Father

My father would have turned 78 yesterday. That means he passed away a little over eight years ago. It's very hard to believe it's been that long.



Last night at choir practice we were rehearsing the old American tune "Hark! I Hear the Harps Eternal." Kathy said we are to sing it on All Saints Day.

Part of the text of "Hark! I Hear..." is:
"Souls have crossed before me saintly
to the land of perfect rest
and I hear them singing faintly
in the mansions of the blest."

That first line made me think of my father. Over the years, my mother highlighted his integrity in conversations with me by commenting on aspects of his personality:
"He doesn't have an ulterior bone in his body."
"One thing your father can't stand for is people being mistreated."



My father loved music, especially the music of the church. The song "It Is No Secret" by Stuart Hamblin played a crucial role in his call to ministry. One of his favorite hymns was "When Morning Guilds the Skies." He chose that as a congregational hymn for many of the worship services he planned.

He grew up in the heyday of the big bands. He really knew the history and output of Benny Goodman and Harry James. He also loved the crooners like Dick Haymes. He even wrote and recorded a ballad on a couple of occasions. It's called "The Moonlight and You" and it sounds a little Glenn Miller-esque. I have the 45s.



In terms of classical music, certain works that I played really captured his imagination:

Debussy . . .la cathedral engloutie

Paganini-Liszt E Major Etude

Ginastera Sonata, First Movement

Liszt Dante Sonata


He liked the image of me as a happy young musician playing the opening theme of Kabalevsky's Youth Concerto.

Debussy First Arabesque was a bit of theme for us - a little bit nostalgic - as it was theme music for a short segement about astronomy that appeared on Saturday TV. After I went away to college, he would sometimes hear it and think of how he and I had often looked at the stars together when I was still living at home.

He also identified deeply and personally with the beginning of Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto. In those opening bars he heard the struggle of a hero and his family facing the stormy opposition of the world and fate.



The second movement of Beethoven Sonata Op. 111 conjures up in my mind my father on his hospital bed in our living room during his last summer. During his mostly unconscious last days it was as though his soul was lingering in the room - not necessarily in his body - maybe up near the ceiling. It is that sensibilty that I hear in the Beethoven: sad, beautiful, questioning, floating, and all about the essence of human identity and existence.



Dad and I were good friends.
Maybe I'll learn Op. 111 for him one of these years.

Vision

Night before last was my first performance at Chowan. My friend Jeff Prillaman (tenor) joined me for this recital. It went well, and we had a great audience. Also, we continued to experiment on stage with out interpretations and came up with a few new ideas through that spontaneity.

My main post-recital reflection relates to planning.

One of my father's favorite Bible verses was Proverbs 29:18, "Where there is no vision, the people perish." It actually continues, "but he that keepeth the law, happy is he." But most often, we hear the first half quoted alone. When you read the entire proverb, it seems that the vision needed comes from God's law.

The name of the newsletter of my father's home church in Durham was "The Vision." When he had the opportunity later in life to name his own church's paper, he named it "The Vision," too.

So I've always had those words in my mind.

For a while, I paraphrased the verse as my own musical slogan "Where there is no plan, the music perishes." That was during the period after I realized that a totally spontaneous and emotional approach to interpretation is extremely problematic. I saw that I needed a vision - a plan - for performing.

I now believe the music doesn't need the interpretative plan to survive, except in extreme cases. The plan is more for me.

Having a specific plan for each passage of each work in a performance provides the performer many valuable things. First of all, you are provided with a narrow and clear path through the performance, and that protects you from many of the distractions - internal and external - that might compromise the focus and meaning of the performance. Second, you are provided a clear way to gauge your success when evaluating the performance afterwards.

Thinking on this issue of planning has brought me to a new thought about the nature of spontaneity. I wonder what the difference is between a spontaneous interpretive decision and a planned decision in terms of the listener's experience. When a critic praises spontaneity, on what grounds does he or she make the judgement that what the experience was a spontaneous happening? Sometimes my spontaneous playing has sounded planned to other musicians.

All of this leads me to yet another question, and it is a question about that seemingly illusive characteristic of performers - charisma. I think our culture tends to think of charisma as something the individual performer possesses. As I write, that strikes me as an odd stance in a mostly relativistic culture. Certain performers demonstrate tremendous charisma, but it is completely lost on some listeners. What are we to make of that?

As I understand them, sounds have absolute qualities related to physics. However, those qualities are perceived differently depending upon the makeup and functioning of one's ears. While I think I hear sounds the way they really are, a whale or a dog may hear very different aspects of those same sounds. The differences in perception exist not only between species, but also within the human race. Ears of different ages hear different aspects of sounds, too. These facts pinpoint the reality that the experience of music at the basic level of experiencing sound may vary widely from person to person, in spite of the absolute nature of the qualities of the work experienced. And these differences have nothing to do with personal preference or culture. They are rooted in absolute physical qualities of the hearing mechanism.

The preceding paragraph relates to my question about charisma in that it touches on the fact that perceptions of the same musical event vary widely from person to person, and that fact is built into the nature of things.

I sometimes pray that my music might be coordinated within God's will to touch specific listeners in the contexts of their lives - that musical experiences might work together with other life events to bring about good in lives of listeners. A listener may need to be musically inspired in a particular way at one point in his or her life but not at another. This need for inspiration has nothing to do with me, and the fulfillment of that need also transcends the score or my efforts.

Thus, I wonder if charisma is not a quality possessed by a performer, but a gift of experience that comes to listeners when they need it. Perhaps that was the way the people who invented the word understood the gift they were experiencing, and therefore created a word that means a grace, favor, a divine gift.