WHY THE BRAHMS REQUIEM?
I first heard the Brahms Requiem when I was in my last semester of graduate study at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. Robert Porco conducted the work and the combined choirs of IU sang. My husband sang in the chorus, and one of my closest friends, Shareese Arnold, provided the rhapsodic soprano solo. My husband conveyed his enthusiasm for the work many times prior to this performance, but I still hadn’t sought it out. At that point I didn't need convincing about Brahms' music. I was obsessed with his symphonies and famous Op. 77 violin concerto as well as a smattering of his other choral and chamber music.
I wasn't prepared for what I heard that night. I was no stranger to the aesthetic experience of goosebumps prickling from head to toe when music bloomed fully within my senses. I have felt the rush of dopamine, the lightheadedness, the opening of the gap deep in my soul as a result of music many times before. As a byproduct of my music education, I thought of music on both an intellectual and aesthetic scale. While I still could be captivated by music on a completely intuitive level, those experiences were fewer and farther between once I began to analyze form, historical or cultural context, and harmonic language. Music possesses the greatest of phenomena, though: no matter how much information any professional or layperson acquires about a particular piece of music, we still sit, united in captivated wonder, as an orchestra unleashes the opening bars of a Beethoven symphony. We are still captured in the grips of an unexpected tonal or harmonic shift, even if we know it is coming. We can prepare our minds for music, but our souls are something that we can never fully prepare.
The night I first heard the Brahms requiem, I sat in my seat completely transfixed. I was so captivated that I was moved repeatedly to tears. I barely dared breathe, for fear of breaking the spell that had been cast over me. The dark melodies glittered past me and I wanted nothing more than to capture them, to possess them for my own, to inhabit them fully. I felt like I had finally made eye contact with some deeper truth about myself, and I was terrified to blink for fear that the truth would vanish. The performance ended, leaving me full and yet empty. C.S. Lewis describes this phenomenon of longing so beautifully in The Weight of Glory:
In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
My first experiences of Brahms’ requiem were purely visceral. I didn't know much about what they were singing beyond the major themes of the Requiem mass, and I was too transfixed to spare the translations more than a glance. For months afterward, I sat in the music library listening to recordings of Ein Deutsches Requiem, chasing that feeling, trying to relive it like a drug. The darkness and sweeping broadness of the work captivated me, and as a human with an insatiable desire to meet the longing inside of me, I gladly fed that desire with the music of Brahms.
It wasn't until over four years later in the summer of 2014 that my appreciation for this work reached new levels. I will write more about that experience when reflecting on the second movement, but let me start by saying my obsession with the work was rekindled in a more powerful way than I ever could have imagined.
I have wanted to more deeply process the Brahms requiem ever since that season in the summer of 2014. I wanted to devote time to listen to it with intentional contemplation, to know Brahms better, both as a composer and as a man. I desired to know this work better structurally, historically, and intimately. More than anything, I wanted to more completely know the God that these biblical texts describe. I started painting again in 2014 and in earnest in early 2015, and by the end of August I thought it would be fitting to pursue a project painting illuminations of the work as a way of processing my questions, my overflow of emotions, and my desire for a deeper understanding of this work. At the conception of the idea, I was intimidated, to say the least. I told my husband about it on a long car ride back from Iowa. He got excited in a way that caught me off guard. He said, "Why not start?" I shrugged and confessed I was afraid I had not yet developed a visual language that was sufficient to express the things I felt as I listened to this massive work. He said it didn't matter; I could always revisit the material later, and good friends echoed the sentiment. He read me the biblical texts in the car and talked to me about the movements I didn’t know as well, and eventually his enthusiasm and willingness to believe in me rubbed off.
The next morning, I walked into my studio and cut a fresh 36x48 piece of Canson watercolor paper from my roll, hooked up my headphones, and began to immerse myself in the work that would become my obsession for the next three months. I saturated the paper with my spray bottle, rubbing the water in with my fingers, feeling the fibers stretch and wake up, listening to the melody lilt and stretch upward. I let Brahms haunting harmonies seep into my bones as I dropped ink and moved the paper and watched the pigments glitter across the fiber. I cracked open scripture and inhabited Christ’s words from The Sermon on the Mount, and stepped into a process that has occupied three months of my creative energy. I completed the paintings almost one week ago as I write this, and I've learned so much about Brahms as an artist and as a man, about the Requiem itself, and about the promises of comfort that scripture offers. I have also learned a lot about myself as an artist, gained confidence in my visual language, and I've had so many wonderful and interesting conversations as a result of this project.
Every so often, creative ideas pass into our world that feel like they are tailored to us. I really see the value of the intersection of arts in this project. As a result of my music degrees, I am able to study Brahms’ music structurally and in the context of music history and paradigm shifts, which lends these paintings, and my experience creating them, a richness that would be absent otherwise. I am comfortable processing and studying scripture in its literary context as well as in the context of my spiritual walk, another layer of value that would not be present if I had no experience studying literature or biblical texts.
It is my hope that others will look at this project and benefit from whatever fragments of it are most appealing to them. I hope that some will see some of the beauty, majesty, darkness, hopelessness, transcendence, and magnificent hope that seep from every page of Brahms’ work. I hope that some will feel their hearts and souls expand to accommodate the conflicting and messy emotions that Brahms’ monumental work forces us to look in the eye. I hope that others will see the majesty of the God that Brahms’ chosen texts refers to and ask the question, “What must He be like? Who is this God, and who is this Jesus that promises comfort, that raises the dead incorruptible?” I hope that some will simply be able to stare at these messy and complex paintings, reflecting on parts of their own experience, infusing the work with a part of themselves and the beauty of our shared experience of longing, suffering, and the hope that rises from it all.
