Strange Relation

Ann Copeland

IT WAS not so many months since I had reentered the world of color .

Reinhabited might be a better word—for, of course, color had surrounded me even in my convent years: earth, sky, clouds, all of nature's bounty which had no respect for our own persistent black-and-whiteness. Reinhabi t though, meant that not only was I, as my new husband would say, appearing once again in Technicolor, but my immediate domestic world, as well, itself invited coloring. As we wondered what dishes or sheets or blankets to buy for our first apartment, I could now imagine in color. If I went—as I now did for the first time in fourteen years—to the grocery store in Chicago's Hyde Park where we were beginning our married life, I could walk rainbow aisles of cans, cereal boxes, pop bottles, toilet paper—and choose my shade. Suddenly my immediate world invited coloring.

All of this dazzled, and there rose in me a raging appetite for color. It could unexpectedly turn timorous, as when my husband set about painting one wall of our small kitchen Kelly green, perhaps to celebrate my Irishness. It just felt like too much. Over the top.

In any case, reinhabiting a world of color generated excitement, release, a thrilling sense of adventure. In a burst of ambition and supposed frugality, I got a sewing machine and set about learning how to use it. My last significant effort at sewing had been fourteen years before, with an old treadle machine in the novitiate where we ten postulants—with our newly minted B.A.'s and our earnestness to follow a call—were told that during the four weeks of Advent we would each make our own floor-length habit for the January clothing ceremony. Yards and yards of black serge challenged us to transform them into the religious habits we so yearned to wear—yokes, pleats, voluminous sleeves, and all. Wondrously, a superior's command seemed to create ability. With minimal instruction and a great deal of ripping out, each of us did as ordered. The yoke was not sweet nor the burden light. We laid out swathes of black material on the long novitiate-room tables. We measured, snipped, pinned, basted, hoped, and prayed. In silence—with a sneaked whisper here and there—we managed to complete our habits in time to don them at the clothing ceremony, once we had removed wedding dresses borrowed for the occasion.

And now I found myself in yet another life, heeding the insistent call of color, equipped with my own sewing machine, an apartment with lots of empty floor space for laying out bits and pieces, and hours alone, while my husband was off teaching at the university. I could distract myself from the dissertation I should have been working on by meeting a different challenge. Titillated by Marimekko designs, teased by pattern books, I spent hours flipping pages, imagining my new self in this, in that, inventing my own extended clothing ceremony in Technicolor. I could go round the corner from South Hyde Park Boulevard , climb on the Fifty-Fourth Street el, whiz down to Marshall Field's and happily graze in pastures of color, texture, design: the fabulous fabric department. On the desk in the study back home, Wallace Stevens's poetic ballet with the meaning of meaning paled to insignificance beside these tactile enticements. Dull print, black and white: he could wait.

Roll on roll of fabric invited my touch. I loved to walk between rows of display, gaze at them, finger the weave, the nub, the soft or taut surfaces, feel enclosed by all that color which might be made into just about anything. In theory. People speak of salivating at the sight of chocolate, and I know something of that, too, but in those days I salivated at the sight of colored cloth radiant with possibility. I poked through remnant piles for bright pieces to fringe into covers and napkins for the table we had created from an unfinished door purchased from a lumberyard. Weeks earlier we had labored to apply the stain (Moose-top clear) and finish to the door as it lay on the empty floor where I would now spread swathes of cloth, and snip.

Appetite and imagination far outstripped my capacity to do the work. Before the novitiate habit-making challenge, my one venture into sewing had been in eighth grade—a brief course at the local YWCA which resulted in an apron of unbleached cotton with red trim that I proudly presented to my mother for Christmas. I don't remember her ever wearing it. Now I aimed to create clothing I would actually wear. I worked away—snipping, pinning, basting—suppressing guilt about avoiding Stevens. The luxurious gold and black cape with a black satin lining that I eventually produced to cover my expanding womb made me feel positively regal. Another dress made out of what I hadn't realized was upholstery material saw me effectively through nine months' expansion. It hung about me stiff and heavy, its muted shades of burgundy, green, gray, and black blending into a multicolored tent. My long-ago lesson in gathering pleats and attaching them to a yoke turned out to be useful for draping this non-virgin about to become a mother. My favorite number (yoke with gathers) featured red, blue, black, yellow, and green stripes, which transformed me into a walking Crayola box of true colors.

