CHORALE

This week, the idea that captured my imagination came about by listening to a wind ensemble.  I was reminded by their music that people who have experienced near death report that the music on the other side is light, flutey music which is simple and free from dissonance.  Some philosophies suggest that perfect sound can be achieved through a universal vowel at a particular pitch-a tone without dissonance or difference that somehow expresses all that is.  I imagined an eternity of such perfection and found myself dismayed.

Truth is, I like dissonance.  I like the beat and thunder.  I like Romantic chords and timpani.  I like the lack of resolution and the ways in which various sounds can come into conflict with one another and merely by moving slightly farther away or closer together, find themselves in accord.   I like the sound when Charles Ives' America the Beautiful bends in the middle and loses all coherence for a moment.  It says something about life when it appears to fall apart; when it chooses to go in an unforeseen direction; when it ends in the familiar strains and you wonder which part of what you heard was an illusion.

Barber's Adagio for Strings spends its entire length sustaining dissonance, maintaining an exquisite tension that never actually breaks.  Masterfully, the listener is left hanging in a question without an answer-having felt some sort of unsettling movement that was never fully released into action.  You will know if you have heard this played well, when you leave the performance hall still feeling a tremor deep inside, and unsure exactly what it portends.

I turn away from an idea of Heaven mostly because it seems to be an idea about the end of tension, collision, individuality and change.  It purports to be a perfection that allows for no difference.  All the discussions are done there, no questions left.  All limits are finished.   I think about those ideas and I am afraid.  What if Heaven lacks dissonance and tension because it is dead.  What if a yearning toward Heaven is nothing more than a yearning toward nihilism?

But then again, maybe Heaven is not about the single tone.  Perhaps perfection is more like the chorale.

The chorale requires individual voices submitting their own inclinations to the composer's idea in some configuration of altos, tenors, basses or sopranos.  Vibratos and straight tones blend.  Maturity and craft are lifted by the brash energy of youth and individual daring. The music of a chorale relates sounds and silences, dissonance and resolution, lyric and rhythm.  Though notes may come into serious conflict with each other, the singers are safe to lean into this dangerous sound knowing it means something significant that cannot be said without clash.  And the important thing for the singer is not the final statement of the chorale, but in the exact moments of each voice being what and where it is intended to be.  The glory of the final chord only exists because of the intricate patterns that preceed it.  

Maybe perfection is easier imagined as singing in the choir:  dissonance, resolution, relation, surrender, power and participation placed carefully into a complex and passionate composition.