Friday, February 12, 2021
Listen
Susan Tuveson
My brothers and I were born of musical parents. A keyboardist, our mother was a piano teacher and the organist in the church of our childhood. My father loved strings, the plucking, strumming kind, a banjo, an ukulele, and to round out the collection, a classical guitar. Both of them sang in amateur symphony choruses, the kind associated with orchestras and called up anytime a great work included a choral component: Beethoven’s Ninth, Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, (with Stravinsky conducting shortly before his death); Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, under his baton.
In addition to the clutter of instruments and scores, we also had a used church organ with two keyboards and pedals, and an electronic harpsichord my engineer father built from a kit. Our favorite, though, was the grand piano, for which we found many uses.
We’d throw blankets over the top to create a fort/school/restaurant, underneath, while one of us would go to the keyboard to provide sound effects: thunder! rain! explosions! with the aid of the damper pedal, if we could reach it from the bench.
My mother played the piano to calm or entertain us, and we had records of fun music we could listen to whenever we wanted. Sousa and Elgar marches, Peter and the Wolf, 1812 Overture, Beethoven; big, noisy great works, all to familiarize us with the workings of an orchestra. Dad was an audiophile with very good speakers. Many nights we fell asleep to Elizabethan airs from Dad’s guitar. Saturday broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera in New York City were a routine accompaniment to our weekend chores. (I’m listening to it now as I write this).
Eventually we siblings went our own ways musically, I, to woodwinds, two brothers to strings, the bowing kind, and the other to brass and composing.. Most of us ended up singing, too, performing the works we heard early, and others, classical and contemporary, at university, and later, in independent ensembles. Not one of us is making our living in music, but our pleasure in music enriches the lives we’ve made in other professions.
We benefited greatly in all this hearing and doing and learning, of setting much in store by listening to understand. The anguish of war, the ecstasy of love, of times of unrest, interpretations of literary works, ritual, geography, terror, or plain silliness: it’s all in there, and more, for the listening.
As we are children of God, created in His image, is it any wonder that from the minds and souls of humankind can emerge the most beautiful sounds, intelligent, transcendent harmonies, in vibrant aural colors, that speak to us of the wonder of being when we take the time to listen?
In these pandemic times, my physic for soul-weariness is art. When sought in humans’ exposition of word, image, or sound, I find solace in the Divine nature of artistic creation. In music, often the more familiar a composition, the more it will speak to me anew every time I focus, and listen to how the piece reveals its truths, just as may happen re-reading much loved novel. There is in the musical phrase a sentence, the tonalities and dynamic ranges yield punctuation, movements of symphonies make paragraphs that yield chapters, and all these interwoven aural conceits giving contour to the ideas of the whole.
Solace in the Divine, where the Divine speaks to us through His gifts of human ingenuity, creativity of mind, and the capacity to express His love for us through music.
Whenever I sit to really listen to the great classical works introduced to me in infancy, beloved ones discovered later, or of our modern classical form, jazz, I am often overcome with gratitude for these gifts God has given us: those which inspire humans to create such beauty, and the ability to listen and understand it.