Listened to the Sounds

Delaware Choral Arts presents some of the finest choral concerts in my area.  Yet there's something bothersome to me about choral music or opera or oratorios.  Even when sung in my native language, not only can I rarely discern the words, but often I cannot figure out that the group or soloist is singing in English.  The organizers are well aware of this, so they provide a transcript of the text which the usher distributes at the entry to the auditorium or sanctuary along with the program.  I picked mine up, found a seat in the pew, read over some of the program, then made a key decision.  I would not follow the program, just listen.  I clapped when everyone else clapped.  I knew how many pieces were on each side of intermission.  I knew how many movements each of the two long pieces contained but not when each ended, until everyone clapped at the end.  And the transcript of the text just stayed on the coarse red cushion that the church offers as its pew's seating surface.  And I listened.

My 8th Grade music teacher, Mr. Nasser, once challenged us to rank the relative importance of the words and the music.  He insisted that language has to take priority, as we think verbally and the composer depends on the texts to create the music.  I bought into his instruction at the time, but as I attend more concerts where the language never captures my pretty decent comprehension of English, I've become more of a skeptic.

So yesterday I put the text transcription aside and just listened to the sounds.  Polyphonic voices.  Keyboard accompaniment.  Soloists merging with instruments.  A bassist and percussionist for one of the pieces on the program, with the composer offering a plethora of percussion sounds.  Singers of various vocal registers.  Entry and silence directed by the conductor.  The text really didn't matter to my auditory experience.  Probably a great disappointment to the composer, and maybe an even bigger one to the author of the texts, as yesterday's concert was largely adapted from African-American literature and Spirituals.  The author created ideas.  I missed them to get the composer's sounds instead.