Music from the New World

by chuckofish

I am reading The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather. It is very good. Here is a quote about going to see a concert in Chicago, which reminded me of my dual personality and how, when she was a very small child–3 or 4–she got a record of the “New World Symphony” for Christmas.

sarah

She loved it and insisted on listening to it over and over. She would walk around the house singing Dum dum dum dum de dum, dum dum dum dum duuuuuum.

She had been to so few concerts that the great house, the crowd of people, and the lights, all had a stimulating effect…During the first number Thea was so much interested in the orchestra itself, in the men, the instruments, the volume of sound, that she paid little attention to what they were playing. Her excitement impaired her power of listening. She kept saying to herself, “Now I must stop this foolishness and listen; I may never hear this again”; but her mind was like a glass that is hard to focus. She was not ready to listen until the second number, Dvorak’s Symphony in E minor, called on the programme, “From the New World.” The first theme had scarcely been given out when her mind became clear; instant composure fell upon her, and with it came the power of concentration. This was music she could understand, music from the New World indeed! Strange how, as the first movement went on, it brought back to her that high tableland above Laramie; the grass-grown wagon trails the far-away peaks of the snowy range, the wind and the eagles, that old man and the first telegraph message.

When the first movement ended, Thea’s hands and feet were cold as ice. She was too much excited to know anything except that she wanted something desperately, and when the English horns gave out the theme of the Largo, she knew that what she wanted was exactly that. Here were the sand hills, the grasshoppers and locusts, all the things that wakened and chirped in the early morning; the reaching and reaching of high plains, the immeasurable yearning of all flat lands. There was home in it, too; first memories, first mornings long ago; the amazement of a new soul in a new world; a soul new and yet old, that had dreamed something despairing, something glorious, in the dark before it was born; a soul obsessed by what it did not know, under the cloud of a past it could not recall.

Makes me want to listen to the “New World” symphony, how about you? Well, here you go!