Wondrous Beyond Knowledge

Here's a guest post by PCO first violinist Ed Mooney. Thanks, Ed for generously sharing your thoughts!


Xylophone! Castanets! Drums! You hear these prominently in a new Bach St. John’s Passion performed and videoed a week ago in the midst of our own passion — deep and profound suffering, mixed with joy.  Crucifixion and Resurrection.

Watch and listen here  Bachfest - Leipzig

The xylophone, castanets, and drums are yet to begin. The evangelist will slide easily from singing to speech.  Harsh death-delivering words can’t arrive in a sweet tenor voice.

There’s room for endless innovation in interpreting Bach’s scores (which are nearly devoid of helpful performance advice). And it’s a prerogative of performers to discover new ways. I admit I squirmed at first — then slowly got to like its daring. By the end it seemed right. The xylophone, castanets, and drums — innovations in delivery of the Bach — were harsh, disturbing at first — it’s just not done in performances of Bach Passions.

On second thought, the Biblical account is not a “beautiful story” to be replicated in “beautiful music.” But standard performances of the Passions convey the clash and clamor of the Crucifixion without xylophone, castanets, and drums. Why does an initial encounter with these noise makers seem untoward? Well, as my listening walked on with this new performance, I became more and more accepting, approving, excited and convinced. The new shifted from shocking or puzzling to stunned and transforming wonder.

As my teaching career drew to a close, I spent more and more time writing about the need to encourage open, unexpected response from students. I needed to undermine the commonplace assumption that the task of education (in the humanities) is to get to an objective answer to the question “What is this text (or portrait or poem) about?” At the deepest level there is no single correct answer to what’s going on in a poem or sonata. That’s an invitation.  It’s good news, not the bad news,  that in open-ended interpretation it’s all subjective, there’s no right or wrong, anything goes.
We are all beginners here, listeners, teachers, students, no matter how much we already know, no matter how many times — even over decades — we’ve crisscrossed the fields.

We travel beyond the edges of knowledge — happily, fearfully, amazed — lost in fields of wonder.