Lehigh University

Lehigh University Keeping Going with Music As in high school, and at RPI, what held me together, what kept me going, was music. “With- out music, life would be a mistake,” Nietzsche said, although I didn’t come across those words of his until many years later. When I see the young losers on Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley listening to their rap and rock ’n roll, or strumming away at their out-of-tune guitars, I know that they, too, are keeping going with music. On cold, empty, fall and winter days, when things became truly unbearable, I would go to the music room in Grace Hall, and listen to LPs through headphones. The room had soft chairs, couches, and was seldom occupied by more than two or three other students. I could listen to the records I couldn’t afford to buy. I listened to Renaissance music, any music that was not of the wretched time I was living in. I listened to an album containing the music of Giles Farnaby, an early 17th-century English composer. I thought that his “A Toye” was in its way a perfect compo- sition. And a work with a haunting, descending harp part that expressed an evening in another world — I have never been able to find the title or the composer, though I will recognize the music immediately when I next hear it. And Bach’s Capriccio on the Departure of His Beloved Brother, composed in Bach’s teens. I liked the sadness, the farewell in it. And Thomas Tallis’ Lamentations of Jeremiah the Prophet1 [“Quomodo sedet sola civitas plena populo...” (“How the city doth sit solitary, that was full of people!”)]. And the second movement of Handel’s Organ Concerto Op. 7, No. 52, with its ground bass (a short phrase in the bass that is repeated, with dif- ferent starting notes, four times, then the whole is repeated again and again throughout the movement while the organ plays variations above it). In my dusty blue room at 6 East 4th St., I listened over and over to Toscanani’s performance of Respighi’s Pines of Rome, and would often be brought to tears by the concluding march along the Appian Way, which conveyed to me the clearest visual images of any piece of music I had ever heard, albeit most of the images were probably derived from movies, for example, Ben Hur3. I saw Caesar in his embossed, sleeveless, shiny, dark-red leather armor; saw the blue Italian sky, the dust swirling up from the chariot wheels, and from the feet of the long lines of prisoners trudging behind, their hands tied, eyes looking down at the road. I saw the soldiers, spears upraised, dark red tunics hanging over their shoulders, shiny armor covering their chests. And along the road, the pine trees, dark green against the deep blue sky. I could smell the horses, hear the creaking of harness leather. And there was Caesar in his chariot, with the soldier standing behind him, whis- pering in his ear, as custom required, that he was only a man, only a man. I have no idea when I first heard this work, but to this day, it has the same effect on me, brings the same images, the same overwhelming sense of triumph at the end. And then there was the duet “Wir eilen mit schwachen doch emsigen Schritten”4 in Bach’s Cantata No. 78 as performed by Theresa Stich-Randall and Dagmar Hermann5, another recording 1. Thomas Tallis: The Lamentations of Jeremiah the Prophet, and Hymns for Alternating Plainsong and Polyphony, The Deller Consort, The Bach Guild, BG-551. 2. I tried for some 60 years to find the title of the work. The search was of course made much easier once Google and YouTube were available. I remembered the notes of the ground bass throughout this time, but not the title of the work! 3. “Your impression may indeed have derived from Ben Hur , or maybe Quo Vadis, but how about the 1953 movie version of Julius Caesar, which opens with such a procession (and, unlike Ben Hur, actually included Caesar)?... Respighi's music of course predated these movies (ca. 1924).” — J.S. 4. “We hasten with faltering but eager steps” [to Jesus] 492 Lehigh University I listened to obsessively throughout those years — and throughout my life thereafter. In the 90s, on KPFA, Berkeley’s left-wing radio station, Bill Sokol hosted a Sunday morning classical music program, for which this duet was the theme music. Despite countless weeks of hearing it at the start of each program, I never grew tired of it. In my seventies, it still brought me to tears. I could never get enough of hearing Stich-Randall’s soprano voice go soaring into the empyrean blue on “Es sei uns dein gnädiges Antlitz