The Food of Love
A poet hums (and grumbles) about music
I spent years, in my youth, as an earnest and grievously self-conscious piano student. I spent more years, youth into adulthood, as a no-frills, competent, help-the-singers-along guitarist. For all those years and more, I’ve been a decent utility alto in one chorus and choir after another.
All to say: music didn’t swallow me whole the way that story and language have done, but it’s been part of my life forever. And every now and then, writing a poem about music, I discover that I have opinions about it.
SOPRANOS AND VIOLINS In a crowd – a choir, I mean, an orchestra – then, fine. They have their part to play; the melody, in fact, plays nearly always in their collective voice. And when the notes fly up and up, above the staff into the aether, their single voices lift each other, round and soar together into the rise, into their sweet arriving. Trouble starts when one stands forward from the chorus, goes questing solo up those heights. Alone, unfriended in the score, how easy and how sad to let the throat or fingers seize, let practiced craft (breathe this way now, the bow lifts here) step in and, straining, step all over. Sad, and sadly frequent. Oh, but then the moment when that one voice, one string finds its truest flight to that one phrase and floats it in the air like the soft scent of all green living things, then lets it fly away, and our hearts fly after! How many hundred valiant scrapes and strains for one cadenza of aethereal joy?
TWO-PART INVENTION #14, IN B FLAT MAJOR By Johann Sebastian Bach Allegretto, piacevole! No need to gallop through, no need for it to sound as if Bach swallowed helium, or was scoring the Keystone Kops. Allegretto – yes, it’s lively but needn’t rush, though clusters of sixteenths keep tempting you up-tempo. Piacevole – delight is at its heart, a cheerful calm, the way you feel in conversation with a friend about something you love, her stories and your own ranged side by side, first one talks fast and then the other, trading pauses, trading slow beats, now and then a crescendo in harmony, beat-for-beat, then each again her own story, her own song, then both songs sung together.
[You can listen to an audio version of the poems using the little widget above the photograph. And you can listen to Glenn Gould’s exquisite performance of the Two-Part Invention #14 here. So sorry I’m not tech-savvy enough to embed the clip, but please click on the link; you’ll be happy that you did.]
These days, when I’m hungry for the food of love, I usually switch on the local classical-music radio station. Listening regularly has taught me a lot, and clarified a number of my opinions: about how much classical repertory showcases strings, and how delighted I am when a flute or oboe or French horn is invited to take the lead; about how much I prefer chorales to arias; about my endless gratitude to J.S. Bach for the music that really feeds my soul, and my profound agreement with Dorothy L. Sayers when she has Lord Peter say, “Anybody can have the harmony, if they will leave us the counterpoint.”
What’s the equivalent of counterpoint in poetry? Have you read a poem where two ideas or images or feelings play together through the lines, each remaining true to itself while they talk with each other? If you have, please point me to it; I’d love to learn how that’s done.
That was so enjoyable, Elizabeth. I started singing as a boy soprano and sang most of my life so I particularly enjoyed this. "Give me excess of it"
"Oh, but then the moment
when that one voice, one string finds its truest flight
to that one phrase and floats it in the air
like the soft scent of all green living things,
then lets it fly away, and our hearts fly after!"
What an apt description -- just gorgeous!