The Long Silence

Abstract

The Long Silence Richard Dale Sjoerdsma (bio) EDITOR'S COMMENTARY One ought every day at least to hear a little song,read a good poem, see an excellent picture, and,if it were possible, speak a few reasonable words. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1 Sunday, March 15, 2020. My church choir was prepared to sing Fauré's "Cantique de Jean Racine" at morning worship service, and Mary and I enthusiastically anticipated attending the next in our Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra Sunday afternoon concert series. While challenging to the average church choir (and mine may be more average than most), "Cantique" has musical and textual depths, enhanced by an excruciatingly beautiful melody, that render it an uplifting spiritual and aesthetic experience for singer and listener. The MSO concert was to have included Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, a monument of Western music that, even after many hearings, continues to stir the soul through its inherent truth and beauty. Alas, in response to the March 11 WHO official determination that the world had been plunged into a COVID-19 pandemic, both worship service and orchestra concert were cancelled. What initially was thought to be only a minor gap in our cultural life soon became a gaping abyss. Worship took place at the altar of a computer desk or, in clement weather, in the sanctuary of one's automobile. The remainder of the MSO season was cancelled, as, unprecedentedly, was eventually the entire 2020–21 series. The long silence began. A brief but welcome interruption in the silence occurred on May 23, 2021, as a chamber ensemble version of the MSO offered a live, invitation-only concert for subscribers. A palpable joy, an almost giddy excitement, exuded from masked and separated listeners in response to an all-English concert that featured Vaughan Williams's Concerto Grosso for Strings and Holst's St. Paul's Suite Op. 29, no. 2, among others. Several weeks later, in lieu of our normal church choir, I sang at a worship service in a double quartet, to considerable applause from congregants. Finally, on October 3, 2021, we gleefully attended an inaugural MSO concert of a full 2021–22 season, a program that included Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, Duke Ellington's New World a-Comin,' and Stravinsky's Suite from The Firebird. The long silence ended. Among many lessons from the pandemic—some learned, some remaining to be learned, and, lamentably, some ignored—an important one is the deep human need for truth and beauty, in community, anecdotal evidence for which, I think, is documented above. In an address to the audience before stepping on the podium to conduct the opening concert of the current season, Chicago Symphony Orchestra Music Director Riccardo Muti reminded us [End Page 315] Click for larger view View full resolution Example 1. Franz Schubert. Impromptu, Op. 90, no. 4, mm. 46–49. that culture is not entertainment. Culture affects our souls, minds, and interrelationships, and, as the maestro insists, we need enrichment, beauty, live music. 2 Recent years have demonstrated that a lack of culture, a neglect of beauty, can damage and inevitably coarsen a society. Exploring the ample evidence for this would lead down dark paths that I choose not to traverse at this time, although it is an axiom we forget to our ultimate abasement. Although it was not my intent when I began to draft this essay, it was serendipitous that at the outset I linked worship and music, that is, spirituality and aesthetic, as the core of my commentary. English novelist and poet D. H. Lawrence said, "The human soul needs beauty even more than it needs bread." 3 A need for beauty and music carries with it a need for its inherent spiritual and aesthetic truth. Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is allYe know on earth, and all ye need to know. —John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" Art is a living thing that shows us truth. Sociologist Frank Furedi asserts that "[t]hroughout history the quest for truth constituted one of the most positive manifestations of our human qualities," citing Robert Browning, who wrote that "There is no truer truth...