Lifted voices

What impelled me to play Vaughan William's Sea Symphony Saturday night might have also arranged for me to see that the same work is going to be performed in two weeks in Cambridge. Or it may have been just part of a triple coincidence since the highlight of the weekend for me was concert of Chorus Pro Music at the Old South Church (which I'm happy to be in, music or no.)

The program included spirituals from the American South and Brazil, a setting of poem by John Milton, and two works of contemporary music in today's language: Little Prayers by Stephen Feigenbaum and The World Beloved: A Bluegrass Mass by Carol Barnett.

Massed human voices: what a resource of expression. I'd forgotten that fact. The male and female voices separately and melded, the two, three, four part harmonies, the counterpoint of soloists and chorus, the register range from loud and abrupt to quiet and whispery, the swelling and diminishing, the complicated syncopations, the onomatopoeic effects, consonant and vowel sounds stuttered and drawled out, the treble and bass lines polyphonically playing off each other, the pregnant pauses, the long, long notes, the echoings, the strange dissonances and familiar resolutions, the sheer amplitude of a hundred lungs worth of air pushed out through a hundred throats into the resonant space: these were the tools the composers and arrangers of the afternoon's concert put to use.

The effects ranged from something like the crash and spout of great waves against a cliff to the gentlest lappings of wavelets on beach pebbles; the mosaic of patchwork quilts and the texture of cable-knit sweaters; the intricate patterns of warp and woof in satin woven fabric.

I wasn't moved so much by the music, interesting to listen to as it was, as by what the human voice, trained and well-led, can do. For sheer emotional power, nothing carries me away more than the lines of Whitman set by Vaughan Williams: 'Oh, we can wait no longer, We too take ship, O Soul. Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas...' Ravishing--old-fashioned and heterodox as it may be.

My job is all about teaching old tongues new tricks, but choruses of  voices raised together on Welsh hillsides, along the Volga, in chain-gangs and prison camps, in churches and other religious buildings, in stadiums, in defiance, in sheer joy, in the abysm of grief, in gleeful frolic, spontaneously or orchestrated, all literally speak our common, ancient and essential humanity.

The poem Everyone Sang by Seigfried Sasson comes to me:

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;  
And I was filled with such delight 
As prisoned birds must find in freedom, 
Winging wildly across the white 
Orchards and dark-green fields; on—on—and out of sight.  

Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted; 
And beauty came like the setting sun: 
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror 
Drifted away ... O, but Everyone 
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

Or Primo Levi's poem of January, 1946, Singing, alluding to Sassoon's

...But when we started singing
Those good foolish songs of ours,
Then everything was again
As it always had been.

A day was just a day,
and seven make a week. 
Killing seemed an evil thing to us;
Dying--something remote.

The months pass rather quickly,
But there are still so many left!
Once more we were just young men:
Not martyrs, not infamous, not saints.

This and other things came to our minds
While we kept singing.
But they were cloudy things, 
Hard to explain.

How had I forgotten this wonder? Will I now remember? More interesting, what if I were to participate in some way, singing regularly as I used to do?  "Sail forth, steer for the deep waters only, Reckless O Soul, exploring, I with thee and thou with me, For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go, And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.' Yes!