New Friday Anniversary Thoughts— PART II of Communing in Performed Sound at St. Stephen’s
For nearly two centuries, St. Stephen’s music participated richly in the sacred through liturgical works and in the city’s “high” cultural life. In 2018-19, possibilities expanded with four concerts of a different nature.
These instead featured contemporary secular music in the belief that, as I proposed in Part I, all serious music participates in the sacred.
Such music also widens the church’s human reach. St. Stephen’s new offerings were solo jazz piano programs that gathered a diverse community around one musician and instrument in the embracing, acoustically sensitive sanctuary. There, they created a unique, sophisticated musical language that responded to its setting, joining all in the sacred and to one another. Everyone was taken someplace new, absorbed within St. Stephen’s fluid redefined congregation.
I say this because I was there. I felt it and heard about it from the performers and others in the audience. This experience with jazz, a new musical form for me, took me on a special journey within the special place that is St. Stephen’s.
The conceptual foundation, however, came from the series’ curator, jazz pianist, composer, educator, and activist Fred Hersch. So, for Part II of our Anniversary Thoughts on Performed Sound at St. Stephen’s, I’ll focus on what I learned about music (and especially jazz), space and us from him.
For Fred, music flows into and from life lived in rich connection, as in his own case.
Fred Hersch. Photo: Vincent Soyez
His 2017 memoir, Good Things Happen Slowly: A Life In and Out of Jazz, traces his bumpy path to becoming a many-layered human who integrated incompatible guises. Nourished by loved ones and community, he is a musician who is now an openly gay activist for gay rights--and is HIV-positive. He is rooted in the world through Buddhist insight (vipassana) meditation. Intensely socially engaged, he retreats to the refuges of his practice—and nature--to be restored, but also draws music from them. For Fred, music is awareness and communication, talking through sound, rhythm, space, and propulsion, with and without words. He considers the best jazz performances continuous storytelling (Hersch, 131).
Fred’s music-language also listens, responds. That’s in part, I imagine, because he’s an improviser. Whether exploring a new take on an old tune or inventing, each encounter is unique, shaping music with a particular piano, space, other musicians, and us, the listeners. The key: being present with all of oneself in all facets of the surrounding reality, the moment, as in insight meditation. When all of music’s elements work together, they engage the mind, heart, and body of performer and listener alike. Fred’s subtle dancing as he plays is as infectious as his music.
A mood and relationship with space and us evolve, shaping the interaction. In the best of moments, all facets coalesce into a transporting, eloquent whole.
Fred’s subject for the St. Stephen’s series, the future of jazz piano, sought to illuminate different dynamic paths forward for jazz piano with the new generation. He chose his favorite format, solo piano, as “a true test of pianistic resources, imagination, and awareness of all of the many historical styles of jazz piano” (program press release). Thanks to Fred’s stature as both activist and “arrestingly innovative” musician (Vanity Fair’s much quoted description), his inaugural benefit performance drew new communities to St. Stephen’s. Gary Day of the Philadelphia Gay News applauded his achievement and mission despite precarious health. Musicians and music lovers from many camps and colors gathered at St. Stephen’s for the first time for his concert.
According to those present, Fred’s performance meshed movingly with its setting. Margaret Darby, pianist/critic for Philly Life & Culture, wrote that to hear his music played in the quiet sanctuary of St. Stephen’s was a “meditative experience.”
Fred thus set the stage for his younger colleagues who performed at St. Stephen’s over the following months. All experiences, each unique, proved galvanizing and transcendent.
So stay tuned to explore them next Friday, June 2!
— Suzanne Glover Lindsay, St. Stephen’s historian and curator