When a slimmer me finally returned to face black print on white pages, another dr ess of blue and white pique would see me through my orals. For some months, however, I ducked the call of Wallace Stevens's verbal games with the circularity of desire and the impossibility of faith except in fiction. His words were always waiting to be dealt with on my desk in the furnished study just the other side of the living room floor, now so hopefully strewn with my own compositions.

From those days of excited forays into fabric, one moment stands forth even now with its peculiar power, a vibrant thread defying thirty-two years of fading and decay. The year is 1970. I am in Marshall Field's department store on State Street, Chicago.

Driven again by this persistent appetite for color and cloth, I have just wandered those fields on the fabric floor. Replenished, I dream my way back to the escalator and head down to the next floor.

Ahead of me, close to the bottom of the escalator, I notice a man busily selling some objects to a small crowd. He holds up what appear to be pieces of parchment with red staff lines on them, some with elaborately colored decorations, and small black squares going up and down on the red lines. I know that four-line staff; I know those square notes, neumes; I know the curves of melody, arsis and thesis. I have more than a nodding acquaintance with the eight church modes.

“These, framed, would make a beautiful object of interest in your dining room,” I hear him say. “A real conversation piece.”

Cloth, color, texture, design: all evaporates.

Years dissolve.

In the novitiate I labored to learned that staff, to recognize the fa clef, the do clef, to decipher the rhythmic implications of the ictus, to accommodate voice and breath to the sense of Latin words, to relinquish self, merge my voice with others as instructed by my Liber Usualis: “In order that all the voices may be one, which is most essential, each singer should attempt in all modesty to allow his own voice to become merged in the volume of sound of the choir as a whole.” After I finally donned my own freshly made novice's habit, I was assigned to train younger sisters in the chant. Still later, as a community member in three successive houses, I was again assigned to help convent choirs elicit from those strange black shapes the beauties of the Divine Office and liturgies for the celebration of Mass: sung prayer lifted in one voice toward a heaven that surely heard. Always feeling myself a novice at this, I puzzled quilizmas and epizemas, the myst eries of the podatus, tonus peregrinus, and cadence—because I was told to.

There came years even later when, having learned how to transcribe that ancient code into numbers so our students could sing the chant, I would stand in front of our high school assembly for weekly Mass earnestly waving my draped black sleeves, curving arsis and thesis in midair—encouraging their young voices (more attuned to the Beatles, whom I had never heard) to strive for that pure unison. And how many decades before that had a much earlier self sat as a parochial school child at Sunday Mass in our parish church in Waterbury, Connecticut, joining with children around me to sing the eighth ordinary and third credo while Sister eagle-eyed us from the end of the pew?

No doubt about it, that strange clef, those odd shapes and the otherworldly beauty they signified had cut deep into my soul over many years.

Now, on the table before the salesman in Marshall Field's lies a pile of parchments, a cache of hidden treasure he cannot assess.

I am i nstantly drawn. I come close, ask if I may poke through the pile. Certainly.

Oh, here they are in bits and pieces—so many antiphons, hymns, sequences, parts of psalms I've chanted over the years, through weather hot or cold, in chapels drafty or stifling, eyes down, mind focused in the beginning years to make sense of the Latin and then, after the Second Vatican Council required vernacular translation, reveling in the more easily understood words of the psalmist. Sometimes with aching backs, addled brains, weary psyches, always clad in ankle-length black, we gathered in chapel to chant the hours of Divine Office. It sanctified our days, our work. It effected an eternal measurement of time. At the first sound of the bell we left work in the novitiate garden, we left high school and college classrooms, we left books open on our desks, papers half-corrected, apples half-peeled, we filed into chapel in silence and joined our voices, young and old, to the ancient, seemingly eternal voice of the psalmist crying to heaven.

