Old Friends

When certain pieces of music have been in our repertoire for 25 years, or even 5, they become like old friends.  Picking up the piece is like a flash-back - stories of concert stages in foreign countries, faces we came to know personally, hours bent over the piece analyzing structure and form and asking God for a vision of what the composer was saying.  The music itself shows signs of familiarity - greasy finger-prints at the corners, spines that have been stapled and re-stapled.  And there's always that slight sense of letting out a breath when we see it's something we've wrestled with and come to love.  But, just like an old friend, there are always new layers to discover.  We sing the Mass for Double Choir by Frank Martin this weekend.  I remember cracking the piece for the first time and it felt so daunting.  Long sustained phrases with subtle movement requiring extreme sensitivity to all the other parts.  We've absorbed and lived with it now for a few years and I think it's safe to say we all love the work.    And it's incredible that still, after all this time, there are things we haven't discovered, a nuance we missed before.  And because WE change, and music lives, there are always fresh perspectives or a new vision to bring to it.  So that music, like an old friend, never becomes "old-hat"