This week, one of my YouTube subscriptions featured a short piece by the British composer Elisabeth Lutyens, a composer I’ve discovered in the last few years. Thematically, it distantly, yet insistently, reminded me of a very different song by the country singer Brantley Gilbert. The pairing that came to mind is typical of my “Country and Webern” musical preferences in the last few years, a pairing YouTube also recently delivered in Merle Hazard’s song “(Gimme Some of That) Ol’ Atonal Music.”
So, today I’ll just be sitting with these songs.
I don’t remember exactly when I came across Lutyens’ music, but I remember liking it immediately. What I didn’t like was learning that she was largely responsible for making the avant-garde music I’d grown up with the musical style for horror movies. I remember in high school, someone played some avant-garde music and the non-music students balked. One of them said, “it sounds like it comes from a horror movie.” But I’d grown up listening to avant-garde music - when I reunited with a friend from grade school, one of his keenest memories of me was the time I played Webern for my friends. So, the narrowing of association of dissonance to “scary movie music” was a bit like a dagger to the heart. I can imagine writing something academic called “Betrayed by Elisabeth Lutyens,” except that that would mean I’d have to watch a lot of horror movies, an experience I’ve never liked.
When I think about having something to say about her “Requiescat” in particular, the first thing that comes to mind is an incident from the summer between 7th and 8th grade when I went to a concert in New York with the composer Perry Goldstein, some years after I would see him regularly at concerts at UCLA. On the train ride back to his apartment, he asked me what I thought of the concert, and my 13-year-old self said, “It was OK,” and Perry reminded me that when I was a child, I would have lots and lots and lots to say about the music we’d hear at concerts, but I’d gotten “old” and taciturn. I was acting my age, but getting older came with a loss of insight. So, I wonder what my 7-year-old self would have to say about Lutyens - and suspect he would have been more eloquent about it than I am today.
So, here’s her “Requiescat,” composed the year I was born, for the death of Igor Stravinsky.
A full description would take me much longer to do than a casual Saturday morning writing session allows, so here are some initial impressions.
Following along with the score, I’m reminded that at one point I imagined my life to be a violist dedicated to playing this kind of music. From that perspective, I follow along with the score and am relieved that I don’t have to count the rhythms as precisely as the score lays out, particularly getting those entrances within a quintuplet right, although had I gone down that path, I’d have developed more facility with rhythm. I recently thought, if a genie gave me one wish, rhythm is what I’d ask for. But since my college journey was discovering I loved the library much more than I loved the practice room, I didn’t keep working on rhythm and I get a bit anxious just seeing those threes and fives in the score.
But I love the way she interlaces the string instruments - and overall my focus gravitates much more toward what they are doing than what the singer is doing, although as the song goes on, I’m more likely to shift my attention to the singer. It’s perhaps like the experience of the installation I saw years ago, where an artist showed the Noir film D.O.A. at slightly different speeds, and at first my attention was to the visual effects created by seeing the images echo each other, but as the movie drew to a close, my attention went more and more to one screen as I was locked into the narrative’s push toward closure. There’s a similar way here I shift my attention from sensation to meaning over the course of the song.
The meaning is clearly rooted in the fact that the song is a kind of lullaby for Stravinsky’s final nap. It’s a good example of avant-garde music being good at expressing emotions other than scary or unpleasant. There’s a kind of stillness she maintains that evokes the fact that death is the cessation of activity, a cessation that the song eases me into. Whatever Lutyens is doing, she is not making me scared. In this sense, the song is a reminder that I am almost certainly closer to my exit from this world than I am to my entrance into it. The song draws my attention to the coincidence that Stravinsky exited the world as I was entering it - which creates an almost uncanny image of the world as a series of fleeting beings, both fragile and interconnected.
Perhaps it’s this somewhat counter-intuitive sense that death can highlight our interconnectedness that made my mind jump to Brantley Gilbert’s “Fire and Brimstone” as the unlikely companion song to Lutyens’ “Requiescat.”
I tried several times over the course of my life to get into country music, and every attempt failed until July 4, 2020, when I had a sudden revelatory moment out of the blue that consisted of the thought, “I have to listen to country music now.” I plugged “country music” into YouTube and to see what I could find. In that listening session, my ears finally opened up to the point that I could no longer say “all country music sounds the same,” which was my basic experience of country music for most of my life. In that period, Brantley Gilbert became one of my favorite singers - in part because I found him handsome -
I gulped when I saw his picture - and partly because I was impressed with his craft and musicality. So, for the rest of 2020, I’d start most mornings with coffee and a Brantley Gilbert song, most often “Kick It in the Sticks.”
The pacing and feel of “Fire and Brimstone” is quite different than “Requiescat,” and it explores the edge of existence within a more firmly Christian mythic structure.
The song’s narrative drives a wedge between Christian spirituality and Christian hypocrisy, between religion as a community of support and religion as an occasion for moralizing superiority complexes. The lyric’s logic hinges on a theology that takes life as a journey towards God’s separation of people into heaven and hell for granted. This is a stance I had a very short-lived attachment to at the end of my teen years, but pretty much rejected by the time I was twenty, so outside of the context of the song, a lot of the imagery wouldn’t necessarily speak to me. This kind of parsing out of religion as both hypocritical and as a source of strength in adversity is something I find a great deal of in country music, and its negotiations of that tension have made me understand Southern religiosity in a much more nuanced way than my general aversion to the Southern Baptist Convention’s blessing of the Republican Party would allow me.
But the mythic framework that Gilbert explores is very much about the relation between what happens after you die and what you do while you’re alive and it’s that razor edge between life and death that links the thematic worlds of these two songs that sonically could not be more different. I’ve listened to “Fire and Brimstone” several times in this writing session to name some of his sounds, and words about the sounds aren’t forthcoming. There’s definitely a different flow of tension and release, a different approach to dissonance, but beyond that, I suppose I can note that Gilbert’s music feels more like a flood that I’m in, while I have an easier time observing while I listen to Lutyens.
I suppose both of these songs challenge me to take a moment to take that edge of existence more seriously - theology for me has been about affirming this life, this world, about the struggle to make this world fair and just. But the quest for justice for people has to meet a limit point, since all people are fleeting, and an absolute justice isn’t possible since justice can only serve people whose existence is temporary. I’ve largely neglected the way in which religion/spirituality is there to help us negotiate our relation to the “limit situation” of the boundedness of our lives and struggles to the inevitable passing we all go through. I suppose aging has been a reminder to hold that tension between embracing life fully, demanding the fullness of life for everyone, and knowing that we all have to let it go. These songs help with that last part.