July 10, 2007
Chambered
Dateline-once-removed: Highlands, NC
Music is the most existential of the arts. Written, improvised, heard and unheard, there it is — getting our attention and making us its subjects, willing or unwilling, bamming along in its way and after its fashion, and then it’s all over, lingering, a commanding presence.
North Carolina’s Highlands-Cashiers Chamber Music Festival is a celebration of the world’s best music performed by internationally-known musicians in an unforgettable setting. As a bit of incidental intelligence, the gala got its start twenty-six years ago at the hands of an Episcopal parson who liked chamber music probably because that’s the usual size if not content of most Sunday morning gatherings in small-town churches. (Let’s hear it for reed organs wheezing out “When Morning Gilds the Skies” with a choir of three and a congregation of eight.)
CP and I attended the Festival’s first week last week (there are five altogether) at the invitation of the Artistic Director, a longtime friend and “adopted” son of ours. Not the least of our intrigue was the opening concert of “Jazz as Chamber Music.” The Emory University in-residence Vega String Quartet and the Atlanta-based Gary Motley Jazz Quartet, together, interspersed with informative commentary, explored and illustrated how jazz developed from and is related to the classical tradition of small, intimate groups of virtuosic players. The program ranged from Bach to Boling, from Thelonious Monk to Bartok, and from Debussy to Herbie Hancock. Some aside serendipity: one night included local thespians doing “Kiss Me Kate” and bringing Cole Porter charmingly to bear on how his music, chambered or otherwise, can transcend even the least of the amateurs.
Music is one of life’s better metaphors and should be sought wherever and however one can find it. It is especially so not only being existential by nature but even naturally so being done existentially. I like to imagine that Eden surely had some precursor of Mozart on its Muzak.
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