transcendental aesthetic

Music Sunday caught me completely off guard. I was looking forward to this special annual event at the Old North Church, but I wasn't expecting it to penetrate the armor protecting the quivering mass of emotional goo inside. I must have walked in at 10:30 with a few unresolved issues, and in some ways it has been a trying couple of weeks, but by 11:30 my heart chakra was working overtime.

You could say the music got to me. It wasn't so much the choir's rousing, up-beat setting of a verse from the Heart Sutra, "Gate Gate," although that probably put me in a certain frame of mind. And it wasn't Sarabeth's soprano solo of a traditional spiritual, although that too was rivetting.

It was when Steve was turning the pages while Daniel, his nine-year-old son, played a beautifully nuanced "Fur Elise" on the piano. It was a father-daughter flute duet of Tchaikovsky's "Reverie" during the offering. It was Wade Jones, the church accompanist, performing his own arrangement of the great John Fahey guitar piece renamed "Let Music Span Both East and West."

By this time I'd dabbed a few tears, taken my glasses off and on several times, and you know what, I don't care, if you can't show some feeling in church, what's the point anyway, even if it is Ralph Waldo Emerson's uncommon denomination of almighty Reason. So when Kurt did the show-stopping baritone solo "Somewhere" from West Side Story that would have made Lenny Bernstein proud, I pretty much had to get out of there.

So instead of staying for the meet-and-greet and being all sociable and normal, I headed for the exit to get some fresh air and try to come down. They say Kant used to go for a long walk every day at five o'clock, or so the philosophical legend goes, and few more reasonable souls than him have walked the planet. Transcendental aesthetic was Kant's term for (paraphrasing horribly) the quality of deep, complex feeling found in art and other experience that surpasses any explaining.

And there I was, leaning against my truck on a windy May morning scribbling on the front of the order of service, trying to explain why a bunch of songs reduced me to a sappy slab of free association. It's the words, no it's the melody, no it's the rhythm, no it's the conviction of the performer, no it's the political message, no it's the shared personal experience, but when they all come together it's something else. When I saw Marlene, the choir director on the way to her car and mumbled my thanks, I think she knew what I meant. It's something else.