20/40: Harmony
I went to a transcendent concert last night and delighted in works of music composed across centuries that transported me. How harmony arises out of the suffering of noise.
Scales of Joy and Sorrow, Marjan Mozetich, First Movement, interpreted by Trio Arbos
I have a confession to make.
I have been secretly addicted for decades to CBC Radio Two (FM).
It feels like certain radio personalities like Julie Nesrallah, Tom Allen, and Paolo Pietropaolo are my friends. They travel with me in my car. We have spent many long hours in my living room, laughing at classical music jokes together. They and others like them were a vital lifeline during countless challenging periods in my life.
The CBC Classical Road to the Junos event last night at L.R. Wilson Hall at McMaster University was an opportunity for me to meet all three of them and it was wonderful. They introduced us to some of the producers as well who work tireless behind the scenes to help them create the shows so many across Canada and in other countries of the world enjoy: Tempo, About Time, and In Concert. I met other fans who like me were eager to meet people to whom they listened every week but whom most of us had never met.
But something even more magical than that happened last night.
The music of Marjan Mozetich, one of the composers whose works were in the spotlight last night, is… well. This is where words feel wholly inadequate.
I linked above the first movement of Scales of Joy and Sorrow that closed off the evening last night. The second and third movements may be listened to here, interpreted by Trio Arbos.
Paolo said last night while introducing the piece that when he first heard Marjan’s music, he went into a sort of trance. Apparently it is a common experience because according to Paolo, when they play the music of this famous composer born in Italy but who grew up in Hamilton, people from all over write emails about having similar experiences.
Personally, I was absolutely lost in wonder listening to Scales of Joy and Sorrow and wanted it to go on for ever and ever.
This wasn’t the only part of the concert that was astonishing. Composer-in-residence for the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra (HPO) Abigail Richardson-Schulte has created an incredible work that somehow takes in inside her traumatic experience of being incurably deaf as a small child (though she somehow completely recovered after moving to Canada). The work is called Into the Silence, and it was commissioned by Shoshana Telner.
The audience exploded in appreciative applause and cheers at the conclusion of the event. It wasn’t simply that the music was exquisite. The performances by Shoshana Telner, who also teaches piano at McMaster, Stephen Sitarski, concertmaster of the HPO, and Rachel Mercer, soloist and chamber musician, were riveting.
If you are feeling like you have lost an opportunity to hear this concert, worry not! It will be featured on CBC radio In Concert on March 29 at around 1:30 p.m. and if you miss that, streamed via the CBC Listen app from March 29 on. I highly recommend it, and plan to listen to it again with my husband so he gets a chance to share the experience to some extent.
There is so substitute for live music and I am deeply grateful that while Covid took that away from us for a while, we can still enjoy it together.
Chamber Music
There is a particular intimacy of chamber music that cannot be rivalled. I have sung ‘power works’ with a larger choir and orchestra like Handel’s Messiah or the Brahms German Requiem, and it is an incredible high. But the performance of chamber music and listening to it, especially live, reveals a depth of connection between the artists that is palpable.
A chamber work like Scales of Joy and Sorrow is a perfect example of how the music of the three instruments blends seamlessly, and how the lines of music flow from one instrument to the other and back again. How without a director the musicians are and stay absolutely in sync with each other. Incredible.
Noise
I don’t know if you have ever been a student of an instrument or lived with someone learning one. It almost always begins with noise. Violin in particular, as I remember vividly from the year I was 8 and attempted to learn it, is painful both to the listener and the would-be violinist to hear.
Saw, saw, saw (already poor intonation and rough, by the typical hapless child), SQUEAK!
Oh dear.
Professional musicians, especially those who regularly perform in concerts and/or record, of course practise for an unthinkable number of hours daily and weekly.
Even they during practice time have to deal with unwanted dissonances, intonation issues, or other musical malfunctions.
Recovery during a performance
The most skilled musician might occasionally slip slightly in the middle of a performance. It could happen more than the casual listener thinks. It is extremely difficult to play thousands of notes at any given performance all with the exactly perfect intonation, in the appropriate dynamic, and at the correct tempo, particularly in combination with other instrumentalists all facing the same challenges.
One of the myriad aspects that distinguish professional from amateur musicians is the ability to recover and seamlessly continue in tempo, thus making it challenging even for the most careful and knowledgeable listener to be sure whether an error had really been made. Did I just hear the artist slip or was that a shade of intentional rubato?
As In Art, So In Life
Practising meditation, writing, being in relationship with others, working at what one does…
Sometimes it is a joyous, seemingly flawlessly played work of music that gives sustenance of the rarest quality to those ‘playing’ and those around.
Sometimes it’s noise. Unintentional dissonance that doesn’t skilfully resolve into healing harmony but bleeds into suffering and at times even harm.
Sometimes, often, I err and don’t recover quickly. The error sits there in front of me and those around as I struggle with shame and confusion, trying to figure out what to do next.
But every morning is a new opportunity to keep practising and to keep learning to see more clearly, to love more dearly, to follow more nearly (borrowing from the Godspell song which in turn borrowed from 13th century Richard of Chichester).
A little less noise.
A little more harmony.
Learning to recover.
I really enjoyed this. There is something so intimate about the way radio voices become part of our lives over time. They sit quietly in the background of ordinary days and before long they feel like familiar companions. I smiled at your “confession” because I suspect many of us have something similar.
Your description of being lost in the music was lovely. That moment when music carries you somewhere beyond words is such a rare and beautiful experience, and it is even more powerful when it happens live in a room full of people sharing the same sound.
But what stayed with me most was the reflection at the end. The idea that life, like music, contains both harmony and noise. The image of practice, mistakes, and learning to recover felt very true. Perhaps that is what living well really is — not playing perfectly, but learning how to continue after the dissonant notes.
“A little less noise. A little more harmony.” That line stayed with me.