Voices gentle and meaningless
Belonging, estrangement, and grief.
I’m in Detroit getting ready to perform Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 for the first time. I supposed there is a chance I’ll get through this performance, sung by friend and absolutely freaking radiant soprano Caitlin Lynch, without blubbering on the bench, but I wouldn’t bet on it. You’re not supposed to cry at work, but if it happens I’m sure no classical voice geek would ever judge. They know all about how Barber puts the soprano up on a gorgeous vulnerable high note twice while singing about her mother and how almost no listener gets through it dry-eyed. The music tugs at my heart, but my tears are more tightly bound up with how the text by James Agee ropes me in and fakes me out.
It all starts by setting a simple scene. You’re in a small town of porches facing streets where people stroll on a summer evening. Birds come home to their trees (“hung havens, hangars,” alliteration, nice) in lilting triplet rhythm. Then a streetcar clatters by, a noisy one seen through the eyes of a child, anxious and energetic and in seven small beats to the bar (I like to think of this as an early harbinger of Soundgarden). You immediately recognize this trope, nostalgic Americana juxtaposing folksy comfort with relentless striving, ah yes, the heart of the good American soul, every one of us an A-lister honking in the streets on our way home to relax. Or maybe it’s about the passage of time. Nothing lasts forever, right? Life is short, so get on your porch and appreciate the good things.
Achievement, peace, and gratitude: you think you know where this is going. But then the streetcar passes and the alliteration returns with the force of an ancient magic spell. Agee zooms in on the speaker, a child surrounded by family. The child lies on a quilt in the backyard looking up at the stars as the adults talk:
They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, or nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seems each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people have larger bodies than mine, with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds.
There are two miracles here. The first is how the text evokes childhood through the remembered remoteness of grownups’ conversations. My nieces and nephews, back in their tiny era, would walk right up to a group of us and patiently say “Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom.” until someone explained that they had to wait; they’d look so surprised, unable to attach meaning to our oceans of words that had nothing to do with snacks or hugs or play. The second miracle is Agee’s inspired confusion of the grownups with the stars, “larger bodies” that “seem very near.” The “smiles of great sweetness” talk of “nothing at all.” The child feels deeply connected to family and the natural world, but is ultimately alone.
The text ends:
And those receive me who quietly treat me as one familiar and well beloved in that home, but will not, oh will not, not now, not ever, but will not ever tell me who I am.
Knoxville starts out like a Norman Rockwell painting but then goes all cosmic on you. In this world, everything belongs to everything else, birds and parents and stars. But at the same time, in this world, each of us is a stranger, as remote to our people as we are close.
In the vast, still space between the belonging and the estrangement, I don’t find nostalgia.
I find grief.
There’s grief to spare in classical music world these days, grief seeping out of the cracked corners of our shuddering halls. Somebody whose writing around grief has inspired me is playwright and singer Bryce McClendon (you should follow them and read about their play The Smallest Sound in the Smallest Space). We were chatting about something they posted recently and they said words that just grabbed me:
“Grief is a discipline.”
It inspires me to look at grief that way. A discipline is a practice, something to return to often, with rigor, with faith and a desire to learn.
Bryce also said, “Too bad we live in a society incapable of grief,” and that landed hard with me too here in late-stage capitalism era America. We don’t really do porches or streetcars these days, those things being terrible communal in a culture that worships lone achievement, or at least the appearance of it. We have trouble allowing ourselves or teaching one another how to rest. Indeed, our systems don’t support rest. Grief is too slow for a culture in thrall to dominance and endless growth.
Combine increasingly poisonous 21st century achievement-wellness-success thinking with classical music traditions of obedience and obsession, and you get something quite difficult to navigate. Our culture can be both generous and culty, thrilling and devastating, and so far it has been inherently unfair. We work within pyramid structures, admiring the lucky-strong-confident ones at the top and encouraging the mess of strivers below to accept the idea that their hard work will be worth the personal sacrifice and delayed gratification it requires. There’s always been enough inspiration in the music-making, sure, but there’s also been enough individual success throughout the systems to inspire us to keep going (so far).
