I’m off to Seattle this week for a couple performances of Resonance by the Seattle Chamber Music Society (SCMS). Resonance is scored for violin and three cellos, and I’m really fortunate to have an outstanding group playing it: James Ehnes on violin and cellists Robert deMaine, Edward Arron and Jeremy Turner.
Resonance is dedicated to the memory of cellist Toby Saks.
I met Toby, the founder of Seattle Chamber Music Society (SCMS), in May of 2013, when I stayed in her home for a couple of days during part of my residency with SCMS. She took me on a hike of her beloved, adopted city that lasted several hours, and our conversation ranged over diverse topics, including music, philosophy, literature and exercise. I came away with a powerful impression of peaceful vitality. That impression was fortified on my next visit in July.
In August, the news of her death came as a tremendous shock to me. I had no idea that she had been ill, she was so generous with her time and attention. I recalled the story she told of passing to violinist James Ehnes the leadership of SCMS, an organization she had overseen in scrupulous detail for thirty years. When it came time for her to give it up, despite having invested a significant portion of her life to it, she did so without hesitation, and with no strings attached.
In the following weeks, I found myself unable to avoid trying to conjure Toby up in music. The result was Resonance, a work for three cellos and one violin. It’s a canon, with the cellos leading and the violin following. The violin takes up the gestures of the cellos in a recognizable way, but with a personal stamp, much as Toby gave James a framework to take SCMS in his own direction.
Over the course of the piece, the cellos splinter off to wrap themselves around the violin line in a shadowy, warm embrace.
Performance details here.
I was thinking of what you wrote here, how you sought to resurrect someone dear with music. Just recently, I was asked where a title of a new composition had come from. “A poem by Allen Ginsberg”, I replied. But I didn’t know what poem. I had skimmed through a number of poetry books, both Chinese and English, searching for words that connected with my new piece, finding “celestial crocodile”.
As it turns out, spurred by the question, I found the poem. Ginsberg had been in Benares when word of his mentor passing came. This was William Carlos Williams, who exerted a powerful influence upon Ginsberg. And so, he wrote “Death News” in lyrical response in 1963. Now, I feel a connection to Williams too, already having one for Ginsberg since my teenage years. We are all connected to all the terrible violence occurring too.
“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” Its something I first read in high school, but there was no resonance until a few years later when it hit me like a snowstorm upon rereading one night.
There is no snow or rain to speak of here in California. Those things have been choked because it has proven too great an effort for our civilization to change in order to save our earth. We feel no resonance with those who might follow us if they had a world to live in. The ending quoted is from a short story by James Joyce, presenting a powerful affirmation of life beyond foolish egos and selfishness. Let’s listen to the wisdom of artists like Joyce, Ginsberg and Williams so others may listen too one day beyond us. Let’s make the changes as brilliantly as Charlie Parker and Lee Konitz.