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Last night I did the only remembrance that made sense to me, emotionally – I sang. There were two choices of community events available in the area. The first was what was being called a “rolling Requiem”, which consisted of choirs in every time zone singing the Mozart Requiem Mass at 8:46 am on 9-11, local time. But the one in which I decided to participate was a community sing of the Brahms German Requiem.
I’ve always liked the Brahms Requiem, both conceptually, and musically. Although still drawn from Biblical texts about death and rebirth, it’s not a standard mass text. The idea was that it should be a German Requiem rather than a Latin one –a piece for the people, as it were. It has lots of really wonderful musical word-painting, making it pretty easy to tell what the music is talking about, even if you aren’t paying close attention to the text. And in any case, I know the piece well enough that I thought I’d be able to sing it in a meditative fashion.
It didn’t quite meet my expectations. In my mind I had this image of people coming together, sitting down quietly, and at 8:00 sharp the conductor’s baton rising, and the people singing, the orchestra playing. In reality, it was a mob scene. We had a little bit of a disagreement at the front door; I hadn’t preregistered correctly. They didn’t want to let Bard in to listen, as they’d advertised audience space but were likely to break the occupancy laws just with singers. (He snuck into the back of the alto section just before we started.)
There was lots of rah-rah welcoming everyone, and for the Arts Council to plug membership. The people giving speeches seemed confused about whether the event was supposed to be “wonderful” or not. But it felt more about patting the local arts community on the back, and less about catharsis and grief, than I had hoped. There was twenty minutes of practicing, and a quite-competent-compared-to-a-baseball game group rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner, before we began. But most disappointing to me was that they took an intermission halfway through. The ritualist in me just felt that as really wrong.
But I got pretty involved in the singing, even if I wasn’t able to achieve the meditative state I’d wanted, and it was probably much better for me than watching the news. It sounded relatively good, it felt good, and I wasn’t nearly as weepy afterwards as I’d been before.
I’ve always liked the Brahms Requiem, both conceptually, and musically. Although still drawn from Biblical texts about death and rebirth, it’s not a standard mass text. The idea was that it should be a German Requiem rather than a Latin one –a piece for the people, as it were. It has lots of really wonderful musical word-painting, making it pretty easy to tell what the music is talking about, even if you aren’t paying close attention to the text. And in any case, I know the piece well enough that I thought I’d be able to sing it in a meditative fashion.
It didn’t quite meet my expectations. In my mind I had this image of people coming together, sitting down quietly, and at 8:00 sharp the conductor’s baton rising, and the people singing, the orchestra playing. In reality, it was a mob scene. We had a little bit of a disagreement at the front door; I hadn’t preregistered correctly. They didn’t want to let Bard in to listen, as they’d advertised audience space but were likely to break the occupancy laws just with singers. (He snuck into the back of the alto section just before we started.)
There was lots of rah-rah welcoming everyone, and for the Arts Council to plug membership. The people giving speeches seemed confused about whether the event was supposed to be “wonderful” or not. But it felt more about patting the local arts community on the back, and less about catharsis and grief, than I had hoped. There was twenty minutes of practicing, and a quite-competent-compared-to-a-baseball game group rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner, before we began. But most disappointing to me was that they took an intermission halfway through. The ritualist in me just felt that as really wrong.
But I got pretty involved in the singing, even if I wasn’t able to achieve the meditative state I’d wanted, and it was probably much better for me than watching the news. It sounded relatively good, it felt good, and I wasn’t nearly as weepy afterwards as I’d been before.
