Summer Suite (with credit to J.S.Bach)

Prelude

Without a doubt the greatest flight of whimsy this summer was not taking a 12 passenger van of grandkids 1125 miles to the beach.  Nor was it running the bases during Levi's baseball night...though making contact with a Levi pitch is a considerable accomplishment.  It wasn't even believing that the Cardinal baseball game we will be attending September 28 might be meaningful....(sigh).

No, thanks to J.S.Bach, J.B. Hurst and YoYo Ma, I spent one moonlit summer evening under the gleaming curls of the Pritzker Pavilion while the great cellist captivated a crowd of thousands with a marathon performance of all of Bach's six concertos for unaccompanied cello.  It was mastery.  It was magical.  And it is the inspiration for this three part homily....a little suite ...

Being Consistent: A Fugue

Day after day I've been walking lines eyes moving left and right looking for something wrong.  A sudden fountain where some varmint, through thirst or orneriness, has chewed through the plastic tube that connects the emitter to the 3/4 poly pipe.  Or maybe a varmint has skittered through the lines, pulling the emitter out and leaving the plant high and dry.  Maybe the emitter or pipe is plugged...with an unfortunate spider or cricket...or sometimes, yuck., a petrified tree frog.  It's still July and there is room between the lines to walk, to watch, and to stop and pull weeds. Weeds grow around almost every pot: crab grass, barnyard grass, purslane, ground ivy, and an assortment of other annuals I categorize as 'mum weeds.'  

We water, we weed, we watch for telltale signs of insect infestation.  Beetles gnawing, caterpillars of a wide variety of sizes and hairiness.  It's not a scientific count, but a combination of gut feeling and the calendar that leads us to call in reinforcements when there are too many webs for comfort.

These are the summer chores.  And to be successful, we have to be consistent.  Same routine, every line, almost every day.  The weather changes and the plants grow, but, like a fugue, the melody is passed around over and over....

Being Persistent: Sarabande

Blake used to love tuberous begonias. And for several years, I attempted to satisfy this preference by planting them under the hostas in the shadiest spot in our large yard.  Alas, these prima ballerinas of the plant world sulked in the crumbly soil of this former ash heap. Then along came sunpatiens, bright and bloomy, resilient and tolerant.....and the begonias were history.  To paraphrase, happy husband, happy wife; the sunpatiens I have planted in the pots and flower bed near the patio where he sits after work in Jefferson City have always bloomed profusely from June til a hard freeze. 

But this year, the sun coleus towers over a flower bed of sunpatiens no bigger than when I planted them in late May!  The varmints quite clearly prefer Blake's sunpatiens to any other plant in the backyard, grazing them down to the height of the mown grass.  

Fool's errand or no, quixotic or not, the summer is long and I am persistent .  Like the stately  slow measured tempo of a sarabande in Bach's suites, I am willing to repeat my movements any number of times to finish the song....or outlast the deer that treat Blake's sunpatiens like hors d'oeuvres.

Take that, deer, and that, and that, and that..

Being Present: Gigue'

Bach Cello Suite #1: Gigue, YoYo Ma

One man playing one instrument in one spotlight on a stage designed for an orchestra under a summer moon and the skyline of a great city. It focuses all your senses...the stillness of the audience, their concentration an invisible wall against the sirens and horns and bustle of the surrounding night life.  After the somber and even atonal chords of the minor suites, the final movements are not so much light-hearted as affirming, an aural expression of the life force pulsing in our veins.  This single-minded focus on the music made time both stand still and flash by.  It was the universal and the unforgettable, the experience that makes one wish we could,  with Emily from 'Our Town',  "realize life while they live it...every, every minute?"

God's glorious creation can bring us to that revelation.  And so can the miraculous, if we recognize it.  But I don't know if anything but music can return us to that state of  wonder and focus and recollection again and again.  Being present and conscious of the marvelous in the mundane lightens steps and lifts spirits.   We take care to memorialize our big moments....but none of us, no matter how we wish to, can summon back all our small pleasures.....

like days of summer chores with dewy feet,

or garden flowers with the morning's first coffee...

but I know a Bach cello suite will always take me a June night in Chicago, the air alive with the music and nothing else....

“I can't look at everything hard enough!” 

― Thornton Wilder, Our Town

Bach to the Future

Way back when in 1968, the Cardinals got beat in the World Series by Mickey Lolich and Denny McClain. The Democratic convention got the best of Mayor Richard Daley. And the movie 2001:A Space Odyssey confounded anyone who saw it.

I didn’t see game seven of the World Series..it may have been a day game, I don’t know. I saw the newspaper coverage of the demonstrators and police in downtown Chicago. And I didn’t see the movie…..but I was curious enough about it to get Arthur Clarke’s book out of our school library.

Sitting here on my couch, typing on my iPad, it takes some imagination to recollect how very strange the date 2001 sounded back then. Men in spacesuits were part of our vernacular; my dad worked with the massive computers of the day; but the next century was farther in the future than Dwight Eisenhower, Winston Churchill and Harry Truman were in the past. The movie was rife with symbolism and ambiguity and I admit feeling so uncomfortable with the part of the book when HAL goes rogue that I skipped past it as quickly as I could.

It’s funny what the mind chooses to remember. Apes and aliens aside, it is the music that remains after all these years. 2001 made Richard Strauss popular for a season as his brooding and melodramatic tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra introduced the black monolith that is one motif of the film. But deep into the book, when Astronaut Bowman is rocketing deeper and deeper into the Solar System all alone, he talks about the music that has been his company: progressing from the Romanticism of Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and Brahms to the Classicism of Haydn and Mozart.  Finally, he says, he settles almost exclusively on Bach, finding inspiration and comfort in his infinite variety.

It is only now in my musical journey that I’m beginning to appreciate that observation. I'd always felt aggrieved for my favorite geniuses, Beethoven and Brahms, not as much for the dismissal of their grand concertos and symphonies, but because Arthur Clarke seemed not to admire the almost modern dissonance and complexity of their later chamber works.  But these days, while I’m road tripping over familiar highways, a Bach cello suite, sonorous or sprightly, is the perfect companion for making the miles fly by. And if I’m practicing my clarinet and open the Bach book to an Allemande or Bouree with a bunch of accidentals and some tricky fingerings, it’s far better music than I deserve…..