Titles are a trick…

Transformations. That’s the title of this year’s festival, now already well underway, and already transformative. Titles are a trick: when they work they open up previously boarded up doors of understanding for an audience; they suggest a through-line, a thread to follow through the labyrinth; they illuminate connections between different pieces, composers, time periods; and they’re memorable, sometimes punning, sometimes poetic. When they don’t work they’re ridiculous, pretentious, impenetrable, forcing works and ideas into relationship with each other where most likely none exists. This can keep one up at night.

When we came up with Transformations, we had no idea how relevant, on how many levels, it would be. We were thinking of Bach and Harbison, and their 200 year musical conversation, of Bach’s continuous transformation of the music of his time, his own and everyone else’s, and John Harbison’s parallel approach to the music of his own time and place; we were thinking of Judith and the tectonic transformation in her life, going from founder and founding artistic director to artist and board president, passing the baton to me and Carrie; we were thinking of the thousand faces of improvisation, and their varied relationships to all of the composers on this year’s concerts, every one of whom was, and is, a skilled improviser. All of these things suggested transformation to us, writ large and small, and so we went with it.

We weren’t prepared to lose our dear friend Ellen Singer, and the depth of transformation it would bring. Ellen died in June, much sooner than anticipated, after a nine-year standoff with cancer. Her last official gesture of support to the festival was to host a get-to-know-you Tea at her and her husband Don Singer’s house, two days after learning that her fight would soon be over. She insisted that the Tea go forward, with Don hosting. It was a smash success, and she was thrilled.

I see Ellen all around me here at Whistlewood Farm, where Don and Ellen have made Carrie and Henry and I a beautiful home for the last six years. Her presence is everywhere, and yet I miss her terribly. We all do, all of us who knew her. The Bach on our programs, originally intended to heighten the sense of continuity between the music of Harbison and that of the great tradition, to spark a purely musical discussion across time and space, is now dedicated to Ellen. And when I hear that music I am filled with the most exquisite joy and, at the same time, an inexpressible sadness. But that’s music, and perhaps in large measure that’s why we need it so: it allows to hold these two extremes of emotion in our hearts, in our thoughts, at once, with no contradiction, and no need to explain.

So the festival has known loss this year, of friends like Cecily Fortescu, and, most recently, dear Ellen. We were transformed in being with them, and in losing them, and now will be again in celebrating them. Ellen would clobber me for making this either gloomy or maudlin. It’s neither: it’s music. The sadness is real, but so is the joy.

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