Last night we drove into Boston after the thundersnow (yes! thundersnow! score!) to see the Tallis Scholars. It was the most amazing concert I’ve been to in years.
The group is dedicated to renaissance polyphony, focused around the works of Thomas Tallis, who lived in the first part of the 16th century. This is music that was written about 100 years before JS Bach or Issac Newton were born. Music was still primarily associated with worship, and there was a strong association between mathematics and the divine. The patterns of harmony, the periodic appearance of planets and stars, and the ideal proportions and relations of geometry were re-surfacing in the western world. This was before solo singing, before the scourge known as vibrato was needed to support solo singers belting out tunes over an orchestra. Europe was just starting to accept multiple voices in harmony as opposed to unison chant. It was all very much intended as a form or worship in a very dark and harsh time.
It’s the most beautiful style of music ever written. Words like “transcendent,” “angelic,” and “soaring” come to mind. I’ve got several of their CDs, but the live version was far beyond the recordings. Perfect music was created 500 years ago, and it’s gone downhill pretty steadily since then. Not 100% downhill, I’m being hyperbolic, but there’s some element of truth there for me. It’s like anti-science: Once upon a time, people got art exactly right, and have been screwing it up more and more ever since.
the concert was in a Jesuit cathedral near the Boston Medical Center. It seated maybe a thousand people. When it was scheduled to start, a chubby little man came out near the altar and said something that none of us could hear. He made his way through the room, repeating himself. At this point the audience was still waiting for amplification. We were shuffling around, muttering to each other, turning off our cell phones, and such. He didn’t have a chance. I’ll admit to a bit of worry at that point because there were no microphones on stage.
Then the Tallis Scholars took the stage, there were 10 of them. They started singing and something amazing happened. A thousand Americans sat still and quiet for two hours, and ten voices absolutely filled that space and shared just a little bit of the divine with all of us. This is music that was designed to have this effect, to capture people’s souls without kickin’ bass or effects or amplification. To be sung, literally, a cappella.
The very first notes were perhaps four octaves apart, low drones from the basses and floating high notes from the sopranos. They had the most perfect, pure vowels I’ve ever heard. A choir could work on nothing but vowels for years and never come close to this blend. The sopranos could open their mouths and, seemingly, descend gently from the sky to alight on a high C or D. The basses were unforced … the countertenor and the altos blended perfectly. Overtone series floated above every chord, and some of the transitions involved nothing more than a change of vowel to bring out different aspects of the overtones.
I was, no kidding, *this* close to having tears streaming down my face.
Honestly, it gave me a little bit of hope. I bitch a lot about how people are stupid, mean, short sighted, and the rest…but there are enough of us who are willing to pay a premium and drive through the snow and hail to see music written 500 years ago … that these people can dedicate their lives to it.
Early in the concert I had the thought “these people could sing the alphabet, and it would bring a grown man to tears.” In the second half, they did: “Lamentations of Jeremiah I” by Tallis (I think). The piece begins with a melody sung on “Aleph,” leading into the first verse. Then “Beth” and the second verse. The letters delimited verses, but the composer had decided that they were a perfect place to lay out the structure of the music for each section. It brought to mind illuminated manuscripts … with incredible weavings of foliage, icons, dragons, and the like surrounding what, at core, is just the first letter on a page.
I find myself filled with hope and peace today. We put up the outdoor and indoor lights, and hung the decorations on the tree.
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