And, there’s always been abuse within the systems. It’s never been under wraps. The most salacious version of it, trading sexual favors for professional opportunities, has been more than an open secret; it’s been memorialized in all kinds of theater for hundreds of years (see: Der Schauspieldirektor, Capriccio, Die Fledermaus, 42nd Street, A Little Night Music, most of Billy Wilder’s best movies, etc. etc. etc.). If no one named what everyone knew, if we joked about it in plain sight on our very own stages, then we had all signed on to a type of agreement. There were a lot of other things that we didn’t talk about, cruelties both larger and smaller, but they all basically fell under this agreement as well.
Don’t play dumb with me, dollface, or something like that. You knew what you were getting into. Shame was the ingredient that kept that agreement in force. It wasn’t just the shame of getting obviously tarred with a word like “ambitious” or “starstruck” or the all-purpose “crazy.” It was the shame of participating in this system purposefully, knowingly, each of us for our own benefit. We didn’t individually know all of it, but we knew - we were all acting it out on stage together.
Short pause here, I need a break.
Look, it’s great to be an artist and almost everyone I’ve known in these spaces has been a loving human with something beautiful to contribute to the universe. Opera is epic and music is wonderful and all human hearts are worthy and it’s good to just breathe for a second. Musical performance can be transcendent for both performers and listeners, not just an ego bath but actually transformative. Hard work to make yourself good enough to be in spaces where you can do that is worth it. I love this profession.
I wrote all that because there’s still part of me that feels like I’m breaking our code by writing these words. I know that’s messed up. I also know how much I’ve benefitted in this profession, which might also be messed up.
Okay.
For years before the first big classical sex-favors-for-opportunity story broke last decade, there were journalistic attempts in the works. Did you get a call from that writer? Yeah, me too. What are you going to say? We’d tell each other that these stories couldn’t possibly see the light of day, because the whole system would come crashing down. Then as people’s relationship with the Internet changed, they started gathering there, getting braver, escaping the isolation of “starstruck” and “crazy.” And the stories came out.
And here we are.
Yes, the economy, yes the pandemic, those are also reasons for the crisis we’re in and maybe they’re much bigger contributors than the inelegant and comparatively sudden exposure of our culture.
I’m not so sure. Everyone can see us now. We can see us now. There are a lot of emotions around this, all of them valid. I do see how we strivers are more naturally drawn to the ones that make us feel more like we’re on a trajectory, like anger. I do see the impetus and even the merit in turning shame around and punching up rather than punching down.
But ultimately, what I find in this vast space between belonging and estrangement is grief.
So many of you have written to me with suggestions of topics for this space. They are all great suggestions, informative and helpful, and I find it impossible to get to them. What I really want to do with you, and by myself, is grieve. We’ve lost a lot.
I’m going to dry my hair now, put on a pretty dress, and go join two dear friends and one brand new one in an evening of music-making. It’s going to be joyous, and challenging, and slightly scary, everything I have always loved about playing music for an audience. Onstage is place where I can experience that incredible Agee-esque combo of total connection and immense solitude. But there will be grief, too, when the performance ends, even if it’s just a little, a grieflet if you will.
In my opera days, when a show closed, I used to go up into the fly space and cry, grieving the loss of all that joy and challenge and scariness and fellowship. Don’t forget, friends, in this era of destruction and revival, to make space for grief. Everything in our history will tell you not to waste your time, tell you to get back up on the horse and back into the practice room, do it again, push through the discomfort, don’t take it so personally, don’t make it a big deal, keep your eyes on the prize. None of those pieces of advice are bad in themselves, but they do keep us on the lonely side. Take some time in quiet to look up at the stars, and hear the voices of the ones who love you all around, even if you can never really understand them, and see what connection you can make in the stillness. Even if it’s incomplete and fleeting.
The dry and exalted noise of the locusts from all the air at once enchants my eardrums.
I wonder, if we take time to grieve, what music might arise.
Acknowledgments for this essay: thank you so much to Caitlin Lynch, Jonathan Lasch, Allen McCullough, David Hanlon, Ariana Strahl, Bryce McClendon, and Patrick Hansen.
I love your writing so much. Thank you. Xoxo