Gearing Up For Considering Matthew Shepard, Part IV

So already, it's time for the final installment of the Considering Matthew Shepard talk that I shared at Linden Ponds last week, and that my fellow singer Stephen Tooker and I developed together. As some you know by now, the two choral groups that I sing in, the Broad Cove Chorale and the Unicorn Singers, will be presenting Craig Hella Johnson's passion oratorio on Saturday, March 28 and Sunday, March 29 in Norwell, Massachusetts. 

As was my last installment of this talk, this installment is also linked to a full performance of CMS by the Western Illinois University Singers. I will tell you at what minute you can hear the pieces of music the audience at Linden Ponds heard--and a couple of other pieces I mention, too.

At the end of the last installment, I left you with the question Stephen and I wrestled with as we considered CMS: So if the ugliest, most violent parts of the story are over in the first third of the piece, what is the rest of the piece about? Just the resulting anger and pain?

So here's our answer to that question, and the final installment. 

The answer is no. Stephen and I knew from both singing and listening to the piece that it acknowledged and dramatized the anger and pain of people, but it also delivered them from it. But we had to give some thought to exactly how it did that. In the prologue, as I told you, the singers vowed to be open to the story (at 14:30) but being open and staying open can be hard, even if we have the will to be. Stephen taught English in college, and I taught English in high school—and in puzzling over this, we found ourselves talking about what CMS had in common with a Walt Whitman poem that we both loved: (Slide 29) “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” Don’t worry if you’ve never read it or haven’t read it in ages.

“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” is about the deaths of Abraham Lincoln* and of so many young men who died in the Civil War. Whitman despaired over the wasteful deaths of so many young men—and really despaired when Lincoln was assassinated, though, of course, many Americans did not: Whitman had believed that Lincoln alone could reunite a frightfully divided America in which so many had lost so much. 

Like Whitman, Johnson, wanted to help people move beyond paralyzing, unbearable mourning. And also like Whitman, Johnson wanted people—the country and the world—to move beyond destructive division back to commonality and unity.

      

      In terms of the moving people beyond paralyzing unbearable mourning was concerned,  

• this meant writing music that could help people to appreciate death as part of something bigger and eternal--as part of a natural cycle, and therefore as a source of life—so in CMS, you’ll find both cyclical time—the time of nature—and linear time—the time of history.
• It also meant writing music that could help people understand death not just as the cause of suffering, but also, in some circumstances, as an end of suffering.
• It also meant writing music that could help people to accept their sadness—hopefully, over time, their non-crippling sadness--as a natural response to the memory of death.

Walt Whitman

As far as the second bullet goes, this meant writing music that would oh so very gently encourage people

• to recognize and explore their own human complexity—and
• to acknowledge and experience the humanity they shared with others, including those they were inclined to regard as the monstrous “other.”

In supporting people to be open to all of the above, Johnson used a lot of the same techniques Whitman did:

• He mixed genres—literary genres and musical genres.
• He employed a lot of visual language.
• He employed motifs—repeating images, or patterns of images that recur throughout a work—and therefore help to unify it. You may want to pay attention to the many references, explicit and implicit, in this work to parents, to human hearts—and to fences.
• He presented many voices—inner ones, outer ones. And with those multiple voices always invariably came a multiplicity of perspectives—so many different angles from which to see events and the world. You might be surprised by who and what speaks in this piece.
• He relied on allusions, on references to and even direct quotations from other music and literature and history and religious traditions that might somehow resonate with us—we saw this in “A Protestor.”



When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, Wordle**

• He wrote a long work divided into sections that create a journey. Sometimes he juxtaposed two contrasting sections. Sometimes he balanced one section with a related section later in the piece. Invariably he gets us to think and feel from different perspectives as we make the journey.

Since we’ve already talked about #9 (at 27:56), I want to tell you to pay attention to #10—because #9 and #10 juxtapose two very different mothers' voices—and two very different musical traditions. And I believe #10 (at 32:25), with its blues/jazz style, its unnamed mother grieving deeply over the death of an unnamed son, intentionally evokes a whole other tradition of American hate crime—anti-Black hate crime. Johnson seems intent on acknowledging all hate crime victims and comforting all sufferers.

Meanwhile, in terms of sections that balance each other, the mothers of the Westboro Baptist Church don’t get the final word when it comes to lullabies in CMS: #26 (at 1 hour 11 minutes) also sung by the women, restores the sweet dream potential that lullabies usually have.

So I’d like to play you just a couple more short selections from the Passion section of CMS so you can hear a few of these techniques in action.

