I am not an artist, so my appreciation of artistic creation and performance is a sense of wonder.
As I sat in the audience of a concert July 19 at the Pierre Monteux School for Conductors in Hancock, I anticipated each phrase of Brahms’ Fourth Symphony, looking forward to my favorite passages of music.
How did I know what to expect? Where did that appreciation originate?
When I was young, my parents subscribed to a classical record club. I believe it was called Music of the Great Composers. Every month we received a new long-playing (LP) 33⅓ RPM record album in the mail: Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, Chopin, Grieg, Mozart, Debussy, Scarlatti, Hayden, Vivaldi, Handel, Mendelssohn, Dvorak, Respighi, Strauss, Shubert, and on and on.
I could not wait to play each new album with its bright blue label naming the latest addition to our classical library. I listened to them over and over, memorizing the music. I would try to compose my own pieces on the piano, mimicking my favorite strains from the recordings.
I did not necessarily connect the titles with the music, but as soon as a piece began, I knew what to expect — year after year, throughout my life, like generations of other listeners.
Imagine creating something that people will appreciate for hundreds of years after you are gone.
Listening to all the instruments of an orchestra come together to create a symphony evokes an appreciation of the composer’s ability to imagine what that combination will sound like. How do they do that? What is it like to live with that kind of talent — that ear for music?
Live theatre and some films evoke a similar appreciation of the ability to coordinate diverse elements to create a unified performance — actors, sets, scripts, sound, lights, music, make-up, costumes, choreography. Playwrights, screenwriters, producers and directors possess a vision similar to that of the composer.
Some plays and movies come and go. Others hold a message for generations of audiences. William Shakespeare continues to inspire audiences 400 years after his death in 1616. Imagine creating such a gift.
I recently read a novel titled The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt that expresses the same kind of permanence in visual art. Dutch artist Carel Fabritius died at age 32 in 1654, the year he created a small, relatively colorless painting of a shackled bird, a goldfinch. Tartt’s story details the value of that painting on both personal and global levels, portraying its emotional effect on individuals who love it and its commercial value on the world market centuries after it was painted.
How does such appreciation happen? I have decided it’s magic.
Music, art, theatre, film, dance all represent a constellation of experiences that overtake the mind and spirit of creator, performer and audience. Individuals merge into a separate reality — musician with music, painter with image, actor with play, dancer with dance — transporting artist and audience into another realm, if only for a moment.
And wouldn’t you know, when I attempt to explain what I mean, my mind recalls the words of poets.
In 1817, Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the phrase “willing suspension of disbelief” to describe the experience of an audience that knowingly accepts the unreal as real in order to fully experience what a writer attempts to convey. In his words: “to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”(That’s from “Biographia Literaria, or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Experiences.”)
While Coleridge does not exactly identify the transcendent experience of music or dance, Irish poet William Butler Yeats does, in “Among School Children” (1927):
“O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we tell the dancer from the dance?”
I think the wonder that affects my appreciation of those who create and perform enduring works of art grows from an awareness that they connect us to something beyond human experience, perhaps the immortal, as described by William Wordsworth (1770-1850) in “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”:
“Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.”
Kathryn Olmstead is a former University of Maine associate dean and associate professor of journalism living in Aroostook County, where she publishes the quarterly magazine Echoes. Her column appears every other Friday. She can be reached at kathryn.olmstead@umit.maine.edu or P.O. Box 626, Caribou, ME 04736.