Steve’s picture and my six-word story for February form one of the more enigmatic instalments in our 2011 wall calendar. It’s a portrait of anticipation. Of what, I can’t say. I wrote two stories for this image to choose from, the other being “Like children greeting their first dawn.” Had we chosen that story, it would have been a portrait of anticipation’s end.
When it came time to write the music, I began by composing a literal equivalent, a piece that hovered in expectation. And I wasn’t happy with it. Somehow, when all three elements of story, picture and music sent out the same message of sitting and waiting, the suspense went out of the message. So I threw it away and started again.
This time, the music takes on an underlying plaintive, neo-baroque quality. I want to evoke ‘mysterious’ but I miss and the piece lands in melancholia. It grows briefly frustrated and emphatic before rising above it all into – what? A quiet acceptance, I think, and a happiness regardless. Like I said, this is one of the more cryptic of the 12 months.
What was on my mind as I wrote it? When I engage in the technical aspects of composition, such as solving voice-leading or counterpoint problems, there is a lot of continuous, repetitive work. It’s the equivalent of, say, polishing silver with all that careful stroking and buffing. Or think of gardening, with its digging and weeding and pruning. You enter a state of trance when doing these things, and your mind is free to visit the stars and wander into interesting places. This time, I found myself revisiting the story of Domenico Zipoli, a Jesuit missionary-composer in eighteenth century Paraguay, where Jesuit missionaries forcibly corralled the nomadic local tribes, Christianized them and used them for labor. Though today the settlements would be considered theocratic regimes, Zipoli’s faith, I have no doubt, convinced him that he was civilising the savages. “Give me an orchestra and I will convert the whole of South America,” he said. So however I feel about his evangelical practice, Zipoli was a gifted composer. He is virtually unknown today except amongst Baroque aficionados and, naturally, Jesuit historians.
The story of the Paraguay Reductions (as the settlements are called) was made famous by the movie The Mission. I’ve only watched it once, back in the mid-1980s when living in Madison. There’s an unforgettable waterfall scene in the movie. For some reason, this miniature piece for solo harp was written with Zipoli at various distances from my consciousness. Everything about this February music, it seems, is an enigma.
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