Tacet

Well, hi. It’s been a few months, a personal “tacet” of sorts. In music, when a part in a score is marked “tacet,” it means that the player waits out a lengthy section or even an entire movement. From the Latin, tacet literally means “it is silent.”

Back in college, our orchestra was playing Tchaikovsky’s 4^th Symphony. Oboes are tacet for 132 bars of the 3rd movement. In the middle of that tacet, my classmate, playing principal, grabbed her oboe and looked like she was about to play her big solo. Of course, I panicked and grabbed mine, too, having no idea where we were. It was clever but mean of her to haze me that way, and after that, I never over-anticipated an entrance again in my life.

I like the Latin “it is silent.” It’s a little flair of drama because all other musical terms (I had a teacher who called them “demands”) are in Italian: Allegro, Largo, Forte, Pianissimo, and so on. The Latin word is more somber, like a medieval nun gliding down a stone passageway humming Gregorian chant to herself.

I like to imagine that after a tacet movement, when the instruments come back again, everyone is happy to hear their voices. There’s an element of surprise – oh! There’s the oboe again, yay!

Lately I’ve been on a “writing tacet,” allowing my attention to stray toward a million non-musical daily minutiae. That sort of stuff dulls the music in me. It is time to get back to writing about how music is the doorway to something, somewhere Else.

Several weeks ago, I went to a performance of an original Easter work, a cantata composed by a friend and colleague. We think of a cantata as a musical work for voices and instruments, usually connected to religious stories or praise, most popular circa later 18^th Century. JS Bach wrote (they think) over 300 cantatas and more than 200 are still performed today. He’s the main guy if you search “cantata” and there are many (many!) groups, festivals, and entire organizations dedicated to these works. D’s piece is in the genre, and if we can ever convince her to record it, you’ll be the first to know.

After the performance, I loitered about in the lobby, eavesdropping and catching snippets of people’s thoughts about the work. One woman said, “I didn’t know I needed to hear that on this very day, exactly at this time. I suddenly don’t hate this holiday anymore.” She had a smooshed-up Kleenex in one hand and her other hand on her friend’s arm. The way she talked about how the music affected her affected me to my core.

In my day-to-day life, I sometimes go silent without even realizing it, overwhelmed by current events or the tedium of admin work or the angst of something way out of my control. And then I hear a beautiful, original, moving work and overhear how it has touched and transformed someone I don’t even know and I’m drawn back to what really matters, as if curtains have opened to let the sun into a dark room.

When I go quiet, I shut out all the sounds around me, even music. Working all day in a community music school, it’s impossible to not hear scales, etudes, Broadway songs, the anapestic beat of a young rock drummer. I hear but I’m not listening, and when I realize I’ve drawn the aural curtain again, I’m shocked. I’m hearing but not listening, like sitting in an orchestra in a tacet, playing but not playing. Lost somewhere in the fog of my own “not-music.” Not-music is not-life. I have to wake up. Wake up and listen again, write again.

Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (BVW 140) - Sleepers Wake is arguably JS Bach’s most famous cantata. I am not a German speaker, so must rely on the translations of others, and there are many. My favorite of them is “Wake Up, the voice is calling us.”

Thank you Johann. Thank you Deborah. End of tacet.