I was walking across the parking lot the other day, and I realized a couple of things that a few of you might consider morbid, or far beyond the scope of what I should probably be thinking about at my age. It's all good, though.
I was thinking at the time how music resonates with me, and I realized two things.
1.) Alfred Reed's Russian Christmas Music is the last music I ever want to hear. The other piece I want to show you is Russian as well; I think it's because there's so much utter pain in Russian music, but always triumph at the end. This is a recording of my university band performing it two years ago, before I began attending. I was in the audience, and I could not wait for this part of the program. I lost my program from that concert, too; apparently I threw it in the aisle at the end, but I was too busy cheering and then crying for no discernable reason, so I don't remember doing anything with it. It's fifteen minutes, but listen to the whole thing, please.
2.) The music I want played at my funeral is "Salvation Is Created", by Pavel Tchesnekov, for men's choir. And now I need to give a small history lesson.
At the time Tchesnekov wrote this piece, the Communist Soviet government had decreed that all Russian music was to be written for the State, and only for the State. Tchesnekov wrote the hymn in response to this edict, and wrote nothing else for the rest of his life. "I will write for what I believe," it says to me, "or I will not write at all."
He died forty years later, without even hearing his work performed.
"Salvation Is Created", performed by the Rhodes Singers
Lyrics: "Salvation is created in the midst of the earth, O God. Alleluia."
