Not having posted for a while, again, I think of music as a way to reenter. Tonight I began thinking of Rachmaninoff, and the beautiful all night vigil, better known as the Vespers. Here’s a fine performance of the Hail Mary from that piece, perhaps everyone’s favorite. It’s short, and it doesn’t reveal all the many virtues of the long choral liturgy of which it is a part. But it’s tonally and melodically spectacular. I can’t identify the performance. You can find it at YouTube.
One of the nice things about YouTube these days is that at the end of a given selection one finds links to other listening. You can likely find some other performances of this piece by following links at the end of this one, if you’re interested.
It’s good to think that one can learn something even in one’s seventh decade when the brain has begun to stiffen with the rest of one’s body. Today I think I have learned something, or at least thought about something familiar in a new way. Easter isn’t about welcoming the happy morning, at least not at first.
I had been thinking about the Easter Vigil, how we light new fire in darkness at the begining of the service and begin the Mass with bells and organ sounding for the first time in three days. A friend had written me to say that his pastor had quoted James Weldon Johnson’s lines about Gabriel’s silver trumpet in her Easter sermon. Somehow it occurred to me that the passage from death to life must be a sudden occurrence, the body snapped into being like a spoken thing. That’s why resurrection, if there be such, is different from birth.
And that’s why scripture tells us that God comes suddenly — when one is unprepared — like a thief in the night. The watchmen cries out from his high tower; but God comes with the watchman’s utterance still unheard, and nothing is the same afterwards. It’s the twinkling of an eye of which Paul speaks. It’s the bugler in Krakow cut off in mid voluntary by an arrow in the throat. And it’s because of the traditional painful imagery that surrounds the whole idea in scripture that I missed it. It isn’t at first about judgment at all. It’s about hierophany.
I think Mozart understood what I’m talking about, and maybe that’s why the Glorias in one of his most famous mass settings sting the ear and run up the scale like birds flushed from underbrush, startling the bonae voluntatis, “the living and the dead in the twinkling of an eye . . . caught up in the middle of the air,” as the poet says.
It’s an old Yiddish saying, I’m told. Here’s another favorite fiddle tune, Flatbush Waltz — written by Andy Statman. The mandolin soloist is Statman, himself. The fiddle player is Itzhak Perlman. I liked this tune so much when I first discovered it that I wrote a poem about it. My poem is here. If you’re interested in some background, you might want to watch Perlman’s EMI video entitled In the Fiddler’s House. Everyone knows Itzhak Perlman, I think.
I’ve been playing hookey — just didn’t feel like writing much. Now that I want to get started again I thought I’d post some more music. This may be my favorite fiddle tune. I hear it slow and sentimental, unlike the famous western swing treatments by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys.
Bob Wills didn’t write Maiden’s Prayer, only some sentimental words for it. Frankie McWhorter quotes Wills in Cowboy Fiddler in Bob Wills’ Band telling the story of how Wills locked himself up with a Mexican fiddle player in Roy, New Mexico, where he was working as a barber.
Bob said, “He played ‘The Spanish Two-Step’ and I locked the door where he couldn’t get out and nobody else could get in, and I made him stay there until he taught me that and ‘Maiden’s Prayer.’ Finally he nodded. I didn’t know whether he needed to go to the bathroom or if I was doing it right, but I let him out.” That Mexican taught him those two tunes.
Here’s a lovely performance featuring Aly Bain and Jay Ungar. Ungar is more famous as the composer of “Ashokan Farewell,” which was used as the theme song of Ken Burns’ Civil War series.
YouTube programs another fine performance (though the photography is less than stellar), featuring Al Joseph with Jerry Vernon and Acie Cargill on guitars. I love it, and I don’t know what’s more remarkable, the fact that it’s “live at McDonald’s” or the shots of the geezers dancing.
