In a couple of hours I’ll hop in the car and go hear Ken Kolodner, an old high school friend, play a concert in Cabot, VT. He’s a fiddler and hammered dulcimer player. His son, also a fiddler, will be playing, too.
Ken and I shared an apartment in Baltimore back in 1978-79, but I’ve never heard him play in public. It’s about time!
Back then Ken was just at the beginning of his life in music. His education had pointed to a career in public health, but music began horning in on his life in a big way – and it’s been his life for many, many years now.
Mine, too.
By chance, I recently came across a YouTube video of a performance of Bach’s “B Minor Mass.” It’s a July 19, 2011 live performance conducted by Jordi Savall at the Abbaye de Fontfroide, Narbonne, and it is by far the most compelling performance of the “B Minor Mass” that I have ever heard from the audience’s perspective.
Which brings me back to Baltimore.
When I was 18 and somewhere in my last month or so of high school in Baltimore, I sang in a performance of the B Minor Mass conducted by my teacher and mentor Theodore Morrison.
Now, the B Minor Mass is massive – pun intended! There are 26 separate movements and it takes two hours to perform. Its greatness is both in its imposing architecture and in its intricate detail.
As we were singing the last movement of this piece, the “Dona nobis pacem” (“Grant us peace”), I had an experience I will never forget. Without warning, and while I continued to sing, I had an incredibly vivid visual image of myself standing on a railroad track as a locomotive bore down upon me. In this vision, though I was not tied down in any way, I was powerless to move. It seemed inevitable that this locomotive was going to run me over.
And it did. The accumulated power and inexorable force of Bach’s B Minor Mass totally flattened me. I burst into tears. I mouthed the words to the rest of the piece while gasping for air. After the music was over, I staggered off stage, and backstage met a friend from high school, who I had somehow dragooned into coming to the concert. She, in a gesture of awareness that I will forever love her for, simply held my hand without talking, while I tried to blubber through my tears what I had just experienced.
That experience – the power of music, the image of the locomotive about to run me down, and my friend’s sensitive awareness of the significance of the moment – all came together and helped me decide that I would become, somehow, a musician.