Earlier this week I woke up in a bad space. I’m talking, “I can’t bear facing the world” kind of bad space. The feeling was probably made worse by the fact that I’ve been fighting some weird cold, one that oscillates between feeling okay but a little washed out and crashing headfirst into oblivion. It's not clear to me whether this has been primarily a physical malady or an emotional one or some combination of the two; whatever the root cause, I wasn’t feeling it.
As I sipped my morning coffee and scrolled through the news and social media, I came across a video my friend and colleague, Evan Harger, posted on his page. It was a video of his orchestra (he is the new Director of Orchestras at UNC Chapel Hill) performing Dvořák’s 9th Symphony (the famous, “From the New World”). I decided I’d pop in and listen for a few minutes, by way of seeing how my friend was doing with his new gig.
Dvořák’s 9th has been a part of me for as long as I can remember. When I was a little boy my parents were members of the Columbia Record Club, and it provided a wonderful supply of classics for me to devour. One of my favorites was Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra in the “New World,” a record whose cover remains stamped in my memory. And so the other morning, as those opening bars embraced me like a warm and familiar blanket, I decided to screw my “to-do” list and listen to the whole symphony.
It’s interesting how, with the pieces of music we’ve known the longest and perhaps tell ourselves we know the best, we might go many years without actually listening to the whole thing. I couldn’t remember the last time I listened to the whole of Dvořák’s 9th…seems like I heard it in a concert a few years ago? But that distance provides a wonderful opportunity to hear something that is both intimately familiar and fresh at the same time.
For those readers who may not know much about the piece, it was written when the Czech composer Antonin Dvořák was in the United States serving as Director of the National Conservatory of Music in America (in New York City). Dvořák traveled throughout the country (the symphony was actually completed while he was visiting Iowa), and was deeply affected by the music of Native and Black Americans. While he didn’t quote that music directly, he incorporated elements of it that give the symphony a unique sound. (Don’t get me wrong: it’s still unmistakably European. But there are clear harmonic and melodic elements that evoke the new land Dvořák had found himself in.)
Hearing it the other day, however, I heard another layer of meaning I hadn’t really considered before, a far more profound one. The symphony is in E-minor — a key that feels darker than other minor keys. Not darker as in “ominous” (ominous is F-sharp minor; depths-of-despair darkness is C-sharp minor). Rather, darker as in the wood of weathered fence posts, the dirt of tilled fields, the sooty fog of a seaport at dusk. In fact, the entire work is actually quite sombre in tone: with the exception of the sunny and ebullient trio section of the 3rd movement, the symphony evokes toil, melancholy, and struggle more than it does the bold and heroic themes so often associated with music intended to embody the American story. Even at the conclusion of the work, where we finally shift into the major key, the final triumphant chord fades away as soon as it arrives. Rather than the emphatic cadence of a typical Romantic symphony, the final major chord evaporates, as if the attempt at an upbeat conclusion is a facade, an illusion, with no more substance than the mist. I’d never really heard the symphony in this way before, and I found myself wondering if Dvořák had perhaps captured the essence of America better than any American ever has.
I know I’m not the only one lately who has started their day wondering how they’re going to leave the house and face the world. Recent events have, for many of us, shaken our faith in the essential goodness of America like nothing else in our lifetimes. In 2016 we geared up and set out to resist, convinced that what had happened was some sort of aberration that we could reverse if we just worked hard enough. This time is different: we’re tired, disillusioned, and struggling to hold on to one of life’s most elusive things: hope.
But listening to Dvořák this week reminded me: we need art more than ever. Not just us, for our own self-care, but us as a society, us as a world. And that means that those of us who are artists have an incredibly important job that we are uniquely qualified to do. For throughout history’s struggles and milestone events, when has art not been present, too?
As far as we can tell, art predates religion and perhaps even spoken language. It’s deeply embedded in the very fibre of our identity — and there must be a very good reason for that. If we consider our most ancient ancestors and ask ourselves what evolutionary advantage art could possibly provide, I think the answer is fairly obvious: it expresses the inexpressible, the ineffable qualities of consciousness, of that which is beyond ourselves. This in turn nurtures that part of ourselves where empathy, imagination, and creativity live. And it does so not in isolation, but in community. Art is at the very center of everything we need as a species to have a functioning society.
Of course, we live in a decidedly dis-functional society — and not only here in America. But that just means we need more art. More beauty. More contemplation and reflection; creativity and imagination. The world needs us and the work we do more than ever. Let that be our energizing call.
Comments