05 VI 2002 - 22:08 - verba20

More Alchera. Doesn't that explain enough?

Project No. 06
Project Begins: Saturday, June 01, 2002
Project Ends: Sunday, June 30, 2002

Project Details:

[blah blah blah]

OPTION NO. FOUR: Who was the greatest musician to have ever lived that touched you in a way no other musician can? What was it about this artist that drew you to him or her? What do the lyrics mean to you? Please, only pick one person.

Since I don't listen to much vocal music -- with the exception of Mozart's Requiem, Britten's War Requiem, Schubert's Masses, Mahler's symphonies, and, improbably, the Indigo Girls, most of my music is orchestral -- lyrics are really secondary; the spirit of the music must be found elsewhere. I could quite reasonably write about Benjamin Britten and the reason his anti-war message in the War Requiem is so powerful; I could write about the power Mahler distills in his shout for men's voices >>Bereite dich zu leben!<< [Prepare yourself to live!]; I could write about the way in which it seems there's an Indigo Girls song for every mood I'm in. But to write about any one of those is to overlook the music of Dmitri Shostakovich, whose music I discovered before I discovered the music of any of the other composers.

It wasn't a necessity for me to have happened upon Shostakovich; although he was fond of the lower instruments, he wrote only two cello concerti and one sonata. I'm actually not sure where I heard his music first; whether it was my sister, eleven years older, practicing the sonata when I was in elementary school, or the programming of his Tenth Symphony during my first season with my youth orchestra -- that seems unimportant, because what quickly became important was the fact that this music existed. The intervals ached in a way I had never heard before, and his talent for orchestration in ways that served only to intensify the already-present mood held me, transfixed.

His music itself, I later read, was a balance between his spirit of creation and what would make it past the Soviet censors; by turns he was extolled and excoriated by the arts board -- most notably after the debut of his opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtensk. He found other ways to explore the new in music, what was possible with sound, to express defiance and disillusionment and make it acceptable by disguising its symbolism. What made him special was that he was not a happy man, but that he managed to produce his music as a very small part of what he wanted to say. I've written before about the roaring in my head, the threat of the void, all-consuming, which appears (like a shadow gone wrong) whenever I'm not busy enough, when I have nowhere to run from myself; what I see in Shostakovich's music, then, is a way of defying the meaninglessness and despair of the void -- of not conquering it, really, but instead of shaping it and putting your voice in. It appears as his musical signature through his later works (d-e flat-c-b: in German spelling, D eS C H, or his initials: D. Schostakowitsch); there are admissions of defeat along the way, haunted echoes of melodies which are twisted until they are only shades, but throughout his struggle he remained individual, he never stopped writing, and it is with this effort in mind perhaps that his music has the power to stop me from feeling quite so empty, to give me the strength of another's footsteps to follow as I trace an unfamiliar, lesser path.