Joy restored

I spent the last few months in a funk. Hiding from the telephone, telling my kids to leave me alone, burying myself in my iPod and the Internet. I felt like I was in mourning, but I didn't know what for. I felt like I was never going to be really happy again.

Tonight I broke out of that for a few hours. I don't know how long I can hold onto this feeling, but my heart is moved and my soul is full. I sang Bach and Mozart with my choir for two hours, after sharing a German meal with them. I could feel every cell in my body; I was alive to my core.

We had been on summer hiatus since May, when we had our annual Festival, our 99th. I didn't realize how much I missed it, how much I missed the people as well as the music, until I was there amidst it all. It had seemed like work that first week in May, with rehearsals every night, seeing my family only for a couple of hours each night, coordinating soccer practices and scout meetings with my rehearsals and concerts. But now, it's all just magic. We're learning new music (well, new to this particular group, and some is new to me), and it's Mozart, even though we're a Bach choir.

We began by singing his Ave Verum Corpus, one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written (see more here and here). It is beautiful in its simplicity and reverence and brings peace to your soul. We then moved on to the Coronation Mass. You can hear Mozart's mercurial personality in the music. The arrogant boy, puffing out his chest with disdain for lesser composers, followed quickly by the awe-struck servant of God who is humbled by his gift. The Agnus Dei is reminiscent of the Ave Verum, but the Gloria breaks out in joy and contagious enthusiasm. I imagine Mozart as a very passionate and charismatic man-boy, someone whose supreme self-confidence made it impossible to take one's eyes off him, but, like so many geniuses, someone whose basic needs had to be taken care of for him because he just didn't register such nonsense. I feel in his music that he lived for it, that God began and ended with it, and that he had time for nothing else. Perhaps that's why he only lived to not-quite-36.

It is a miracle that we can feel the force of one man's personality 215 years after he died. Bach wrote truly great music, but, perhaps because I know it (well, the sacred choral stuff) so well, the force of Bach's personality doesn't hit me as hard as Mozart's. I may have become inured to its effects after almost 20 years of singing it (though the B Minor Mass still moves me to tears even after some 45 performances of it), but I think Bach's relatively long and happy life makes his music more straightforward, with less ambiguity. Not passionless, but passionate within the context, without the huge ups and downs of Mozart.

Music is a language -- really the only world-wide language. We don't all know the great composers of every country, but the universally-acknowledged masters, like Bach and Beethoven are known by all, even if peripherally. Imagine sitting down with a stranger from a foreign country and trying to convey one's feelings. All you need to do is find the right piece of music, and even if one's counterpart hasn't heard it before, s/he can get an inkling of what's going on in your head. It's Tower of Babel stuff! It's basic to our humanity, something that binds us as common inhabitants of Earth.

Douglas Adams said it best: "When I listen to Mozart, I understand what it is to be a human being; when I hear Beethoven, I understand what it is to be Beethoven; but when I listen to Bach, I understand what it is to be the universe." I think that's it -- it isn't that Bach's personality is less forceful than Mozart's. It's more that Bach's music is a basic ingredient of the universe; we're permeated with it, it feels like part of us, like it's always been there and always will be, like a force of nature, timeless. Its ebb and flow is our ebb and flow. Whoever the composer, communication is happening on a very basic, visceral level, and it can bring intimacy to strangers.

Joy restored. That's what it feels like. It was missing from my life, and now it's back. Listening to music is for me too far removed; I need to be part of the music, inside it, making it happen. I can't go to concerts because I want so desperately to sing or play myself. I like to sing alone sometimes, but sharing the joy is the real key. There is nothing like singing beautiful music with people who love it as much as you do. It's better than any drug.