Had a very special experience this evening. It was at a concert in the Music before 1800 series at Corpus Christi Church, my first live concert in a spell. The program was all concerti grossi by or inspired by Arcangelo Corelli, and performed with tenderness and verve by a newly minted ensemble called Helicon.
At some point into the "Aria: Cantabile" of a moody piece by someone so obscure even the ample program notes didn't mention him, one Evaristo Felice Dall'Abaco, I suddenly became aware of all the string instruments as a sort of community. All seemed to be resonating together. Indeed, the whole room was thrumming with them, the wood panels of the balcony and that cladding the columns and the pews. Beyond and enclosing the human gathering I was witnessing a musical gathering of woods in joyful mutual recognition. Of course, some let me ruefully reflect, the violins, violas and 'cellos would be moving on, but that just made the shared resonance more sweet...
I reflected that my last live string concert was before I took the deep dive into Roland Ennos' The Age of Wood, which celebrated the ways in which until not so long ago practically everything in human life, necessity or luxury, was made of or with wood, including of course musical instruments...
I wondered if I was able to pick up this wooden communitas because of a lovely book I've been reading, Métis writer Michelle Porter's A grandmother begins the story, whose many narrators include not only five generations of a human family (one of them already dead) but dogs, a young bison - and the grassland, which at one point tells the young bison about fire through its feet. (Every being in the novel's world inherits and shares songs.) Had I been let in on the party beyond the party at Corpus Christi by the wood in the pew I was sitting in? ...
But wood is dead, is it not? And yet in class we've just read David George Haskell's account of the after life - the life after life - of a fallen tree, as a whole new set of species make their homes and livelihoods of its wood. At some point during a sublimely agitated piece by Geminiani, the coordinated grinding and bobbing of the players put me in mind of the rhythms of animal jaws making new worlds of the decaying log, which delighted in their efforts...
The person sitting next to me didn't return after the intermission, so I got a more central view for the second half. Waiting for me, as the festal chorus of woods resumed, was a very elongated painted wooden crucifix of possibly great age, with a small Christ hanging from a very tall narrow cross. Everything came together.
