Handel
on the Kettle
By
Marvin Payne
Some guys
wanted to publish a book about “Hallelujah Chorus Moments” in
the lives of Mormon Artists. You know, how Handel threw open
his upstairs window and angels sang it to him, amid clouds of
light and strains of, well, the Hallelujah Chorus. So the aforementioned
guys contacted lots of Mormon Artists (if they didn’t contact
you, it was only because you don’t have a web site where you
offer to write for virtually anyone who’ll agree to publish
you ((which is, incidentally, why I have a web site at all —
because I have agreed to publish me)) ) and I wrote the following.
Only it’s been four years and they haven’t published their book,
unless in secret, so here it is. (Because Meridian has agreed
to publish me. ((I ought to mention that this Meridian agreement
is not “carte blanche,” they’ve sent some things back (((I’m
saving them for the “out-takes” reel!))).)).)
Brigham
Young is rumored to have said, “If I were placed on a desert
island and given the task of civilizing the natives, I would
straightway build a theatre for the purpose.” I think people
have supposed he meant that fine artists might parachute onto
the island, stand on the stage, and spout uplifting and enlightening
poetry and song at the savages, thus taming and teaching them.
That can work, I think. But having spouted from many stages
(some of them savagely primitive), I’m convinced that the most
direct way to achieve civilization is to send the fine artists
home and put the natives onstage.
When I was
a kid, I rode the crest of the folk-music craze of the sixties.
I wrote on the blackboards of my high school the slogan “Folksingers
rule!” festooned with quick sketches of Martin guitars and Vega
banjos. When Bob Dylan (just echoing the forgotten Woody Guthrie)
made it okay for folksingers to write their own songs, I jumped
in with a passion. It was a kind of music that demanded meaning.
You couldn’t just go on writing, “I met you at the dance and
our love is gonna last for weeks.” Inherent in the genre was
the supposition that you wrote because you had something to
say, rather than merely something to sell. To most people in
1963, this was a new idea.
So. What
to say? For the first couple of years (ages fifteen and sixteen)
what I really had to say was, “I met you at the dance and our
love is gonna last for weeks.” But even at seventeen, that sentiment
began to thin. My dad solved it for me. My dad, who had a sterling
silver character and a wooden ear, whose only musical expression
was the continual whistling of whimsical little tunes that never
lasted longer than four seconds –- my dad, who slept blissfully
through numberless high school choral concerts, awaking for
my solos –- my dad, who would never for a moment consider buying
me a surfboard, but who saw a Mexican 12-string guitar in a
store window on the way home from work and bought it for me
as a surprise –- my dad, who sheltered me from all danger and
evil, but took me prowling through the dangerous and evil pawn
shops around Fifth and Main in L.A. when I wanted a good old
banjo, began to notice that there was an indefinable earnestness
and power in what I brought to the music I was playing. He said,
“Son, why don’t you write songs that will teach the Gospel?”
That only sounded dumb to me for about a day and a half, long
enough for me to realize that I wasn’t being asked to propagandize
for the adult “up with people” establishment so much as to do
what I really longed to do: let shine something that I felt
flickering inside. (Jeremiah had said, “...his word was in mine
heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones.”) The savage was
being civilized.
Let’s jump
from history to method. To articulate your feelings, you have
to go beyond feeling them –- you have to observe them. To observe
them, you have to go outside them and create a little world
around them that will both make sense of them and provide contrast
and color and conflict that will bring them into focus for an
audience. This is the making of real songs, and it civilizes
the maker. He feels compelled to give his gift, his reminder
of the feeling, his record of the grace, to others. If he’s
noticed that his talent comes from the Lord, he also feels even
responsible to share. And any audience that has gathered for
higher purposes than to feel the beat and see the lasers will
be touched and bonded as these tokens of light are passed back
and forth. This is also called teaching. This organization of
light and testimony acts out what the composer Igor Stravinsky
recognized as “the need that we feel to bring order out of chaos,
to extricate the straight line of our operation from the tangle
of possibilities and the indecision of vague thoughts.”
This helps
make art out of what you’re feeling. Once it’s art, you can
invite people to listen without appealing primarily to their
kindness and patience or the fact that they’re your family or
roommates. If you can manage to add praise of the Lord, and
inspire it in your audience, then you’re inviting the Spirit
to your performance as well. The Psalmist said, “Thou art holy,
O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel.”
The tricky
part, of course, is staying “clear” so the Spirit may use you.
In the first days of my career as a “Mormon Troubadour” I wrestled
mightily (well, “wrestled mightily” might be a little strong
— I may have been merely evaluating a rationalization) with
the issue of priestcraft, which is the business of being paid
to bear your testimony. Three realizations clarified things
a lot for me.
