Next Stop

True to my ritual greetings (and farewells) while traveling, I feel compelled to say something about Vienna. As a musician, this is a no-brainer. Like New York was to jazz, Paris to artists, London to novelists, playwrights, poets, Vienna has unquestionably been a powerful constellation in the galaxy of European composers. Though not all of those mentioned below were born here, many lived and worked here and you’d be hard pressed to find more exalted company in the world of classical music than Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Strauss, Mahler, Schonberg. Even Vivaldi came to Vienna from Venice at the end of his life, though it was a sad event as his patron died soon after,  leaving him impoverished. He died at 63 years old (like Bach, on my birthday!) and is buried in Vienna. 

 

No one is going to add my name to the list of Viennese music history, but I believe I gave a memorable workshop yesterday at the University of Music and Performing Arts—on Anton-von-Webern Platz right near the Arnold Schonberg Center! These folks know how to honor their artistic legacy!. 

So very few people actually listen to the music of Webern and Schonberg, so far removed from earthy rhythms and recognizable tonal centers and I understand why. The calm serenity that settled over the room as the participants played my arrangement of Rain Rain Go Away on the elemental wood and metal Orff instruments was an affirmation that simplicity that reveals the beauty of the harmonic series, based mostly on the first five overtones, is powerful and delicious. Not a virtuosic complex meal, but the grand pleasure of picking a ripe tomato from the garden or crisp apple from the tree. And then the dynamic rhythms of Boom Chick a Boom brought a different kind of life-giving energy into the room. I wish Schonberg and Webern could have been there and let me know how they liked it. 

 

If you’re reading this and wondering, “Who the heck are Schonberg and Webern?!!” my point holds true. Even if you listened to their music, you wouldn’t leave the concert whistling it. Still, I’m not dismissing them here. They came on to the scene after a long evolution stepping up the harmonic series into the distant realms of that stratosphere and made their mark, even if it proved to be a comma rather than an exclamation point. Schonberg wrote a supremely engaging and intelligent book called The Theory of Harmony  and though he was credited with dismantling functional harmony in favor of an “all notes are created equal” 12-tone system, he knew harmony down to its bones. No casual tearing apart of the past there. 

 

So that's my little lesson in "modern" (over 120 years old!) classical music. It's hard for me to talk about anything these days without a reference to what's going down in today's Disunited States of America. When I introduced Boom Chick a Boom and the legacy of black musical roots from whence it sprang, it was the moment to acknowledge the horror of what’s going down back home. I told the people that I have never felt more ashamed of my fellow American citizens who brought this on and who still mindlessly and heartlessly support it and have never felt more proud of my fellow American citizens who are speaking out when they used to be silent and showing up on the streets when they used to stay home. 

 

Of course, Vienna has its own history as some of the high points of human culture (the aforementioned culture of composers) and the lowest (Hitler was born in Austria and spoke in Vienna). The light and the deep dark shadow—it is everywhere in all times.

But it is one thing to read about it in history and another to live it in the daily news. I’ve been far away from it these last five weeks, but these days, one is only as far as a click away. It helps to be surrounded by beauty, meeting only lovely, intelligent and sympathetic-to-our-plight people and now, doing my work again that aims for healing. But it still hurts like hell. 

 

And so my brief stay in Vienna and on to the next stop of the train. Where this all ends is anyone’s guess, so nothing to do but live as fully as we can each day of the journey.