In advance of his recital this weekend, second-year MM student Tim Lambert shares his thoughts on the intersections of time and music.
Tim at age 6 with his cousin Tara
I have always been interested in cycles. The organization of our lives around manmade units of days, weeks, months, and years, is a fascinating example of the ways in which we strive to create order and meaning from a chaotic world around us. Despite the conventions being artificial in origin, I actually find the practice to be incredibly helpful. Life is chaotic. Experiences pass by in a rush of packed schedules, commitments, and obligations. At each new school year or the start of a new job, I find myself becoming pensive as I take stock of who I am and what the close of one chapter and genesis of another means for my life. As I come to the final year of my master’s degree program, I wonder where the time has gone. I ask myself: how am I different from a year ago? What do I want for myself in the next year and beyond? This process of taking stock and organizing my life around a unit of time that I can reflect upon is helpful. It orients me and gives me a sense of self and progress. All of us exercise this practice in our own ways. It is human nature to reflect as we come to certain markers of time – to arrange our lives into various periods of time. The natural world mirrors this with its own seasons. Each year, nature progresses from life to death to rebirth in a mystifying illustration of the passage of time – demonstrating to us that in every end there is beginning and in every beginning there is an eventual end. My interest in how the cycle of time and nature mirrors our own life’s journey formed the basis of my programing and led me to Brahms’s “Im Herbst” and Jonathan Dove’s The Passing of the Year.
Brahms’s “Im Herbst” from Fünf Gesänge, Op. 104 is a sublime retrospective contemplation of the end of one’s life. In it, the speaker finds himself in a somber autumn with a sinking heart as life draws to a close around him. Nature is silent as the birds have flown and clouds vail the sun. Brahms captures this perfectly with a simple strophic setting of the text, colored with lush harmony and unexpected harmonic progressions. Simultaneously, the music is simple and complex, mirroring the somber autumn backdrop against which the speaker sinks into dreary woe at the end of his life. In the third stanza of the poem, the tone shifts. Instead of residing in a place of despair at the
Tim at his 8th Grade graduation ceremony, with his father.
finality of his life, the speaker begins to smile in an outpouring of bliss. He realizes that life is truly like the passing of a year, and in its finality there is also joy because while this is the end, it is the natural conclusion of a full life.
Jonathan Dove’s The Passing of the Year utilizes the texts of several poets spanning the years of 1500-1900 to capture the seasons of nature and life and the meaning found in the transitions between them. Navigating from spring to summer to fall and finally winter, the cycle considers the ways in which each season of the year and the transitions between them reflect our own emotional hills and valleys.
The highlights of the cycle are its final two movements. Text drawn from Thomas Nashe’s 1600 play, Summer’s Last Will and Testament, forms the basis of the penultimate movement:
Adieu, farewell, earth’s bliss;
This world uncertain is;
Fond are life’s lustful joys;
Death proves them all but toys;
None from his darts can fly;
Tim at college graduation with his sister, Alaina
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!
Rich men, trust not in wealth,
Gold cannot buy you health;
Physic himself must fade.
All things to end are made,
The plague full swift goes by;
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!
Beauty is but a flower
Which wrinkles will devour;
Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died young and fair;
Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!
This strikingly emotional text unapologetically derides mankind for its attempts to escape mortality through the acquisition of fame, wealth, and power. Death is imminent for all of us, just as it was for every great figure throughout human history. While this may be a morbid and depressing text for me to favor, it is actually one of my favorite parts of the work; it is the awareness and acceptance of an end that allows us to hope for and celebrate a beginning. By acknowledging that each chapter of our lives–and our entire lives ultimately–will come to an end, we are able to enjoy the rich fullness of experiences that each episodic cycle has to offer. We can rest assured in the idea of starting fresh when we come to the genesis of a new beginning. Dove mirrors this sentiment by following this heavy, contemplative movement with text from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam in the final movement:
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Tim as a senior in college conducting Bucknell University Choir
Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.
Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
After an exploration of man’s mortality and imminent demise, the mood of this movement is hopeful and one of promise. It transitions from its ominous opening to a hopeful conclusion complete with vocal representations of ringing celebratory bells. It emphatically culminates with the shedding of the challenges and difficulties that ail us at the end of each cycle as we move on to the promise of a new beginning.
This is why I was so enamored with Dove’s piece. It captures what I have felt and continue to feel throughout my life. We are beings of change and transition. Our conception of time and repeating cycles of events may be of our own contrived design, but it offers a wonderful opportunity for reflection and meaning. As I embark on this culminating degree recital, I can’t help but find myself at another one of these cyclical crossroads. I’m not sure if I arrived on my final moment of catharsis quite yet, but I am glad to be able to explore it through this music with these artists.