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There is a direct way you can put words to music: listen to the music and put your words to it. Three poets, Lorna Crozier, Anne Michaels and Jan Zwicky, accepted Tafelmusik director Jean Lamon’s invitation to do that with solo works by Bach. Ms. Lamon also chose three painters who agreed to paint while they listened to Bach solos.
Here you have a painting by Margaret Shaw made in response to Bach’s “Suite in D Minor for solo violoncello, BWV 1008″. As we contemplate Shaw’s ascending spiral structure, Christina Mahler plays the sinuous ‘Prelude’ of the Bach. Its progress is leisurely, compared to the spirited benchmark Rostropovich. A reading by Karen Woolridge puts the words of poet Lorna Crozier to the Bach.
They speak of the cello that knows the lower body best, the heat “of the belly, / the bowels, the genitals—the sweat/ and stain of things, holy and otherwise, / their dark vibrations….” Forgotten is Rostropovich. Michelle Pfeiffer, the pregnant Witch of Eastwick, merges with Christina Mahler as the “dark vibrations” of the ‘Allemande’ begin to issue from “the clutch of calves and knees and inner/ thighs, the pitch and muscle/ of their sounds.”
Crozier has a poem for each of the five intervals between sections of the suite. Her words change how I hear the cello: “whale song echoing miles/ across the sea floor, calling the lost, / the ones without a mother, home.” |