I wasn't prepared for what I heard that night. I was no stranger to the aesthetic experience of goosebumps prickling from head to toe when music bloomed fully within my senses. I have felt the rush of dopamine, the lightheadedness, the opening of the gap deep in my soul as a result of music many times before. As a byproduct of my music education, I thought of music on both an intellectual and aesthetic scale. While I still could be captivated by music on a completely intuitive level, those experiences were fewer and farther between once I began to analyze form, historical or cultural context, and harmonic language. Music possesses the greatest of phenomena, though: no matter how much information any professional or layperson acquires about a particular piece of music, we still sit, united in captivated wonder, as an orchestra unleashes the opening bars of a Beethoven symphony. We are still captured in the grips of an unexpected tonal or harmonic shift, even if we know it is coming. We can prepare our minds for music, but our souls are something that we can never fully prepare.
The night I first heard the Brahms requiem, I sat in my seat completely transfixed. I was so captivated that I was moved repeatedly to tears. I barely dared breathe, for fear of breaking the spell that had been cast over me. The dark melodies glittered past me and I wanted nothing more than to capture them, to possess them for my own, to inhabit them fully. I felt like I had finally made eye contact with some deeper truth about myself, and I was terrified to blink for fear that the truth would vanish. The performance ended, leaving me full and yet empty. C.S. Lewis describes this phenomenon of longing so beautifully in The Weight of Glory:
In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
My first experiences of Brahms’ requiem were purely visceral. I didn't know much about what they were singing beyond the major themes of the Requiem mass, and I was too transfixed to spare the translations more than a glance. For months afterward, I sat in the music library listening to recordings of Ein Deutsches Requiem, chasing that feeling, trying to relive it like a drug. The darkness and sweeping broadness of the work captivated me, and as a human with an insatiable desire to meet the longing inside of me, I gladly fed that desire with the music of Brahms.
It wasn't until over four years later in the summer of 2014 that my appreciation for this work reached new levels. I will write more about that experience when reflecting on the second movement, but let me start by saying my obsession with the work was rekindled in a more powerful way than I ever could have imagined.
I have wanted to more deeply process the Brahms requiem ever since that season in the summer of 2014. I wanted to devote time to listen to it with intentional contemplation, to know Brahms better, both as a composer and as a man. I desired to know this work better structurally, historically, and intimately. More than anything, I wanted to more completely know the God that these biblical texts describe. I started painting again in 2014 and in earnest in early 2015, and by the end of August I thought it would be fitting to pursue a project painting illuminations of the work as a way of processing my questions, my overflow of emotions, and my desire for a deeper understanding of this work. At the conception of the idea, I was intimidated, to say the least. I told my husband about it on a long car ride back from Iowa. He got excited in a way that caught me off guard. He said, "Why not start?" I shrugged and confessed I was afraid I had not yet developed a visual language that was sufficient to express the things I felt as I listened to this massive work. He said it didn't matter; I could always revisit the material later, and good friends echoed the sentiment. He read me the biblical texts in the car and talked to me about the movements I didn’t know as well, and eventually his enthusiasm and willingness to believe in me rubbed off.
The next morning, I walked into my studio and cut a fresh 36x48 piece of Canson watercolor paper from my roll, hooked up my headphones, and began to immerse myself in the work that would become my obsession for the next three months. I saturated the paper with my spray bottle, rubbing the water in with my fingers, feeling the fibers stretch and wake up, listening to the melody lilt and stretch upward. I let Brahms haunting harmonies seep into my bones as I dropped ink and moved the paper and watched the pigments glitter across the fiber. I cracked open scripture and inhabited Christ’s words from The Sermon on the Mount, and stepped into a process that has occupied three months of my creative energy. I completed the paintings almost one week ago as I write this, and I've learned so much about Brahms as an artist and as a man, about the Requiem itself, and about the promises of comfort that scripture offers. I have also learned a lot about myself as an artist, gained confidence in my visual language, and I've had so many wonderful and interesting conversations as a result of this project.
Every so often, creative ideas pass into our world that feel like they are tailored to us. I really see the value of the intersection of arts in this project. As a result of my music degrees, I am able to study Brahms’ music structurally and in the context of music history and paradigm shifts, which lends these paintings, and my experience creating them, a richness that would be absent otherwise. I am comfortable processing and studying scripture in its literary context as well as in the context of my spiritual walk, another layer of value that would not be present if I had no experience studying literature or biblical texts.
It is my hope that others will look at this project and benefit from whatever fragments of it are most appealing to them. I hope that some will see some of the beauty, majesty, darkness, hopelessness, transcendence, and magnificent hope that seep from every page of Brahms’ work. I hope that some will feel their hearts and souls expand to accommodate the conflicting and messy emotions that Brahms’ monumental work forces us to look in the eye. I hope that others will see the majesty of the God that Brahms’ chosen texts refers to and ask the question, “What must He be like? Who is this God, and who is this Jesus that promises comfort, that raises the dead incorruptible?” I hope that some will simply be able to stare at these messy and complex paintings, reflecting on parts of their own experience, infusing the work with a part of themselves and the beauty of our shared experience of longing, suffering, and the hope that rises from it all.