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.”
