Castalia 365
Tears
Dear Friends,
It’s a honor to share with you…
Tears
for piano
composed and performed by Ishmael Wallace
Music can register the presence of spirits. In Schubert, for example — a single note, and the quality of light has shifted. We sense something has arrived in the worlds above — a cloud. Clouds are not always a bad thing: they can mean rain, rain sometimes badly needed. Earth can receive moisture, our heart become fruitful once again.
The great Italian poet Ungaretti writes,
M’ illumino
d’immenso1
(Mattina, from Sentimento del tempo, 1933)
This is completely precise.
But it speaks not of something earthly; it speaks of something beyond — something we sense in the long u, in the inward m’s.
His contemporaries found scandal in this — felt poems such as this were devoid of meaning, devoid as they were of precise earthly referents. They were mistaken, but right in longing for understanding, in believing that a poem should have meaning.
When Antonin Artaud calls for a nonverbal theater, he is speaking from a great longing to go beyond the things of earth, to reach the world of myth. We would be wrong in taking this for refusal of meaning.
But loss of interest in meaning can occur. It is likely a sign of trauma. One becomes content with a certain opacity. A composer, for example, may say, perhaps even believe, that in a certain moment the notes don’t really matter…
How much they matter! Though it speak not of earthly things, our art is a speaking — a speaking in which that rain may reach us which restores life to our heart.
Thank you so much.
With every good wish,
Ishmael
Music as a Path:
I coach musicians online, guiding composers and performers alike to deeper connection with the Muse. For details, please see my website:
"I flood myself with light / of the immense” (translation by John Frederick Nims, in The Poem Itself, Pelican).