First, I’d like to play just the choral beginning of the piece that sits right at the middle of CMS. But before I do, I want to share with you a part of my story—because, let’s face it, each one of us brings their own story to Considering Matthew Shepard –and to any work of art. I was a teacher at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in 2013 when the Boston Marathon bombings happened. The Tsarnaev brothers both graduated from CRLS, and a number of my colleagues and our then juniors and seniors knew Dhzokhar***--he was called Jahar by those who knew him at CRLS. And lots of us had personal connections to some of the people who were among the most badly injured in the bombings. So pretty much everyone in the school was a mess—the kids and the adults. One day, a girl in one of my classes who knew Dzhokhar came to talk to me, and she asked me a question that, frankly, no other student asked me during that time—and that I’ll never forget. Her question was, “How do I know that I won’t change and become somebody who could do something just as terrible as Jahar did?“

I think of her every time I hear this next piece from CMS. The voices we hear here are tense, inner voices of an unidentified “I” speaker who addresses Matt’s murderers.

#16 "I am Like You" (at 55:00)

I am like you
Aaron
and Russell
When I think of you (and honestly I don't like to think about you)
but sometimes I do,
I am so horrified, and just so angry and confused (and scared)
that you could do things to another boy--they were so cruel and
so undeserved, so dark and hard and full of (I don't know)
Late one night I had a glimpse
of something I recognized, just a tiny glimpse--
I don't even like to say this out loud,
It isn't even all that true--
but I wondered for a moment,
am I like you? (in any way)
(I pray the answer is no)
Am I like you?
I bet you once had hopes and dreams, too.

Don’t think the whole piece continues in this way; it actually has a second half. As Stephen put it, “This tense and dissonant introspection leads into the stirring melody sung by the men in unison: We are all sons of fathers and mothers.” I think it’s really significant that #16, with its two-part structure, sits right in the middle of CMS. It’s almost like through this piece, we musically manage to round the spiritual, emotional Cape of Good Hope, this place of great risk, and we start our ascent to a better, less dangerous place—which doesn’t mean there’s only clear sailing ahead.

And now for the last piece.

The fence is a major motif that runs through the piece—it even reaches into the Epilogue. Here’s one of the fence pieces, one that explores, from a very unusual perspective, the human penchant for pilgrimage to places to pay tribute to the dead and, I think, to reckon with our own feelings. 

#19 The Fence (One Week Later) (at 43:43)****

I keep still
I stand firm
I hold my ground
while they lay down
flowers and photos
prayers and poems
crystals and candles
sticks and stones 
they come in herds
they stand and stare
they sit and sigh
they crouch and cry
some of them touch me
in unexpected ways
without asking permission
and then move on
but I don't mind
being a shrine
is better than being
the scene of the crime

I want to assure you, since you’ve just listened to a couple of the more “troubled” pieces in the Passion, that there’s much more affirmation than angst in the Epilogue. I promise you you’ll experience affirmation and hope once you’ve completed your journey through the Passion.

So now that you’ve had a foray into some musical moments, I’m going to end with some more of Stephen Tooker’s words:

Laramie Wyoming Photo by Debi Milligan

“ . . . after experiencing CMS you may come to view CMS as unusually suited to our times. Mention Charlottesville, Charleston, Tree of Life Synagogue, whole immigrant groups labeled as rapists and drug dealers, immigrant deportation, family separations, children in cages. Cruelties committed when groups and individuals are seen as the other; their voices not heard. Could prophetic poetry work in here? Art as transformer?  (Slide 40) Note that even the murderers are not cast aside as objects of hate and revenge. While their acts are never excused, CMS works towards understanding of our flawed human condition and our commonality of experience: . . .. Instead of hate, fear, and division, CMS advances love, understanding, and inclusion. For the singers, this message is amplified by the act of raising our voices together, breathing together, feeling together, in short, making music.”      

Thank you for inviting me here today; thank you for being such an engaged audience—and I’m looking forward to seeing you and singing for you on March 16 [Note: March 16 is the date of our dress rehearsal performance at Linden Ponds; our final public performances are on March 28 and March 29.]

* Photo from Wikimedia Commons. "Broadway Blvd, Albany New York. April 26, 1865." timesunion.com. Retrieved March 10, 2020. 
** When Lilacs Last In Dooryard Bloom'd, photograph by David Bearden uploaded on 11/29/11. 
*** I blogged about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's death sentence a while back: https://soalready.blogspot.com/2015/05/digesting-dzhokars-death-sentence.html 
**** I blogged about this piece--this fence--in another blog in January: https://soalready.blogspot.com/2020/01/on-fence-on-maine-friday-morning.html