ETERNITY
ETERNITY
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS: Eternity from Ten Blake Songs
He who binds to himself a Joy
Doth the wingèd life destroy;
But he who kisses the Joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.
The look of love alarms,
Because it’s fill’d with fire;
But the look of soft deceit
Shall win the lover’s hire.
Soft deceit and idleness,
These are Beauty’s sweetest dress.
- William Blake
Eternity is the only text out of Vaughan Williams’ cycle of William Blake settings which is not taken from The Songs of Innocence and Experience. Instead, it’s an assemblage of fragment sketches collected by Blake under the title Several Questions Answered. If these lines are the answers, what were the questions?
This song mystified me for the longest time, because I didn’t realize that the text was actually three different adages, as opposed to one cohesive poem. The only detail about the song that initially jumped out at me was the endless lines the poor oboist is forced to play throughout, long phrases that seem seamless and un-ending – the musical conjuring of eternity for any instrument that requires human breath to speak.
I’ve been drawn back to this collection of songs simply because I have the time to complete this project as I wile away the weeks of this concert-less lockdown. Still, I think there is more to these musical miniatures that has inspired me to finish this project now. There is so much about this time of enforced stillness for musicians which speaks to these poems, and more broadly to the creative process itself.
The first adage in Vaughan Williams’ setting is clearly akin to the Latin saying carpe diem or “seize the day”. But there is something infinitely more gentle about Blake’s image that almost admonishes those who, like Robin Williams’ inspiring teacher in Dead Poets Society , encourage us to grasp the present moment, milking it to its fullest. If anything, Blake suggests a much more sensuous and loving approach to the moment. Rather than try to suck it dry or crush it with our meaty hands as we attempt to grasp hold of it, he asks us to brush it with our lips as it floats by us, which it inevitably must. The flow of time cannot be stopped. Imagine how our lives would be filled with kisses, if we took the time to bestow that kind of affection on each joy as it drifted by.
Most musicians are drawn to this life and this art as a calling: I sing because I must. The tagline to this blog has always been “The only time it all consistently makes sense is when I sing”, and I feel the truth of that statement every second of every day. In a time where live performances as we had known them are impossible, it would be so easy to simply give up and sink into despair – a temptation I have admittedly succumbed to occasionally during this hiatus. Robbed of the external structure which ensures that I make music almost every day – the calendar of engagements, the rehearsal schedule, the performance days – these past 5 months have really forced me to contend with how that framework allows me to become negligent about nurturing my relationship with my muse. Running from thing to thing, with a long list of pieces to study for each engagement on top of the plane tickets to buy, hotel rooms to coordinate, and social media updates to post, it’s not hard to lose touch with why I have chosen to devote my life to this art form in the first place.
When the exoskeleton of my (and everyone else’s) schedule collapsed in early March, and I stared down a long tunnel of performance cancellations with no certain end in sight, I had to ask myself: “Do I want to practice?” Once I decided I did, I was confronted with the most bewildering question of all: since I don’t have to practice anything for any particular purpose, what do I want to sing? Guided only by my whims for the first time in a long while, I’ve found myself pulled in a wide variety of directions. I dusted off opera arias by Mozart and Glück that I hadn’t thought about in over a decade, discovered Buxtehude cantatas I had never even known existed, and reacquainted with art songs by Wolf and Finzi that I’ve not glanced at since college. I’ve even spent some time sight-reading Bach chorales at my piano to brush up my extremely remedial keyboard skills.
Each of these moments of practice have brought profound joy and have lifted me from the despair of seemingly endless updates about concert cancellations, nervously awaiting the end of the supplementary weekly $600 from the CARES Act, and examining my life-savings to figure out ways to financially weather this storm. Showing up each day to practice has felt a lot like kissing each of these joys as they have flown by, and it has buttressed my big hopes for the future, after this pandemic lockdown has passed. At the beginning of all this, my muse gave me the illusion that it had disappeared. But in reality, Music is always there, matching my devotion with equal constancy. All I need to do is be willing to show up in the practice room. In that sense, there is a luxury to this time of enforced ‘idleness’ – it has allowed me to experience ‘beauty’s sweetest dress’.
As I fantasize about a return to concertizing post-COVID, I hope I will carry forward these lessons. I need time to be idle in order to experience and romance my muse, Music, my lifelong partner. In some ways, when I think about the enforced thirty minute practice sessions and much-resented violin lessons during Friday recess which introduced us during my early childhood, our story feels a bit like the plot of a romantic comedy in which the protagonists express disdain for each other at first, only to confess an epic love for each other by the end of the story. Music kept me alive as a lonely and depressed pre-teen feeling his other-ness come into sharp relief through my middle and high school years. It has carried me to some of my most joyful experiences in life, facilitated almost all of my most-treasured friendships and romances, and comforted me during my darkest moments. Stealing moments to reconnect with it is the least it deserves, and reinvigorates me and my sense of wonder in untold ways. Every challenge and bump I encounter on this pathway of a musical life (even pandemics) are not catastrophic endings, they are simply a bit of a tease. It’s my muse playing coy, reminding me of the importance of our relationship, and simply inviting me to lean in harder, with more devotion, and to continue to fill my life with joyful kisses.
This project is a fiscally sponsored project of FRACTURED ATLAS, and was made possible in part through a grant from SAN FRANCISCO FRIENDS OF CHAMBER MUSIC / INTERMUSIC SF.
To find our more information and to make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE donation to support the continuation of this project please visit: https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/nicholas-phan-recording-projects