Truth in Rehearsal
INWARD SOUND | 4.4.21
In the New York Times this week I spoke to the environmentalist and author Terry Tempest Williams about music, birdsong and time. The conversation is part of a series in which I swap songs with nonmusicians and then talk about our listening experiences.
I knew I wanted Terry to listen to the “Abyss of the Birds” from Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” ever since I had read her affecting memoir “When Women Were Birds,” in which she talks about birdsong as “truth in rehearsal.”
She responded with a Keith Jarrett improvisation I had never heard before, “First (Solo Voice)” from the album “Invocations.” He recorded it in the Benedictine Ottobeuren Abbey in Southern Germany. Playing soprano saxophone – who knew? – he created a conversation between his sounds and the echoes that dance about the sacred space. The result is absolutely mesmerizing.
Terry went all in with her assignment. The morning of our conversation she rose before dawn and hiked into the red rock desert outside her home near Moab, Utah. There, she played Messiaen’s forbidding, mystical clarinet solo as light spread. Before long, real birds joined in, mingling their song with that transcribed in the midst of WWII by Messiaen when he volunteered for dawn patrol so he might witness the first notes of the blackbird piercing the darkness.
Messiaen was a devout Catholic who didn’t lose faith even when he was imprisoned by the Nazis. Still, he later said he used birdsong in his music “in a spirit of no-confidence” in the human race. As a tenacious advocate for the preservation of public lands and a survivor of nuclear tests that bequeathed breast cancer to seven close relatives, Terry struggles with her own faith in humanity. And she told me this story:
About two weeks ago a friend and I hiked up this canyon where there was still water and we found a slit up one of the walls. We were sitting about halfway up the wall and we just listened.
He’s a Vietnam vet he’s spent half his life fighting on behalf of grizzlies, we were talking about the climate and we ran out of words. Because there is so much sorrow. And we listened to the wind. We listened to the stillness. And suddenly everything stopped. And somehow the silence created its own echo. And that’s what I heard in Jarrett’s own improvisation. There is that moment where sound wilts or bends, that is where that existential moment was where time ceased to exist and we were held in this timeless moment of presence. And it thought maybe this is what music gives us. It reminds us how we connect to nature.
In that memoir, Terry imagines that “once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy.” This Easter weekend many music lovers turned to the Passions by Johann Sebastian Bach as a means to heal the world through compassion. If you didn’t catch it last year, you can revisit the extraordinary pared-down St John’s Passion performed last year in Leipzig with the Icelandic tenor Benedikt Kristjansson singing every role. The pandemic had already made ensemble performances impossible, so he sang in an arrangement with a single percussionist taking on the role of the orchestra to stunning effect.
I have linked to Messiaen’s ‘Abyss of the Birds’ in a previous playlist, but here it is again next to Keith Jarrett’s “First (Solo Voice)” from “Invocations:” an invitation to slow down and reflect on faith and absence in the natural and the man-made world.
Corinna
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Image: Jan Meeus on Unsplash