S'mores

The famous conductor Arturo Toscanini discovered the music of Samuel Barber when Barber sent him the score to his Adagio for Strings.  Barber was offended when he immediately returned the score with no comment.  Later Barber would learn that Toscanini returned it because he had already memorized the entire score. Toscanini premiered Barber's orchestral arrangement in 1938, two years after Barber had composed it for string quartet.  Barber's work was an immediate musical and commercial success and remains one of the most performed American  works worldwide.

I discovered Adagio for Strings in September of 1971. When I entered music school at the Enterprise State Junior College, the only music I knew was what I had learned at church, listened to on my family's stereo or heard on the radio. The "music suite" at the junior college was a large rehearsal room with a  grand piano and one other room.  It was that "other room" where I spent most of my time. Imagine a small, narrow walk-in closet. The contents were simple--three turntables with three sets of of headphones and a wall full of albums. I would think that some of my assignments included quality time in that room, but I didn't have to be told to go there.  If I wasn't in class or in the library, I was in that listening room. One fall afternoon, I randomly pulled from the shelf an album of the music of Samuel Barber. Holding the album with my palms I  reverently placed it on the turntable careful not to put my fingers on the grooves, and I dropped the needle for the first time on his Adagio for Strings.

I've been married to the same woman for over forty one years and I love her with all my heart. Our romance, however, was not "love at first sight." The night we met, we were mutually unimpressed. By a year and a half later we had worked up enough love to exchange meaningful "I dos". We did. And we still do.  But that afternoon at ESJC as that needle dutifully followed the groove on that record, and as those vibrations were transferred to my headphones and my ears as music,  my world stood still. It stands still as I listen to it now forty six years later. Different music medium. Different headphones. Same ears and same incredible music. 

If I didn't already adore the music, I discovered a few years ago a recording of Agnus Dei.  This is an a cappella arrangement of the piece which I learned the composer himself had arranged for unaccompanied choir and published in 1967. Now there was text to accompany the incredible music. And it was not just text, but meaningful text,  text extracted from that great body of liturgy know as the Latin Mass. "Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem. Miserere nobis." (ahnus dayee, kwee towlees pehkahtah moondee, donah nobese pahchem. meesayrayray nobese).   Translated: "Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, grant us peace. Have mercy upon us. Have mercy." But the words are not sung sequentially; they are sung simultaneously. As each voice part carries its text, the text is different for each voice part.  Even before  the listener knows any translation or  meaning, the effect is magnificent.  Then when  "grant us peace" is  sung simultaneously with "have mercy upon us", for example,  both phrases take on new meaning.  The combined words mean so much more than the sum of its parts. When marshmallows are toasted over  an open fire and squeezed between two graham crackers loaded with Hershey's chocolate, it becomes much more than the individual ingredients. And can you separate the s'mores from the chill, the crackling of the fire, the ascending sparks and the laughter? Who would want to. The first recipe by the Girl Scout leader Loretta Scott Crew in 1927 called the concoction "some mores".  Whoever later combined the words  created a catchy masterpiece. 

I pride myself on being able to recognize many different aspects  of music. I notice things about music that most people have no interest in knowing. Since I recognize and retain these aspects of music rather quickly, what happened last week came as somewhat of a shock. Over the past forty six years  I've listened to Adagio for Strings and Agnus Dei  hundreds of times.  Last week on YouTube I discovered and listened to a performance of Agnus Dei that included the vocal score.  For the very first time, I viewed the score as the choir sang. And right then and there before my very eyes was something my ears had never noticed in all my years of listening.  Samuel Barber based his famous Adagio for Strings on Gregorian chant. It was immediately easy to see and to hear how Barber's Agnus Dei was chant, but I also then understood that those strings in the original orchestral version  had been singing Gregorian chant all along. The melodic steps and small leaps could not be denied. And then Google confirmed what had been there all along. With no neumes or Latin text,  Barber had written chant sung by human voices for lifeless instruments--violins, violas, cellos and basses.  Not only was the vocal score transformed, but the orchestral score as well. Thirty one years separated the strings from the voices, but now neither can be separated. And why would I  want to?

I  excelled academically and musically during my first two years of music school at ESJC. And those six quarters propelled me to ten semesters of music education in two more institutions. But after seven years of music school, in so many ways I can trace a significant part of my education to that small room in Enterprise, Alabama containing  those headphones, turntables and record albums. None of them work without the other. 

Adagio. Agnus Dei. They even sound alike. You can't separate them.  And I dare you to try.