First, it
was never my testimony that was for sale. It was the art. If
I couldn’t say something in the art, I couldn’t say it from
the stage. The mere words, “I feel the Spirit right now, do
you?” were not allowed outside a song. “I love you,” yes, but
“I feel the Spirit,” no. Afterward by the stage door, maybe
— if it was to someone I knew. Art invites audience members
to choose how to respond and the artist trusts their responses.
Unadorned (artless) testimony demands a very specific kind of
“non-artificial” attention and response that’s not at home in
the theatre. That’s why artists put their truth into the mouths
of characters. (And in concert every song is a play and the
singer a character or storyteller.) That “aesthetic distance”
is essential to art.
The second
realization was that I don’t represent anybody but myself. Especially
I don’t represent the Church. I have a little certificate that
identifies me in flowing calligraphy as a representative of
the Church, signed personally and beautifully by David O. McKay.
I cherish that little piece of paper. At the bottom it says,
in very unflowing plain type, “Expires October 1969,” when my
mission in Australia
was finished. And since I don’t represent the Church anymore
(outside my Primary class or home teaching families), I can’t
borrow authority from it or demand attention because I’m singing
about it.
The third
realization is that nothing I create can ever be as beautiful
as what it’s designed to remind people of, which is the Grace
of God. Let me try to capture this idea in a picture. Imagine
the artist as a window, through which all those he serves may
see into the beauty that lies beyond these dark walls of discouragement
and drudgery and even death. To do any good, the artist attends
to two things — “framing,” which is the choosing and composition
of the spiritual landscape the audience hungers to see, and
“polishing the glass,” so that when the audience comes to the
window their eyes aren’t distracted by smudges or smears. This
polishing is as much an artistic challenge as a moral one, because
weak or weird art choices can smear and obscure their view of
the “beauty beyond” as badly as if the audience (or the Spirit)
discerns that we are hucksters or hypocrites.
Well, people
are looking for “Hallelujah Chorus Moments.” The following journal
snapshots are as close as I come (and, if the more careful music
historians are to be trusted, about as close as Handel came,
too). Starting with 7 May 1987 and then jumping all over the
place:
- About
a dozen years ago, I traded a box of whatever album I’d just
released to a record store in Provo for an equivalent number
of whatever albums I chose. One was a double album of a live
improvised concert in Germany by Keith Jarrett. I didn’t know
his music, but when I looked on the back of the cover for
all the musician credits, it just said “piano: Keith
Jarrett.” I was drawn to that. I never listened much to sides
two and three, but the first and last are magnificent. The
music flows out of this guy and pulls the listener through
a forest of otherwise unutterable feelings. Like other true
artists, he makes you say “I feel that, I know
that. I just never knew how to say it.” I transferred the
record to cassette and played it in the van driving across
the country on concert tours. Often I would lay one of my
P.A. columns along the back of the bed in the van and plug
the stereo into it. My most vivid memory of listening to this
music is of driving late at night in the Salt River Valley
in Arizona, windows down with the hot breeze blowing by, cascades
of piano pouring from that big speaker column across the back
of the van. He took me down paths you cannot walk without
opening your emotional eyes.
This is
because making art is practicing at godhood. Artists who wouldn’t
admit or even understand that idea (maybe Jarrett does) are
still children of God, and James Talmage said, “There is a filial
passion in man that flames toward heaven.” I’ve confessed in
this journal to having listened to Bob Dylan. But also an occasional
snippet of Rod Stewart, and even that rascal Mozart. When the
art in a piece is good, I calm my suspicions and look for the
light. Often there’s lots.
At Sundance
one recent winter I was part of a five-player Sondheim review
that scampered in and out of worldliness like a kid afraid of
water chasing sand crabs at the beach. After the show was up
and going and the director had returned to the coast, we prayed
as a cast before every performance that the Lord would help
us find the light in the show. And He did. Empathy, compassion,
love, humility, aspiration, and forgiveness characterized that
show. I never saw it in London or New York, but in the snowy
mountains of Utah it shone. Choosing to be driven by the pursuit
of light (rather than by the fear of darkness) may keep us from
noticing some of the darker truths an artist may intend, but
finding even unintended light is sweeter than any intended darkness
we may have missed. The ideal, of course, would be for us to
become such masters of empathy and passion and observation and
detail and craft, and at the same time so attentive to the Spirit,
that the art we make never needs sifting, because there’s no
chaff in either the artistry or the message. Then it might be
godly.
