I offered to play for the Lenten service this noon, upon hearing the opportunity was there. What to play was my choice. As I planned my selection, my considerations were these: what aspect, what shade of Holy Week can I bring out musically, using only solo instrument, no words? What part of the story can I aid in the telling?
Today the pastor spoke on betrayal. Jesus reclined on a pillow and shared an intimate meal with his disciples, confiding in an almost offhand manner that one of them, in that very room, would betray him.
Those were the words, or some of them. Other practical issues for my choice figure in as well: how tiring is this or that solo to play? How many minutes? Does it sound too much like the opera house for sacred use? What sheet music can I locate since we moved last year??! (I've looked through more than three crates of music, and I am still missing a stack of solos I've been collecting since college...)
Also, how can I portray psychologically the pathos of broken trust, of betrayal? I have been in church, Sunday in, Wednesday out, through the season of Lent, taking part in the crescendo of the story of Jesus: the expectation of the people as their future ruler, the dread of his horrific death to come.
The color of an instrument's sound, the timbre, is one of my musical and expressive tools. One of my colleagues at Christ Lutheran kids me as Ash Wednesday approaches: this is your season, the season of the bassoon! Think lugubrious, and you will know where he is coming from.
I studied music in college and bassoon performance in graduate school, so the bassoon is my most developed voice. I do not like or dislike it; it is now far too much a part of me and what I do, too much a part of how I feel things, how I understand the artistic role I play within the breadth of human emotion. I occupy a certain place in the spectrum through that instrument, which I treasure in the way it helps communicates my identity and my spirit so directly. So, yes, I guess Lent is my season. Bassoon has a sound that knows mournfulness, and a certain depth. (...Ideally, anyway- as long as the reed speaks and all of those complicated keys continue to go up and down like they should.)
Throughout Lent, we lean toward the more solemn means of expression, until we land on the downright dark on Good Friday. On one noon Lent service, our recorder consort played a Fantasy by Telemann that was stridently minor. Talk about mournful. When the four different recorder lines converge into a single, loud, unison melody, the effect is ominous.
But, Holy Week begins with Palm Sunday. Last Sunday the choir sang hosannas over and over. The children stood up front and sang, and the brass played. It is festive, with an edge to it. Our hindsight view of this annual ritual tells us: The pageantry of Jesus on a donkey, walking a street strewn with palms, is the false celebration- the one that preceeds the violence of human nature come to fruition in Jesus on the cross.
So, for this Wednesday of Holy Week, first I chose the slow movement of the Mozart bassoon concerto. It is the most important solo I learned as an instrumentalist, written when he was only 19 years old. It is very sweet, with the simple beauty and clarity of the era which bore it. It is written in the most innate, most intuitive key of the instrument, F Major. To me, all of this communicated an appealing honesty, and also a naïveté that I felt suited this last Wednesday of the season.
I wanted my other choice to be something unaccompanied, which would have a stripped down feeling of solitude, of aloneness. Nothing too obvious, beyond that. For that reason I did not want anything based on hymn tune, which has an explicit meaning, or content, beyond harmony and melody. For a Lutheran instrumentalist, especially for the lower range instruments like bassoon, Bach's 'Cello Suites are a "go-to," so to speak. Lutherans get to claim J.S. Bach as one of ours, and the many movements of the cello suites are a masterpiece. I told my husband how effective it seemed like they were this noon, saying, even if it is just me playing them on the bassoon, just as a matter of course (and you usually lose a little when you play something written with a different instrument in mind). He replied, no, it's you, and it's Mister J.S. Bach. Good point.
I guess for me, getting to do this, to play this role, it is an exercise in both expressiveness and faithfulness. If I can share a little bit of the intimacy of how I get to take The Story to heart, then I have done something. When juggling schedules and bills with my husband, along with worrying about the responsibilities of parenthood specific to our family start to turn this music-making we do into a gray, mundane duty, I try to remember the high points with gratitude- like these solo moments I am privileged to share; like my colleagues, past and present, who have shared so much of themselves and their own faith through music; and getting to commune with Mister Johann Sebastian, unworthy as I may feel occasionally.
The sun is shining, the pollen is flying, there are (of course) errands to run and children to care for...
