Back when I was in Alaska, I mentioned once that I listened to the Passacaglia from Ravel's A minor Piano Trio while flying over Kotzebue Sound. The almost unbearable loneliness of the piece and crushing beauty of the sea ice in the sidelong winter sun was such that it gave one the urge to commit harakiri right then and there.
This summer I'm helping to conduct a seminar in writing about music, and I see how hard it is to put words to an essentially wordless phenomenon. How is it that scattered sounds come together to tell their own stories, elicit unspeakable joys, draw out the loneliness of sea ice? As a classical musician by both training and trade, I've had to write piles of academic papers on the subject, and it seemed like nothing I ever said was of any justice to the matter. It was like throwing pebbles at a river and expecting to create a dam to contain all its fury. But I've revisited a favorite author recently for another project, and here is what she had to say on the matter:
"Here is where I come to some trouble with words. The inside became the outside when Shamengwa played music. Yet inside to outside does not half sum it up. The music was more than music - at least what we are used to hearing. The music was feeling itself. The sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous. Those powerful moments of true knowledge that we have to paper over with daily life. The music tapped the back of our terrors, too. Things we'd lived through and didn't want to ever repeat. Shredded imaginings, unadmitted longings, fear and also surprising pleasures. No, we can't live at that pitch. But every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware. And this realization was in the music, somehow, or in the way Shamengwa played it.
"Thus, Shamengwa wasn't wanted at every party. The wild joy his jigs and reels brought forth might just as soon send people crashing on the rocks of their roughest memories and they'd end up stunned and addled or crying in their beer."
-Louise Erdrich, from The Plague of Doves, describing Ojibwe violinist Shamengwa
Last week I went to see a jazz band downtown. The gorgeous tenor sax player played a solo that the word "haunting" doesn't even begin to describe. I stared at the face of my own loneliness, stood on the edge of the blue-gray sea ice as it spread before me, aware of all I had and had not done. I was thrust into "the river of my existance," as Erdrich put it. I saw Arctic winter again, and I sat paralyzed staring into my gin. I could barely applaud when he was done. Much more upbeat pieces filled the rest of the program, probably to cheer everyone up after that.
Later in the evening I asked that tenor player out, and when he refused, I found myself staring at the sea ice of sunless winter once more.