So here it is with no warning, smack in the middle of Marshall Field's: my very own madeleine. Eat your heart out, Marcel Proust. No taste, no smell, no little cupcake, just notes of Gregorian on a familiar staff with that odd little clasp on the left—and I am back in that black and white world, Liber Usualis heavy in my hands, anxieties about class preparation resolutely squelched, my spirit freed to join that ancient voice rising now from the transept, weaving through the nave and traveling up, up, beyond candles, beyond altar, past stone and mortar to some other dimension where, we believe, we are heard.

Customers brush past me, mildly curious, intent on their own goals. The material wonderworld is a full floor above. I have forgotten it.

A few people stand near me. Quietly, almost inaudibly, I start to sing. It is an instinctive response. These brittle pages before me were part of the breviary. Someone has torn them out, dismembered the book. These neumes so carefully etched on the old parchment are meant to be chanted in an atmosphere of worshipful prayer.

There is no way I can create that in the middle of a shopping day on State Street in Chicago , Illinois . That isn't even in my mind. The notes are there, calling. That's all there is to it. I try a few bars, the start of a hymn, as I look through the pieces of disassembled book for a text and melody that strike me. Others elbow, but I persist. For I must have one.

Ah, here is one I have always loved. It is intact, the whole sequence, part of it on the front of the vellum, part on the back. The Veni Sancte Spiritus . Less colorful than some of the other pieces with their elaborately illuminated initial letters, it is, nonetheless, complete. Red lines of staff fill both sides of the sheet. The initial letter of each verse is done in alternating red and blue. What better plea from the midst of consumer heaven could this color-crazy consumer make than “Come Holy Spirit”? Pentecost has long been my favorite feast. I love the notion of power mysteriously taking over and transforming one, be it by fire, or breath, or Holy Spirit. He did it in color, too. With pizzazz. Flames of fire above their heads. And so I sing the whole thing.

Veni Sancte Spiritus,

Et emitte caelitus

Lucis tuae radium.

Veni pater pauperun....

I sing quietly, there in the midst of abundance: come father of the poor, come giver of gifts, come light of hearts.

Consolator optime,

Dulcis hospes animae,

Dulce refrigerium.

Just days ago I have listened over the radio to accounts of the Kent State killings. And now, at the university, students threaten to take over the administration building.

Consolator optime.

Week by week, desperate young men are secretly heading for Canada .

A few people nearby seem to be listening to me. I'm not a good singer but I do know how to make these lines work. Years of weekly choir rehearsal and daily chanting of the hours liberates some capacities.

Rest in labor, moderation in heat, solace in tears.

How long, I wonder now, will my own labor be?

I am afraid these days to go alone at dusk through the streets of Hyde Park . South of Hyde Park, Black Panthers roam.

I go on singing.

I am afraid to go alone over to the shore by Lake Michigan after a frightening encounter there with one man. He came too close. I motioned to a fictional husband resting nearby under a tree. My intimidator left.

I go on singing.

Flecte quod est rigidum,

Fove quod est frigidum,

Rege quod est devium.

Out of curiosity I have attended a city council meeting run by Mayor Richard J. Daley. When he didn't want to listen to the Hyde Park alderman, he turned off the mike, reduced his adversary to silent babble and sat imperturbably up there on his dais like a little pope.

My voice sounds feeble and shaky.

No tongues of fire descend.

I turn to the back of the vellum. This side is not as beautiful.

Da virtutis meritum,

Da salutis exitum

Da perenne gaudium.

Amen.

Alleluia.

Perenne or not, I'm all for gaudium.

I am there, in color. I am there in black and white.

The transept is around me, the spartan choir stalls, the black and white figures next to me and across from me, my voice joining theirs. This powerful stirring to life, the unsought surging upward from the past, the echo from a deeper self, the longing to give it voice: what is this?

Perhaps the secular surroundings created some of that urgency. I could have stood there mute, mentally singing, the way one browses through print here and there in a bookstore. But no. The chant so beautifully inscribed on that vellum, the words beneath it called for voice, sung prayer .

I bought the parchment for fifteen dollars. Later, in the Strand Bookstore in New York City I would see less beautiful, incomplete pieces for two hundred and fifty dollars.

I was assured it came from a fifteenth-century breviary. I have no need to disbelieve this.

We framed it with both sides of the sequence visible to be read, or sung. It now hangs next to my grand piano, which these days issues a far stronger call than color, or cloth, or even print.

