Friday night, in Greenville, SC, the Bob Jones University Chorale gave a concert of Craig Courtney's sacred choral anthems, with Courtney conducting. I sang bass in the Chorale from 1999 to 2005. My youngest sister is now one of the altos, and Friday was her birthday. But my mind wasn't on the performance, the performers, the music, or even the composer, who has been one of my favorites since college.
In the broadest sense, music is sound worth hearing--valuable sound. What gives sound its value, though, is where humans disagree. John Cage, to the extent that he would have anything, would have listeners enjoy every sound for its own sake. E. T. A. Hoffman would have the Romantic generation devour Beethoven symphonies for their expression of infinite Sehnsucht. Hildegard von Bingen would have her novitiates (and perhaps townspeople) follow Virtue instead of Satan. Many others simply would have their hearers dance a certain way, enjoy a certain story, or hear a certain mood. In every case, the experience is most valuable to the listeners when their values are expressed in the music.
On September 30, 2009, my brother died. (Please don't feel uncomfortable; explaining why it's OK is another story, but I love to tell it. I mention it here only because . . .) Friday, also September 30, was the second anniversary, and my family had gathered to commemorate it and to celebrate my sister's birthday. When we realized that the concert would take place that night, we knew it would help us do both. What we didn't realize was how well it would.
My family and I were introduced to the music of Craig Courtney (bio) in 1999. Since then he has become one of our favorite composers. The intensely personal spirituality and relative musical depth of his settings (meaningful to cultured listeners, if not always accessible to amateur performers--have you heard this before?) have made several of his anthems something of family heirlooms for my mother the pianist and music educator, my father the choral director and Christian educator, and me the churhc musician and hopeful hymnologist. A cello was playing one of these heirlooms (MP3) as my fiancee walked down the aisle to become my wife. If I had to spend part of such an important evening at a concert, I thought, at least I might get to really enjoy some of my favorite pieces.
Courtney, however, had not built a concert around what attendees were hoping to hear. After an energetic opening, the program began with an anthem called "The Yearning" and progressed to songs of assurance and hope. The journey to Hope, however, traveled through a land of a specific kind of Sorrow.
Courtney introduced each song and its place in his program. When he reached "None Other Lamb" (to a Christina Rosetti text), he pointed out that he had written it and the following two anthems literally for three couples who had each lost one of their children. After he had lost one of his own, others had asked him to write for them. I had sung and heard "None Other Lamb" many times but had never known the story. I had not before heard the next, "I Know That My Redeemer Lives." But it was the text a dying girl's mother had recited while rushing to her side. The third, "None Like You," was one of my favorites, and Courtney had published its backstory in the octavo. But Courtney told each story with a frankness and restraint that only increased its setting's musical and theological tensions. The tensions themselves--from near-despair to celestial reality to purposeful praise--moved each other toward Hope in a musical-dramatic-spiritual progression that was as real as it was transcendent.
The three pieces could not have been better chosen. My brother's parents had come to celebrate their living daughter and commemorate their dead son. Courtney had no idea what day it would be for them. Most of the 500 people there had no idea what was happening in our row. But the values of the composer, transmitted through a live performance, were aligning perfectly with the values held by the hearers. It was a night I will never forget, and one I hope someday to relive.
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