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The Universality of Truly Great Music
To The Editor:
As a Juilliard product and a former church organist and choir director in the nation’s capital, I weigh in with Chris Simone regarding his concern about the elimination of “The Messiah” from the Garrison School repertoire.
There are many more complex compositions than “The Messiah” out there. (Try Bach’s “Mass in B Minor” on for size), and inability to pull together a performance of “The Messiah” reflects poorly on any school music teacher who cannot train students to perform the work in a reasonable length of time. If this were foreseen as a problem and it were important to perform the classic work, the problem could have been anticipated, and rehearsals could have been scheduled for much earlier. I cannot believe that Garrison young people lag behind their peers elsewhere in native ability, so I fault the adults running the show.
Incidentally, my vintage allows me to know something about prejudice in music. As a high school freshman at the start of World War II, I sang in a high school chorus directed by a remarkable woman (who never had a problem with Handel’s “Messiah”) who ran a first class operation. She imported four stars from the Metropolitan Opera each year for solo parts in our annual oratorios.
The year that I was a freshman, Miss Hazel Clark announced plans to perform the Brahms “Requiem.” Anti-German sentiment ran high, and a storm of organized community protest went up against performance of this work, labeled by protestors as “a memorial to German war dead.” The indomitable Miss Clark held her own, insisting that the work was a memorial to all war dead. The “Requiem” played to a full house in the Springfield (MA) auditorium, and we all learned something about tolerance and the universality of great music.
Upon relocation to Washington, DC, the next year, I found myself in a segregated school in a then segregated community. That was the era in which the Daughters of the American Revolution denied the outstanding black contralto Marian Anderson the use of its Constitution Hall for a concert. Although I missed the ensuing concert on the Lincoln Memorial grounds after the artist was shafted by the DAR, I did take one in at Watergate later on. From a stage floating in the Potomac River, the great contralto performed the haunting “Were You There?” as an encore, a cappella, with the sounds of her magnificent voice echoing from the bowels of the river. I have never heard anything like it and will never forget it.
I wish that the students at the Garrison School had been permitted to share the experiences that I have had in the universality of truly great music.
Catherine Portman-Laux
Garrison
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