While I struggle to articulate a line of keyboard music, or try to figure out just how this chord relates to the next, above me hangs a cry to the Holy Spirit: Veni Sancte Spiritus.

That seems just right.

I need all the help I can get.

Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

I have Stevens to thank for that line.

And so, by way of strange relation, comes another turn to the story of chant and color. It occurs thirty-one years after the singing moment at Marshall Field's.

Not too long ago, my husband and I visited a cherished fourth-grade teacher of his, now sadly moving away from recognition and memory into the world of Alzheimer's. His wife had set a beautiful lunch for us in their bright apartment on Bainbridge Island , Washington . Surrounded by signs of a long, richly cultivated life together and deep mutual devotedness, we shared a memorable lunch and tried to suppress sadness.

After lunch, as we were preparing to leave, I was stopped by a large framed piece on the wall straight ahead of me. Gregorian chant. I read it quickly, mentally hearing what was clearly the beginning of an introit. This time I didn't sing out loud. It might be the beginning of the introit for the third Mass of Christmas, I thought. I wasn't at all sure. Midway down the left side of the page (it was paper painted to simulate vellum, not crinkly vellum as my Veni Sancte Spiritus) a large inset square of gold held a brilliantly decorated letter H, the first letter of Hodie nata est. I hummed tentatively. The text was incomplete, in the way these pieces can be, but I seemed to recognize the curve of the melody on the five red staff lines. The five instead of four lines suggested this was a later work of art, not torn from a breviary but created to appear that way. And if the text really was from the third Mass of Christmas, the nata should be natus, but that didn't unduly disturb me. Perhaps the monk nodded, or the artist didn't know his Latin. In any case, the piece was quite beautiful.

What on earth was this doing here in the home of pious Jews, whose observance was grounded in deep and faithful devotion to their tradition? He had been for many years a cantor in their congregation. Was he perhaps aware that historians understand Gregorian chant to have originated from ancient Jewish synagogue tradition? Did he know what my Harvard Dictionary of Music tells me: that Jewish peoples living in isolated areas today (Saudi Arabia, Iran) still sing melodies strikingly similar to Gregorian chant?

My hostess saw my delight and surprise.

“How come?” I asked her. “And I think it might be from the introit of one of the Christmas masses, of all things!”

She laughed with pleasure. Others had wondered, too. She said that she and her husband had been attracted by it years ago, quite simply that. They found the whole colorful composition quite beautiful. “But you know its meaning,” she said. She knew my story and had read my earlier book about convent life.

We began to gather our things to leave—a sad, final parting.

She took me aside. “I want you to have this,” she said, pointing to the colorful Gregorian composition in its large gold frame. “You understand it. We have enjoyed it. We cannot keep it forever. It would mean a great deal to us both to know that you have it.”

The world we inhabit abounds with empty gestures. In the instant of her offer, though, this gesture felt so solidly grounded. It honored a tie that transcended lesser barriers—of belief, of ideology, of background and spiritual lineage. I never hesitated for an instant, though I could see my husband wondering. We had come to give, not take. We had come to make our gesture to a man whose gift through teaching and friendship had spanned decades and profoundly touched an early life.

No matter. Beyond the giving and the taking, beyond placing who was doing what and to whom shimmered an action that transformed the moment: This chant, this has special meaning for you. I want you to have it.

We took it home.

In only a few instances in my life can I recall a gift so spontaneous, so aware, so right.

Then began the search to identify it. After we got home I took down my Liber Usualis from the shelf in my study. Hodie nata est. Today is born.... I flipped to the three masses of Christmas. My nagging suspicion was confirmed. This was not from the third Mass. The melody was wrong. I had somehow wanted it to be from Christmas. Could it be a hymn? I checked these. No. An antiphon? No. Finally I began to go through the two thousand tissue-thin pages of this thick black book which had seen me through thirteen years, from chapel to chapel, from house to house, from early dedication and certitude to growing perplexity and doubt. So many vestiges of that former life have vanished, yet this book remains, its pages covered with neumes and Latin, a priceless compendium of hymns and psalms and sequences and lessons and masses, texts rich with meaning and history.

I hunted and hunted, but have yet to find the source for these particular lines of chant.

We hung it in the dining room, near our table.

