[First published in Broad Street Review, 1 Aug 2017, and revised]
This is the part they don’t tell you when they tell you about composing. This is the part where every start to your piece is wrong, every note is wrong, every page you’re staring at is false and mocking and hateful, and you don’t know how to fix it. Two weeks and 26 pages go by. All you need are three pages, maybe. All you need is one minute, max—and not any of it is good.
They came to you because it’s the big Reformation anniversary, and they wanted a fanfare to “A Mighty Fortress,” and you’re a Lutheran and you’ve done this Lutheran stuff before and oh, You’re perfect for this, they said, This’ll be great, they said, and you said, It’ll be great. Just a minute of music, but you are further away than when you started, further away because you have nothing, and now everyone will realize, finally, that you’re not a composer at all and you never were.
No, they never tell you this part when they tell you about composing.
Sick of it, you slink out of your composing room and into the yard, maybe move some bricks, there are always bricks to move. You made a patio out of old bricks once, you know bricks well. Hitting together, they make a clock sound, deeper than click. And always a double-hit. A flam, drummers call it. They sound higher when someone else is moving them and you’re farther away—they almost ping—but when you’re right on top of them, it’s clock.
From the front and side porches you’d removed all the bricks that held up the half-length wood columns when years ago you had full columns installed, like what the porch originally had. All those bricks you carried to the backyard, stacking them into a low wall to hide the compost pile, then moving and re-stacking them later when you expanded to two piles. You bordered garden beds with them, you moved them again when you rejiggered the beds. You made brick holding areas for loose stone. You stacked extras next to the tottering old shed and when you tore that down you stacked them behind the new shed. You know the sound of bricks.
Chunks of cement sound lower than bricks. You broke up a sidewalk once and tossed the chunks onto a pile: thud for the first chunk, then, for all the others, tuckle as they hit each other.
Oh stop it, you’re wasting time. You should be composing. But you’ve always loved the personality of sounds. Maybe “loved” is too strong. You’ve always noted it. The hard susurration of an aluminum extension ladder being thrust up, somehow cold and warm at the same time, like swimming in a lake. The finch’s peep and the cardinal’s liquid pip and the difference between the adult sparrow’s cheep and the young, fuzzy, fledgling sparrow’s chreef-chreef-chreef.
George Crumb once told you at a formal dinner about how when he was a boy growing up in West Virginia he would hear a dog bark at night, way down and across the hollow. There’s nothing in the world like that sound, he said, and you looked into his smiling eyes and in an instant you understood the music of George Crumb.
When you were a boy you remember saying the Lord’s Prayer in church but you were embarrassed because you loved—yes, “loved” is the right word—the s sounds. You waited for the s’s in the Lord’s Prayer in your church, a new one, built after you were born, one of those churches built in the ’60s, concrete and glass and acute and new, cold and bright and metal and modern because nobody wanted in the 1960s to be old. Those s’s rang with white and sharp echoes. They hit your face like a message, they hit like a dive into water.
The s’s take a long time to show up in the Lord’s Prayer. It isn’t until “as it is in heaven” that they appear. But then they pelt—give us this day, forgive us our trespasses—trespasses, a triple, what a delicious word to say out loud, and even then, even as a boy, you caught the curve of enjoying that word while praying it out of you. Each s caromed off concrete angles and bounced off glass and sizzled in your ears, as everyone prayed and you prayed, as you said each s a little louder than the word around it.
As… we forgive those… who tres… pass… against… us…, each s springboarding and vaulting into the air. You could not write a prayer better than this, you’d think, ashamed at arrogating that office to yourself. The s’s slapped your face and you felt each tres and pass and against and us…. Sometimes you felt those trespasses more than your own: Yes, yes, you did.
And then it came. Lead us not into—here came the only sh in the whole prayer; all this time you waited for the sh; and here it came, here came temptation, the sh, the shun, from you and from everyone, exploding through the nave.
A forgive us is left and a thine is is left, and that is it.
You carry that with you still. The s’s are unexpected signals given for you, barks across the hollow, barlines in the music of the Lord’s Prayer. The irregularity as much as the sound is what you loved. It was like chant to you—you fell in love with chant in the same way, music in unlikely two-beat and three-beat chunks tuckling over each other. Like chant, like those chorales from the Reformation, those original, word-driven, non-smoothed-out versions of chorales like… oh, wait, yes, like “A Mighty Fortress.”
Ein feste Burg. Da-dahhh, dahhh, dahhh. One-two three four five six sev’n, one-two three four five six sev’n. That could work. That could be a fanfare.
A day later, three pages and one minute of music later, you have it. This is the part they don’t tell you. You were so worried about composing. All you had to do was listen.
Fanfare on Ein feste Burg. Commissioned and Premiered 20 Oct 2017 by Piffaro, the Renaissance Band, Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral, for the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation.