Toward the Unknown Region

Toward the Unknown Region

It seems strange that as spring approaches we sing of death… that even as we move towards the resurrection we must first embrace the crucifixion.

As the Lenten season came to a close the final week began with the passing of our mother and grandmother. Interestingly, as I watched throughout the week tears appeared to be lost in hope and ultimately the passage through to the unknown was envisioned in the soloists rendering of the piece my mother-in-law had chosen to accompany her on her way.

“Morning Has Broken” 

Morning has broken, like the first morning


Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird


Praise for the singing, praise for the morning


Praise for the springing fresh from the world

Sweet the rain's new fall sunlit from heaven


Like the first dewfall, on the first grass


Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden


Sprung in completeness where his feet pass

Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning


Born of the one light, Eden saw play


Praise with elation, praise every morning


God's recreation of the new day.

The week also found me reading a fascinating book by Stacy Horn, Imperfect Harmony, Finding Happiness Singing with Others, and more specifically her chapter on singing of death, a theme common in their spring repertoire.   Here she writes about Ralph Vaughan Williams’s, “Toward the Unknown Region”, the text of which comes from Walt Whitman’s, “Darest Thou Now O Soul.” You can access this piece on YouTube and I especially like that you can access it with the notes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_kxBjDud8I

Darest Thou Now O Soul
by Walt Whitman
(1819-1892)

Darest thou now O soul,

Walk out with me toward the unknown region,

Where neither ground is for the feet nor any path to follow?

No map there, nor guide,

Nor voice sounding, nor touch of human hand,

Nor face with blooming flesh, nor lips, nor eyes, are in that land.

I know it not O soul,

Nor dost thou, all is a blank before us,

All waits undream'd of in that region, that inaccessible land.

Till when the ties loosen,

All but the ties eternal, Time and Space,

Nor darkness, gravitation, sense, nor any bounds bounding us.

Then we burst forth, we float,

In Time and Space O soul, prepared for them,

Equal, equipt at last, (O joy! O fruit of all!) them to fulfil O soul.

Horn writes, “…His [Vaughn Williams's] grief in the face of death is reawakened, but so is the path he created to get past pain, fear, and sorrow…When we arrive at the part in the piece about a place or state where we can no longer look into the eyes of those we love, or hold their hands, where we won’t ever be able to laugh or cry or sing again – what could have been a bleak or terrifying section – Vaughan Williams gave us this direction: "misterioso". He wanted neither fear nor sorrow, but beauty and mystery. That great big question of death, “All is a blank,” is incredibly moving in Vaughan Williams’s hands.  There are no answers here, only questions held out with an open heart. When I sing about that moment, the moment of death, I can hardly wait to die, which is insane.  But the music just keeps growing and swelling in emotion and I get swept up. “all waits undreamed of,” we sing, all the voice parts coming together, then apart, then entwined again, each enticing step of the vocal dance drawing us deeper into the beautiful mystery where anything is possible.  It’s not about dying or the afterlife.  It’s about living for a few seconds in a very open way, without fear, and being a part of something magnificent.”

And further, she writes, “Vaughan Williams once said to a group of school children, 'Music will enable you to see past facts to the very essence of things in a way which science cannot do.  The arts are the means by which we can look through the magic casements and see what lies beyond.'  That’s what those monks were after when they chanted death, death, death, death, death. They weren’t being morbid. They weren’t ignoring the beauty all around them.  They were trying to understand something they couldn’t fathom in any other way. “Toward the Unknown Region” is Ralph Vaughan Williams’s death chant, his answer to the eternal silence.”

Horn closes the chapter with a quote from Durufle’s Requiem, sung in honor of a fellow choral society member who recently died.

"May Angels lead you into paradise;

may the Martyrs receive you at your coming

and lead you to the holy city of Jerusalem.

May the choir of Angels receive you,

and with Lazarus, who once was poor, may you have eternal rest.”

And so, on a dreary, grey, rain-sogged spring day, when it is so easy for our thoughts to grow morbid, I think there are ways in which we can move forward, through the grey, through the unknown.  And I leave these thoughts with Morten Lauridsen’s incredibly lovely “O Magnum Mysterium.”  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn5ken3RJBo 

While the text comes from prayers of Christmas, Lauridsen chose to reflect Mary’s experience from the birth of Christ to his death on the cross – Mary’s “significance and suffering” and of this he says, [and you will want to read this because you will notice this note as you listen to the music],

"The most challenging part of this piece for me was the second line of text having to do with the Virgin Mary. She above all was chosen to bear the Christ child and then she endured the horror and sorrow of his death on the cross. How can her significance and suffering be portrayed musically?

After exploring several paths, I decided to depict this by a single note. On the word “Virgo,” the altos sing a dissonant appoggiatura G-sharp. It’s the only tone in the entire work that is foreign to the main key of D. That note stands out against a consonant backdrop as if a sonic light has suddenly been focused upon it, edifying its meaning. It is the most important note in the piece."

May you, in your listening, be taken once again to a place beyond words, to a very sacred place “when you experience something that is so profound that there is no way you can begin to express it through words, or really by any other means.”