Halfway down the left side of the page, the beautiful H of Hodie, set in its square field of gold, houses an intricate design in red and green and gold and blue, like a flowering tree blooming upward, then bending over, green and blue leaves and red flowers caught forever in a graceful bow. The whole composition breathes color and life, as if the artist wanted to signal fecundity in a single letter, bless text with life and show forth its rich blossoming: Hodie. Today.

Above my Steinway hangs a plea for the Holy Spirit to come and deliver his mysterious, much needed gifts.

Near our table hangs a celebration of birth— Hodie nata est— an affirmation of new life today.

Breaking bread with those we love, attending to words in texts, lifting voices in sung prayer, making music together: such efforts link us invisibly as we thread our single ways through time. Now and then, along each of our separate strands, a moment may light up with rare incandescence. Such moments offer solace strangely peace-giving.

Dulce refrigerium.

As I write these words, television, radio, newspapers abound with paeans to power and might—the power of stealth bombers, Apaches, Tomahawk missiles, poisons too many to number, weapons of mass destruction feared but yet to be found. It feels a bit wistful to affirm the slender strength of Gregorian chant against such power. Yet one way or another, through compositions that color our lives, we forge links across time and weave connections. Such links hold their own peculiar power.

Thirty-seven years have passed since my formal departure from the world of Gregorian chant. Occasional visits to a Trappist or Benedictine monastery renew my sense that the chant holds something eternal, perhaps singing a human need too deep to express in another way.

Fragile as this thread may seem—a curving line of neumes given voice by monk or choir in rarefied settings—a brief coda to the above chain of incidents suggests that chant continues to speak to some, even in the era of Tomahawk missiles.

Four months ago I received a notice that a professor of music at a nearby university was about to give a colloquium for students and faculty. Its title caught my attention: “Chants: Metamorphosis of a Composition.” I knew him to be an outstanding teacher, a composer and jazz musician, as well as present head of the music department. In 1995 he had been commissioned to compose a piece for perfo rmance by the local chamber orchestra. That year he conducted the premiere of this composition which was based on melodies from four different eleventh-century Gregorian chants. More recently, a summer grant had enabled him to undertake transcribing for wind band the original orchestral composition. His presentation for this colloquium would focus on the chants themselves, the original compositional process and resulting work, and finally the transcription of the lar ge work from the medium of chamber orchestra to contemporary wind band.

On a drizzly late January morning he met an assembly of college students, music majors, colleagues from his department and the university, plus a few interested outsiders, like me.

By way of in troduction, he explained something of his own musical background.

As he put it, he grew up thinking it was normal that every Sunday he and his dad would sing in the church choir his mother directed and that every weekend he would listen to his father's jazz group rehearsing at their home. His father was a band director and jazz trumpet player. Church singing, jazz improvisation, family talent and shared music, years of education and a persistent attraction to composing: from that matrix grew a professional life given to music in several forms.

Facing our assembly of assorted sleepy, hungry twenty year olds (it was near lunch time), he sought to account for his lifelong attraction to Gregorian chant. In words something like this, he summed it up: “Maybe the attraction to the chants is that they are a means to bring us close to our own true selves, close to God. They are simple, pure, and they seem to me, more than any other kind of music, to express spiritual truth.”

Honoring that attraction, he turned to Gregorian chant as the source for his composition, hoping to discover within the chants interesting musical ideas that he could express in a new instrumental composition. From a cassette he selected three chants to work with: Procedentem Sponsum; Veni Redemptor Gentium; and Dies Est Laetitiae.

At this point he played for us a tape of the original chants. Into our rehearsal room on that drizzly morning floated the pure sound of voices raised in prayer along clear simple lines. No nave, no altar, no liturgical context, just that rare purity of voice and line echoing in the air about us. Students in jeans and backwards baseball caps, their backpacks crowding the aisles, their laps holding lunches soon to be consumed, a few listeners taking notes, others with eyes closed the better to hear: a far cry this from chilly chapel, erect black and white forms, or from tired shoppers stopping to see what that odd pile of vellum might be on a table in Marshall Field's. Yet there it was, growing in the room as we listened: a sound pure, simple, rising, then falling, curving high then dropping off: a voice that seemed to speak of something beyond lunch, beyond shopping, beyond political turmoil, beyond brutality, beyond time itself, yet grounded in time—by the human voice.

