songblog

Sleepers Awake

Its Saturday morning here in Portland and its cold, at least for here. The temperature is about 28 degrees Fahrenheit with a stiff breeze, gusts up to 50 mph.

I make a quick run down to the store, since I am low on some essentials. The store is really close, too far to walk in weather like this, and the car doesn’t even get close to getting warmed up enough to use the heater. I have the radio on, tuned to the only 24 hour a day classical station here in the pacific northwest, and as I start driving home I hear the familiar strains of Bach’s “Sleepers Awake”. Its part of this famous cantata "Wachet Auf, ruft uns die Stimme", and its maybe all of five minutes long. I have been so familiar with this piece for so many years, back from the 70’s when I was a serious classical guitar student. Before we go on here is a link to one of the maybe hundreds of arrangements of this piece: Sleepers Awake.

This is not at all some flashy piece for a virtuoso, no amazing chromatic runs or complicated, mind bending modulations, although if you listen closely, you can hear one beautiful, almost dissonant, at least to my ears, note about ¾ of the way thru the piece. I have heard this music countless times, even once in the 70’s as done by a rock band called Graced Lightning – and it was a damn fine version in my opinion.

But back to it - its simple, just a few lines of counterpoint, that weave their way around and around with one of those catchy melodies that is instantly unforgettable. Yeah you could hum this, and I certainly did as I drove the short distance to my house.

I wasn’t in a bad mood by any means, but certainly hearing this music again, so familiar and yet so interesting, with clarity of thought and masterful restraint, hit me on that deep level that truly great music always does.

Let me be clear about something here, lest you think I am some kind of classical snob: I can get just as turned on by a great jazz performance, a killer rock band or something non-western (like the Kronos Quartet’s recording with Ashe Boshle, my god what a record!) as I can by J.S. Bach. I still considering him the finest composer of all times, but he is not of course the only person that has ever made fantastic music.

I was a bit transfixed by this sublime little piece of music, and even though it was freezing cold in the driveway, I had to listen to the piece thru its conclusion. At the end I said to myself, as I often have, that man was a genius! It made me feel good down to my bones. And I realized at that point, once again, why I spend so much of my time writing music: if I could get just one person, once, to get 1/10 of the righteous, soul-satisfying feeling that I get from “Sleepers Awake”, - well, it would make all the effort more than worth it.

Posted by dana at December 18, 2005 10:31 AM