Nothing happens unless first a dream.

I've been thinking about this quote lately. It's from this poem by Carl Sandburg, who might have been the first poet I ever fell in love with. Seventh grade, man. I still have little quote-flashes of his emblazoned all over my mind. This one might have made it to the collection of quotes I wrote over years on the wall next to my bed. No one needs any more information to ascertain that I'm a nerd, but "if you don't know, now you know." 

This is a tough mental moment. We are fenced in on a lot of sides; maybe more sides than we have. The virus isn't going anywhere, but you can see our own resistance to it cracking and straining; we're breaking down just as cases are going up. There's an election happening in three weeks and I don't know anyone on any side who isn't tense and bracing. We're having to innovate in every single corner of our day-to-day lives, as the goalposts shift, and shift, and shift, demanding more and more of us and giving less back. To blindly trust in an outcome for any of this which is good, which is safe, feels... like something that's just not possible to do right now. But there's no question that despair is worse, and on the darkest days, that's the only motivator there is - not to move toward hope (some days it's just too hard to let it in) but to move firmly and decisively away from despair. 

And in the middle of this, A Far Cry is playing a program called "Dawn Breaks." And it is very beautifully, very overtly, a program about things getting better. It moves from Shostakovich's Quartet no. 11 to Juantio Becenti's "The Forest At Dawn" to a sublime, cradle-rocking Mozart movement, to the Beatles' immortal, incandescent "Here Comes The Sun." 

It is a BEAUTIFUL program. But it's been a struggle for me to know how best to interact with it in this moment. I feel like it represents - for me - something which is not - yet - here, something I can't trust in yet. 

So, I'm grateful to Carl Sandburg, for two things. First: for helping me realize that for me, right now, this program is a dream. Maybe a vision, if you will. A dream can lie between despair and hope. A dream might lay the architecture for something that will one day be filled with hope. But it's OK to dream first in the darkness. 

Second: for reminding me that nothing happens unless you dream it. It's not just a relief to dream, it's a duty - to walk over to your desk and pick up your pencil and start drawing lines on paper until the castle emerges. Dreaming is a right, but also a responsibility. 

I think Shostakovich, who begins the program, knew that. He was in so deep - in ways most of us can never imagine - that even his dreams had to happen in the shadows. But he still kept creating. Maybe his responsibility was just to make sure that art filled with truth still had a place in his world. Paradoxically, if you're Shostakovich, writing music that is not happy is more of a positive statement than writing music that is. I often feel, when I'm listening to or playing his music, that I'm walking down a long tunnel. I'm not walking towards some shining light at the end; the miracle is simply that I'm walking there at all. 

Juantio Becenti and I have a deep love of Shostakovich in common. When I read these words by him I cheered internally: "I first heard musical dissonance on a large scale when I was 17 after I bought a recording of the entire cycle of Shostakovich string quartets. The music grabbed me in a way that nothing had before and I began to listen, bewilderedly, to this amazing music." Becenti's path to composition is so unique - he was strongly drawn to it, but really, really, had to forge his own way forward in terms of accessing the world - and yet, there's a part of it that every person who decides to go into music will recognize. There's a moment when you choose to go deep, when you decide to let it be your voice (whether as composer or performer.) 

In many ways, I think Mozart would have sympathized perfectly with Becenti. One of the chamber groups I coach starts every week with a reading of a Mozart letter - I try to find some fun and colorful stuff to explore - and especially the young Mozart will just casually say things like how sad he was to miss an opera, but that it didn't really matter because he had the whole thing in his head. Wunderkind aside, you only do that when you love something a lot; when you've made a commitment to having it become a part of your mind. 

So, yes, one chooses to act. One chooses to dream. One chooses to end the program with "Here Comes The Sun" (the same song that some Boston hospitals played when they released a COVID patient) not necessarily because we can feel its light right this second (it is, after all, after sunset - unless you're reading this tomorrow morning with your coffee) ...

...but because it is incredibly important to remember what that light and warmth feels like. 

Looks like the concert is starting in just a few minutes. Let's turn on the sun. 

All my best, 

Sarah