- One deep
winter evening a friend was kind to me (listened to some songs
and liked them) and on the way home I pulled over to the side
of the road in a blizzard and wrote a song about how glorious
it would be to be mere friends in heaven. A neighbor driving
by recognized my van through the whipping curtains of snow
and stopped to help. I thanked him and sent him away a little
confused. How could he have known the Spirit was speaking
to my heart and I simply needed both hands to write?
- One summer
I worked harder than ever before on a role in Shakespeare’s
“King Lear,” and prayed out among the foothills that the Lord
would consecrate that preparation to some work of very direct
service to the kingdom. A couple of days after opening “Lear”
in Park City, the phone rang and I was asked by the Church
to play the Man Who Searches For Happiness. I hadn’t even
auditioned.
- I learned
during a season as Noah in “Celebrating the Light” that a
show doesn’t have to be a bright trumpet in every moment from
beginning to end. In some moments it can be an honest tin
whistle. But the Holy Ghost will pick it up and play it.
- While
helping to produce an album of “spiritual” songs for my good
friend Debbie Au in the early seventies, I learned that we
can be standing at the window listening for the Hallelujah
Chorus, when in fact the Lord wants us to be listening for
our bishop’s assignment or our Primary kids’ questions. One
morning on the way to the studio in L.A. Debbie told me that
she’d been praying earnestly the night before about the central
focus of her life, which was her album, and the Spirit had
answered, “What album?”
- I remember
doing “Baby” at Sundance and realizing that these were the
passions I had been trying to arouse out on the road in “Saturday’s
Warrior.” The Spirit resonated with the truth in “Baby” so
strongly that sometimes I’d be reminded of the lyrics while
driving and I’d have to pull over because my eyes were full
of tears.
- Some
of the richest hours of my life I have spent with Roger and
Melanie Hoffman and Steve Perry, figuratively holding hands
and following the Spirit to the center of some gospel thicket,
so we could come out again and tell children about the wonders
we’d seen. At moments along the path we often waited, feeling
hushed and blessed, for Melanie to clear her eyes and get
back control of her voice. And in that circle I have also
come to know that laughter is music to the Lord.
- At the
first company read-through of “Phantom” (not the rock’n’roll
chandelier show, but the penetrating treatment written at
the same time by Americans Yeston and Kopit) the Spirit so
moved me over the Phantom’s longing for the beauty of heaven
and the feeling of Father’s love that I wept, and could only
whisper my last scene.
- I once
had a close, close friend who needed to be touched, and who
could be moved by the language of poetry. Praying hard to
be helpful, I felt images roll out of me like they hadn’t
since I was a kid, and I wondered if that music may even have
been a form of the gift of tongues. Still, the Spirit said,
“Here are some feelings, here are some visions, here are some
words, and here are some hours and days in which to work thoughtfully
until something beautiful has filled this clean half-sheet
of paper.”
- The influence
of Heaven was always with me when I guided the young lovers
through the mystery of death and resurrection as El Gallo,
the Narrator in “The Fantasticks.”
You simply
can’t choose early in your life to take your gifts seriously
and then write a few hundred songs and a few dozen scripts and
act every year in a couple of plays and several film projects
and dutifully say “Yes” to every opportunity your home stake
and ward offers you to magnify those gifts without the Holy
Ghost steadily and quietly turning on lights in your mind and
whispering words in your ear. Maybe that’s what it feels like
at Handel’s window.
RATHER
IMPORTANT P.S., IF NOT PRECISELY A DISCLAIMER:
Some of
the best work is so entirely for others that you hardly even
feel it yourself.
After directing
an original Book of Mormon play in my stake, I testified to
my cast that I felt I had been an instrument in the hand of
the Spirit, sometimes cutting cleanly as a scalpel, sometimes
striking surely as a hammer, but feeling little more than would
these tools. (I love the Lord asking Isaiah, “Shall the axe
boast itself against him that heweth therewith? or shall the
saw magnify itself against him that shaketh it?”) After singing
a solo in church, I never really know how it went, just like
after a priesthood blessing when you wonder what you said. And
I’m thoroughly convinced that some of the most valuable acting
I’ve ever done has been as Job, King Benjamin, or Pioneer John
Brown for the primary kids in sharing time.
It may be
an inescapable consequence of growing up that the universe of
the genuinely unknown yawns wider and deeper with each passing
year. But it’s scattered with veils of light and vast wheels
of glory. Longing for that light in my work makes me feel like
something inside me belongs to that light, and that possibility
gives me great joy.
I feel though,
with the writer Flaubert, that, “None of us can ever express
the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows;
and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude
rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that
will melt stars ...”
Still, I
remember that the Light of Christ can melt them — and
even make them, tame them and teach them to sing.