erfreulich!” (“Thy gracious countenance is joyful to us.” ). Heim and I were ready to marry any woman with a voice like that. But the singer we were truly in love with was Christiane Legrand of the first Swingle Singers album. (And she was French!) Even though, in memory, we talked about her in raptures on the way to and from jobs, this could not have been, because the first album by that extraordinary group didn’t come out till 1963, several years after I had left the East coast. So I can only assume we communicated our passion for her — especially as inspired by her solo on the Bach Sinfonia from Partita No. 2 in C Minor, BWV 8261 — via phone and in letters. Incredibly, we didn’t know her name, because the incompetents who designed the album cover didn’t list the name of any of the singers! So it wasn’t until some 40 years later that I learned who she was, thanks to a reissue on CD of the original album. The names of all the singers are listed on the CD cover. An article in the San Francisco Chronicle for 6/17/01, p. 27, makes clear that Christiane Legrand was the lead soprano, and that it was her glorious, bell-like, mountain-stream-clear, pitch-perfect voice with its dazzling technical virtuosity, that goes soaring through this immortal music. (Marry me!) There are some things that are beyond dispute and one is that Christiane Legrand should be adored and loved and provided with every comfort until the day she dies. Where is she now? Has she been taken care of, given the best, loved, throughout what is now a long life if she is still alive?2 Has there always been someone there to tell her what a glorious voice she has, that even though the record company executives will one day erase all remembrance of her, that she can rest assured that she brought hope and brief happiness and a reason to endure one more day to countless lost souls in this wretched age? Lehigh hosted an annual concert series by the Bethlehem Bach Choir, the concerts taking place in late spring in the tiny chapel on campus, people who hadn’t been able to get seats standing and sitting on the grassy bank outside. Yet, for reasons I have yet to understand, these concerts had no appeal for me. Possibly the reason was that they were something the university sponsored, and that therefore I wanted nothing to do with — Bach lost his power when the university had him in its clutches. 5. Choir and Orchestra of the Bach Guild, Felix Prohaska, conductor, Vanguard LP BG 537 1. Unfortunately, the recording engineer over-miked the drums, so that on the second half of this track, and on several others, the drums are annoyingly loud. It is amazing that the blunder was not caught before the album was issued. 2. “Christiane Legrand turns out to be the sister of film composer Michel Legrand... In addition to being the co-founder of Les Swingle Singers in Paris in the early 1960s (with Ward Lamar Swingle, who was studying music there on a Fulbright Scholarship), Christiane did vocal work in her brother’s score for ‘Les parapluies de Cherbourg’ (‘The Umbrellas of Cherbourg’). Michel and Christiane came from a musical family, follow- ing in the footsteps of father Raymond and uncle Jacques, who were band leaders in Paris in the 1940s. Their mother was Armenian (like Charles Aznavour), so perhaps that voice had Eastern roots rather than French. Christiane was still alive and well in 2001, directing her own musical spectacle “Ah! Vous dirais-je maman” (‘Ah! I would tell you, mama’) in Paris. ...she was born on Aug. 22, 1930, so she’s probably a lively old lady of 75 now... NOTE: You can download any of a dozen or so of her renditions as ringtones for your cell phone (//cristiane- legrand.ringtone.fm). What a wonderous age we live in.” — J.S. 493 Lehigh University I must confess that there were also a few pop music performers who kept me going: Fats Domino, for one. On just about any juke box you could hear: “Ah found mah thriull Own Blueberrih Hiull...” and “Ahm walkin, Yes indeed Ahm walkin, You know indeed Ahm walkin...” I had an image of the droopy dog members of his band, a few skinny, not-too-bright blacks (like Lightnin’ on Amos and Andy) who had just barely learned a few blues phrases and who didn’t even know how to create a vibrato, who stood there with knees bent, leaning forward like Zach Clements at White Plains High, wearing long beige jackets and zoot suit pants, holding these unfamiliar machines their saxes, and who played because it was the only job they could get.

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