For the rest of the hour we listened to his compositions while he projected the score on a screen in front of us. Occasionally he interspersed a comment, but most of our effort consisted of looking at notation and listening. No doubt many of the music majors could decode some of the motifs, formulas, and structural devices that underlay his original orchestral composition. I was looking and listening hard, but more ignorantly. My efforts to compose have been largely verbal, written, with only the occasional foray into composing little pieces of music—strictly for fun. Writers' work ends up as black print on white pages. I listened hard, though.

As he explained to us: “The challenges of the compositional process were to create meaningful instrumental music for orchestra from vocal music that originated in and is used for an entirely different intent.” This kind of composing had nothing to do with text or liturgy.

In each composition we could hear instruments echo, develop, play with that original section of the chant. He gave a descriptor for each section derived from the chants: Procedentem Sponsum became “Fanfare and Six-Eight Melody”; Veni Redemptor Gentium became “Mixed-Meter Chant with Amen”; Dies Est Laetitiae became “Unison, Three-Part Texture.” These descriptors, as he called them, were not titles of movements or sections but simply a description of how he used each of the chants in the instrumental composition. The fanfare featured, among other instruments, muted trombones and unmuted trumpet. Elsewhere in the composition I was struck by other combinations: oboe with bassoon; exploration of musical distance through the joining of piccolo with bassoon; a quasi improvisational jazz development—a kind of “Gregorian blues,” as he remarked; a truly wonderful and grand amen; and finally a grand restatement of the theme with whole orchestra.

Listening to the orchestral effects with the chants still echoing in our memories was like seeing a lively, teasing spirit suddenly appear then fade, only to reappear in a new color or dress, embedded suddenly in an unexpected texture of sound: appearances and vanishings daring, playful, subtle, engaging. Oddly, the phenomenon reminded me of the closing lines of Wallace Stevens's “Angel Surrounded by Paysans” in which the poet gives voice to an “angel of reality” devoid of heavenly accoutrements such as “ashen wing,” “wear of ore,” “tepid aureole.” The angelic voice goes on to tell us:

I am one of you and being one of you
Is being and knowing what I am and know.

Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,

Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set,
And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone

Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings,
Like watery words awash; like meanings said

By repetitions of half-meanings. Am I not,
Myself, only half of a figure of a sort,

A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man
Of the mind, an apparition appareled in

Apparels of such lightest look that a turn
Of my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?

A fanciful connection perhaps, but somehow apt. No need for liturgical texts here, no remnant of Latin syllables or psalmody. Orchestral colors sufficed to transmute ancient materials into something new—yet still with figures half heard, or heard for a moment in “liquid lingerings” of sound.

As we listened, we were looking at the score. Notation itself, therefore, remained part of the whole experience. We were not monks chanting words integral to our way of life; we were students seeking to hear and understand a complex process of musical metamorphosis.

The relationship of text to musical composition has long been a tortured topic. Its complex history lies beyond the scope of this essay. I do know, though, that if today I hum the Veni Sancte Spiritus with no words, the melodies still carry meaning for me. To what extent does that meaning derive from the melody itself, or from being embedded in the liturgy of Pentecost, to say nothing of the specific appeal those pleas to the Holy Spirit still carry for me? In other words, I cannot assess just how inextricably text and music, liturgical context, plus the elaborations of memory and belief are bound up in my personal responses to the chant. On the purely secular level, the same applies. How often during our twenty-five years of living in Canada did I stand at an opening ceremony while the orchestra launched into “God Save the Queen” and instantly substitute, mentally, the words of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” And even now, all these years later, were I to hear, unadorned by text, the melody of the Salve Regina, Te Deum, Credo, and many other bits of Gregorian I chanted for years, I would instantly attach to the melody the words they called for, if I knew them.

How exquisitely subtle are the gradations of disengagement and attachment in life, of moments lost and regained.

A few years later our composer faced his second challenge: transcribing his orchestral composition into a piece for contemporary wind band. Here the challenge tipped, as he put it, “toward maintaining the musical integrity of the original composition, perhaps even enhancing it, while rendering it playable by an entirely different kind of ensemble.”

