Understanding music means learning pattern recognition. Musical sense hangs on specific arrangements of rhythms, or pitches, or chords. Those arrangements repeat in predictable ways, and being able to recognize more and more complex patterns within a piece of music is one of the indicators of the richness of a given song. Entire books have been written which describe the patterns found in studying just one single fugue of J.S. Bach or oratorio of G.F. Handel. That is how complex the arrangements can be. That is how complicated the relationships between the many elements of a tune can get.
Unfortunately, in music, as in life, we sometimes seem to sell ourselves into one pattern so thoroughly, we can't see any of the other possibilities. Taking an example from my own repertoire, I have been singing Franz Schubert's Ave Maria for thirty years. I have to be honest. The words (I always sing it in Latin) have not changed. Neither have the notes (I still sing it in the same key). The arrangement of the accompaniment hasn't changed either. In other words, the patterns seem to be set. I could imagine that there is nothing new in that piece of music. I could imagine, after 30 years, that I know all there is to know about that collection of notes, and that boredom and irrelevance should have set in long ago.
That can happen with a piece of music. It happens all of the time with pop hits on the radio. For some reason, I simply loved Jon Bon Jovi's Wanted Dead or Alive when it was first released. I hear it now, and nothing happens except puzzlement. I have no idea what it was about that pattern of notes, rhythms and chords that so moved me then. Quite simply, it does not now.
Yet that simple prayer by Schubert is still with me. I have never fixed its pattern in my mind. I have never fully committed to one interpretation of breath line, word emphasis or note articulation. It sings differently at a funeral than at a Christmas Eve service. Before I knew death, I emphasized a different poetic idea. I play around with the piano part-playing the chords unbroken, and with more modern rhythmic emphasis. The patterns shift and the music looks a different way. It means a different thing. It communicates a different perspective. It is rich.
If I have one wish for today, it would be that we try to take life a little bit more like Ave Maria and a little less like Wanted Dead or Alive. Rather than claiming a moment as the pattern that makes sense, and working to make the world fit into that pattern, I hope for the wisdom to know moments as parts of many patterns whose lines and colors can be aligned and realigned in a variety of ways which never cease to amaze, delight, challenge and ennoble us.
