[This post comes to us from guest writer Stephen Lamb.]
At the premier last Friday of Michael Hersch’s “Images from a Closed Ward,” performed by Nashville’s Blair String Quartet, the program notes included some thoughts from Michael Mazur, the artist whose etchings bearing the same name had inspired the new work. “These compositions are filled sometimes with frightening sounds,” Mazur wrote for the liner notes of the first recordings of Hersch’s work, words that applied equally to the quartet being performed that evening. “They are unrelenting, nearly without hope… But no artwork can be without hope since it is in the very nature of creative work to be optimistic, if only in as much as we continue to work through everything but our own death.”
In the midst of the chaotic dissonance that fills up much of the work, sounds truthfully reflecting Mazur’s images in the only way possible, harsh and unforgiving, we see a whisper of a flame of light, a candle poking through the dark. In two of the movements, we are given the gift of a slow, simple melody, played by a solo violin. The cello sneaks in underneath the melody after the first statement, adding soft pizzicato whole notes, while the second violin and viola join the first violin with supporting harmony. These two short movements are beautiful, at least in part, because of their unexpectedness.
Throughout the piece, fourteen movements in all, one is never given cause to question Hersh’s mastery of the form and instrumentation he chose for this work, the string quartet, with his knowledge of orchestration displayed in passages like a pizzicato pattern in one movement from the cello offering a sharp, brittle contrast with the col legno the violins and viols were playing, a surprising and effective color. I walked out of the concert hall at the conclusion of the piece with the realization that it was exactly what I had needed that evening, to see those moments of beauty in the midst of chaos, a needed reminder after a week that had been difficult in many ways.
Returning to Michael Mazur’s words and his defense of Hersch’s music, his claim that “no artwork can be without hope since it is in the very nature of creative work to be optimistic, if only in as much as we continue to work through everything but our own death.” I found that his comments proved helpful in considering my reaction to Lars von Trier’s new film, Melancholia, starring Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Kiefer Sutherland, a story that displays the mood, the condition described by the title with more accuracy and compassion than I’ve seen before on the big screen. I was drawn, by what amounted to a religious compulsion, to return to the theater again and again to watch Melancholia. Maybe I only wanted to see the first and last ten minutes again on a big screen, to experience again the ending in the immersive setting of a theater, where Wagner’s prelude to Tristan und Isolde is mixed with the sounds of rocks being rubbed together and wood being ripped apart, the sound effects digitally slowed down until they become unrecognizable, until the only thing we’re sure of is that we are hearing the end of the world.
In the beautiful terror of the last seconds of Melancholia, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the ending of Gustav Mahler’s 6th Symphony, his “Tragic” symphony. Throughout the eighty-minute work, and especially in the last movement, we hear, over and over, a two-bar pattern, a major triad followed by a minor triad, often in A, with that middle tone descending from C sharp to C natural. Hope, and then despair. Light, followed by dark. Sometimes the whole orchestra, tutti, plays it, sometimes it is buried somewhere in the brass or strings, undergirding the melody. Major, minor. Major, minor.
And then we come to the ending. As a melody we’ve become familiar with, a melody that starts with an octave jump from one A to another, dies away, played, finally, by the bass clarinet, bassoons, cellos, and double basses, we’re suddenly startled upright. The full orchestra, now, is playing fortissimo, nearly as loud as they can, the Timpani beating out a death cadence underneath it all. But this time, not for the first time in the piece but the first time it has been so evident, A major is nowhere to be found. We are given only, devastatingly, a solitary A minor chord, dying away to nothing, and then punctuated by a unison pizzicato from the strings on A. One final nail in the coffin.
What are we left with when we find ourself in that dark place, when we swear, with the Psalmist in the 88th Psalm, that the only friend we have left is darkness, that even God has become our enemy? Can it be enough to simply create? To use our creative powers to share comfort with others, as Kirsten Dunst’s character does in the ending of Melancholia, where we witness a creative act marked by child-like innocence? Sometimes the simple act of sharing a lovingly prepared meal with friends, or giving care to a loved one – whether it be someone obviously dependent on us, like a child, or someone whose need is not so much on the surface as it is hidden underneath dark waters – is enough to help us through the night. In loving, we are loved. In caring, we are cared for.
It is a well-rehearsed cliche to say that we read to know we are not alone (was it C.S. Lewis who said it first?), but it fits here, expanded to include the works that prompted me to write this. I recently heard Andy Crouch, author of Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, define great art as “anything that requires and rewards attention.” I know the debate rages about the worthiness of Melancholia, and I was approached by two fellow audience members after the performance of “Images from a Closed Ward,” one asking if I had liked it and, if so, if I could tell him what he missed, another with a list full of everything he hated about the piece. I am not here disputing the experiences others may have had with these works that differed from mine, just as I don’t feel any particular desire to argue back and forth about why someone should feel the same way as I did. I only hope here to communicate something of why I needed these works when I first heard and saw them, and to commend them to you as art worthy of your consideration. I find myself grateful, a bit unexpectedly, for Lars von Trier and Melancholia, for “Images from a Closed Ward” and Mahler’s 6th Symphony. For moments when I no longer feel I am all alone. And for art that encompasses the full range of human emotions.
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Stephen Lamb lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he works as an arranger, composer, and copyist. Sometimes he dreams about being a writer. He blogs at Rebelling Against Indifference.