That's a tricky synthesis. Anyone who has listened to a Beethoven symphony a nd then played a four-hand piano transcription of it knows something of this. And an yone who has tried to play a Liszt transcription of an operatic aria knows it in anot her way. To hear what Sorabji could do with a Bach fugue is to enter another w orld of metamorphosis where the strange and the familiar open out to newness.

My trail of anecdotes ranges far and wide in time and setting: from chilly chapels, to an apartment floor in Hyde Park, to a salesman's table at Marshall Field's, to a hospitable home in Washington, to a music department's rehearsal room in Salem, Oregon.

What links these moments?

At the heart of composing lies the mystery of attraction. Some might name this a call. Others might call it a leading, or a persistent itch. Such attractioninvolves more than mere impulse, however, for the one who answers it will soon find herself in a thicket of questions, perplexities, and endurance tests, as well as moments of deep satisfaction. I saw and heard this demonstrated in the rehearsal room that drizzly January morning as we moved beyond one “man-locked set” to a new composition.

In his little book, Poetics of Music, based on his 1947 Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, Stravinsky speaks of appetite, of the attraction behind all composing. “All creation,” he says, “presupposes at its origin a sort of appetite that is brought on by the foretaste of discovery. The foretaste of the creative act accompanies the intuitive grasp of an unknown entity already possessed but not yet intelligible....”

The appetite for making is an appetite to raid the palette of possibility, to release from it into the world we inhabit something beautiful, interesting, unexpected, new.

Colors fade, sounds disappear, words betray, cloth feeds the moth: in the end, gestures remain.

One of the best music teachers I had, a teacher of jazz improvisation, concluded his course at Westminster Choir School in 1986 by reminding us: “All music is gestural.” I have come to believe that attempts to make an artistic work are fundamentally gestural. Human gestures are of the moment, yes, but not limited to this hour, this week, this day. They can span time and space. I like to think of the arc linking the monk laboring to inscribe his neumes on vellum so a voice could release what lay hidden there, the composer exploring, nine centuries later, what waited to be discovered in those chants, and the wife recognizing a hidden linkage, then offering a bit from that life to be shared in a new way, quite literally, in a new composing of life around a table she will never see, in a home she will never visit.

Perhaps one way to think of a composer is as an artificer of links.

The links he forges may appear self-enclosed. Not so. Links embedded in poetry, painting, orchestral composition stretch over eons, connect in unpredictable ways. There's luck in moments when we experience that linkage. My finding the salesman at the bottom of the escalator was luck. My happening to read of the composer's lecture on the metamorphosis of chant was luck.

Pressures abound today to reinforce our sense of darkness and disconnection on many levels. Dead ends. Final losses. As I finish this essay, newspapers and TV carry tales of the looting and pillaging of the National Museum of Iraq, whose records and artifacts recorded the history of a civilization that began to flourish on the fertile plains of Mesopotamia more than seven thousand years ago. Links have been broken, destroyed forever. Closer to the heart, in personal lives, there is no denying links broken, as any adult knows. A sense of disconnectedness is our human métier. A page is torn from a religious book, a particular path of religious commitment loses its power, connections to a loved one are severed through illness. History, our times, our individual lives educate us to sustain only guarded optimisms, skeptical faith. E.M. Forster's “Only connect” retains painful resonance today.

Even so, in a classroom nearby, students listened to chant from nine centuries before and heard it become new. At the end, Beethoven turns back to learn from Bach. At the end, the grieving spouse makes a gesture that recognizes a history of friendship. At the end, the multicolored cloth feeds the earth. It helped to compose a new being: enough. And somewhere, as I write here in rainy Oregon , voices join in worship through Gregorian chant—or some other chant equally pure, equally faithful, rises in hope of being heard. Somewhere else—perhaps at this very moment in the house next door—a poet struggles toward words that will link to others, bridge time.

We make the links. We experience them. We discover them. We blink and miss them.

When we are lucky, they transform time itself, connect us to that which is larger than self, alter the very color of this universe we cherish.

Visit Tom Ann Copeland as Image Artist of the Month for March '06

Issue 42 • Summer 2004