of Claramae Turner and Norman Treigle, among others. I loved what I heard …. but then I got to that radiant quintet, and I was beside myself. I felt like I had never heard anything so gorgeous in my life. I found myself replaying it again and again and again and again . . . until at least 2:30 in the morning. At the time, it almost felt like I was having some sort of ecstatic nervous breakdown, but I simply could not stop listening to that 6-minute piece. It was as though it had control of me. And every time since that I have either listened to it or conducted it (the Carthage Choir sang it under my direction in 2000-2001- and Musici Amici with the KSO some years after that) I am back in my room in Luther’s Gjerset House, under the spell of that incredible music and its deeply moving text. It was almost scary. It was also wonderful.
A few minutes later, they were singing F. Melius Christiansen’s arrangement of “Praise to the Lord” – which is another piece I came to adore as the Carthage Choir sang it for their European tour back in January of 2000 . . . in places like the Vitas Cathedral in Prague or Notre Dame in Paris or in an almost impossibly reverberant church in Basel, Switzerland. But as memorable as those performances were, what I remember even more vividly is the performance which occurred in Siebert Chapel not that year but the next – the gala concert celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Carthage Choir with a mass choir that featured both the current choir and dozens of alumni. That concert opened with that arrangement of “Praise to the Lord” – and the sound which that group made was simply incredible, and to have all of those fine singers representing three or four generations of the choir was amazing, in and of itself. I also cherish the memory of Dr. John Windh, one of the past conductors who was back for the occasion, taking me aside and gently suggesting that I take even more time with “Let the Amen …. SOUND FROM HIS PEOPLE AGAIN!” I did- and I’m glad I did! And I remember that when the applause had finally died down after that piece, I spontaneously turned around to the audience and asked “what now?!?” or words to that effect. Because it was hard to know how you could follow something as magnificent as that. By the way, Dr. Windh always did this arrangement a capella, even though there is a keyboard part – and Polly did it the same way. So here was one instance in which at least I could get lost in my little trip down memory lane without fear of screwing something up at the piano. At that point, all I had to do was sit there and listen to those fine Chorale singers do their thing and remember all of the times when this marvelous arrangement had given me such pleasure.
After that, the Chorale sang my arrangement of Amazing Grace – and when it comes to this, I scarcely know where to begin. I was actually working pretty hard to focus on the performance at hand, so it was mostly afterwards that I was thinking of memorable performances of it with the Carthage Choir, Weston Noble Alumni Choir, the Lincoln Chamber Singers, Musici Amici, Caritas, the Holy Communion Senior Choir . . . even a performance of it in which a really fine baritone horn player from Carthage named Andrew Geocaris who liked the arrangement enough when he heard it to ask me to adapt it for him, which I happily did. And most recently, I played what amounted to a piano solo version of it for the funeral of a lovely woman named Nancy Frost (grandmother of one of my former voice students, Scott Frost.) But as I was playing it, the one past performance that flickered through my mind was the very first time the Chamber Singers sang it at Carthage …. for chapel …. and how one of the tenors, Paul Marchese, took it upon himself (since it wasn’t indicated in that morning’s bulletin) to announce to the congregation right after we were done that I was responsible for the arrangement which they had just heard us sing. It was an incredibly sweet moment – a moment of grace, you might say.
And to finish it all up …. The Wizard of Oz! I was the Tin Man back in Decorah (I think I was in about sixth grade at the time) …. and it really was in the process of doing this production that I truly fell in love with this music. But the other thing about it is that this is the first time I remember realizing how fantastic it was to be able to play piano by ear. I had always done it, almost from the start, but it was during The Wizard Of Oz that I would spend hours at the piano at home, figuring out how to play that whole score without any music in front of me …. all of the Munchkin stuff, all of the Emerald City stuff, in addition to all of the big famous tunes. So in some ways, I feel like the kind of pianist I am today – especially the play-by-ear part – is due in part to the irresistible score of E.Y. Harburg and Harold Arlen, so it felt so good to finish out this great evening with music that has meant so much to me for such a long time. And because it was the combined Chorale and Concert Choir singing, I got to play as loudly as I wanted – O Joy!
Sometimes when your life is inundated with music, it’s easy to take it – like the air we breathe – completely for granted. But one of the things one learns by the time you’ve passed the half century mark (it is to be hoped, anyway) is to not allow any of life’s most precious blessings to be viewed as anything less than that. And for me, music remains not only a present joy but also a rich conduit to so many great moments that have come before. Who knows? Maybe some of those seniors in the Chorale who were crying during “Amazing Grace” will someday (long after I’m gone) hear the sweet strains of John Newton’s hymn and will be instantly reminded of a memorable night many years before …. It was 2014, wasn’t it? …. when they, along with some of their closest friends, sang “ Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Sound. . . “
pictured above: Yours truly conducting the Carthage Choir, a long long time ago. (What a joy, by the way, to recently see Kris Caputo and Shauna Adler, who were in the Carthage Choir back in those days – along with Eric Adler – when they came to Racine to see their friends Nick Barootian and Jason Aaron in the RTG Les Miserables.)