Beth Taylor at Glasgow Art Club

I spent lunch-time yesterday at the Glasgow Art Club attending a really superb concert organized by Westbourne Music. The soloist was the Glaswegian mezzo Beth Taylor, and she was performing a programme of songs by female composers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

There was a lot to like in the programme, including three songs by Clara Schumann (which left me thinking that Brahms had learned a lot from her), five songs by Alma Mahler, plus pieces by Lili and Nadia Boulanger, Ethel Smyth, Hedwige Chrétien, Germaine Tailleferre, and Augusta Holmès. I think my favourites were the pieces by Tailleferre, Holmès, and Nadia Boulanger.

All the music was very strong, but what made the concert stand out for me was Beth’s performance. She throws herself into the music with absolute confidence and communicates it as much by her gestures and expressions as by her amazing voice.

Music and humanity

I was struck by this passage from Kafka’s Metamorphosis the other day:

And yet his sister played so beautifully. Her face was turned to the side, intently and sadly following the notes on the page. Gregor crept forward a little further, keeping his head near to the ground so that his eyes could meet hers. How could he be a brute beast, if music could make him feel like this?

To outward appearance, Gregor Samsa has become a monstrous insect (Ger. ungeheueres Ungeziefer, lit. ‘monstrous vermin’). His family has responded with hostility or indifference. He has come to be regarded as vermin and as a result is feeling increasingly isolated from the human race. Then he hears his sister playing the violin.

The music gives him the courage to dare to make eye contact. In response to what he hears, he risks breaking out of the isolation that has enveloped him. Music still has the power to move him. And in this capacity to be moved, he finds evidence of his continuing humanity.

The point is not really about the transformative power of music. Rather it is about Samsa’s capacity to be moved. To be human is to be capable of responding in this way to our fellow human beings and to God.

A Christmas carol for our time?

In spite of my doubts about its Unitarian origins, I do think one of the verses of ‘It came upon a midnight clear’ seems particularly appropriate given the mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza over the past three months:

But with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
Beneath the angel-strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song which they bring; –
Oh hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing!