The act of doing it meant something – it was a part of the experience. Getting up at 3:45, in the deep dark of the night, dressing silently in the dark, scurrying out the door alone into the streets, that was part of it all. St. John the Divine is just two blocks from my apartment; I walked towards Broadway, where life was pretty dang busy with cabs whizzing past, people walking together and laughing, and even the halal truck up and selling food. In the middle of Broadway, the paper-white nearly full moon caught my eye and I had to stop and look at it for a minute. I love to remember that I am on a planet, whirling around in a solar system, twirling around in a galaxy, spinning through the universe. Little old me.

The cathedral wasn’t as full as it was for the Winter Solstice Concert, but it never is for the summer concert. I took a seat on the aisle and sat in the dark, thinking. One thing I thought was why are the hooks on a bra right over the spine, because that’s mighty uncomfortable when sitting in a hardback chair. I pulled out my moleskine notebook and a pen to scribble notes in the dark, hoping I’d be able to read them when I got home — I imagined the experience would be wonderful and I wanted to remember detail.

The extremely dim lights went down and the music started. A saxophone played from behind us, and then Paul Winter came up the center aisle, playing the whole time, and took the stage. One musician after another did that, and it was extremely cool. There was a Tibetan woman named Yangjin Lamu who sang this very high, wailing song**; her voice broke again and again but on the same note (not like yodeling, in other words, where the break takes the voice to another note). Her vocal breaks were almost like a stutter. It was such an eerie sound, like something from the ancient past. There were sounds that were so deep they were nearly just a rumble, so deep they almost didn’t have a note. I thought about how deep rumbling is so closely associated with something wrong, something terrifying, something of the earth itself. There were spaces of silence, where last notes hung in the giant space until they faded, and after a space of no sound, something else began. It reminded me of the great OM, where the silence after the last sound is part of the OM itself.

The musicians played for two hours, sometimes performing solos and sometimes together with others – voices and instruments – without a real break between songs. They just kind of flowed around like streams of water, one into the other, mingling and overlapping and then something else emerging. There were some sounds that were so mysterious, I couldn’t tell if they were voices or instruments. None of the vocal music was in English — most contained just sounds, but any words were in languages other than English.

Why are minor chords so dark? There is such great relief when it moves into a major chord. I know so little about the psychology of music, I’m sure someone could talk about the differences between minor 5ths and 7ths and how and why they’re colored differently.

Just as in the Winter Concert, Arto Tunçboyacıyan was part of the ensemble and his voice alone was worth getting up at 3:45. I think I could listen to him forever.

Sitting in the dark of a gothic cathedral, you can really see the spaces carved out by the architecture — the even darker spheres shaped by the domes over the apse, the pointed shadows that hang near the tops of the arches, the long hollow spaces made by the barrel vaults. Darker shadows in a dark space, but shadows that are in very particular shapes. The stained glass windows above the apse were illuminated a bit by the moon, just enough to see indistinguishable shapes, but with a big slash of brilliant deep red. As the light came up with the sun, the figures in the smaller windows around the clerestory, which were set in backgrounds of dark blue glass, looked like people just hovering high above.

[this note I scribbled just to relieve some of my irritation: dude behind me: can't you shut up and stop sharing all your thoughts for 2 hours? for the record, whispers are really loud in a silent space.]

At the end of the concert, the first word was spoken. Paul Winter finished playing his note, stepped toward the microphone, and said Good Morning. It was the most wonderful thing – the audience laughed with something like relief and happiness.

When I turned around to leave, I saw the gorgeous sky-blue rose window:

It’s too bad the stained glass windows don’t show up in this photo (both taken with my phone), because the blues and reds are gorgeous.

It wasn’t as joyous or intensely moving as the Winter Solstice Concert (here’s my post about that one), but I’m glad I went. I do wonder why the summer solstice is welcomed with quiet, and the winter solstice is welcomed with noise and flash — something like whistling in the dark I guess. I may not go again next year, though I’ll always try to go to the winter concert. Maybe the summer just isn’t scary, and we don’t need courage to face it, as we do the dark winter.

***

A Summer Solstice Poem: The Summer Day, by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

**If you want to hear the ancient style of Tibetan singing, listen to this, starting around 2 minutes and 30 seconds: