Ask me what my favorite single piece of music is, out of all the music in the world, and I'll say that's a ridiculous, unanswerable question. But in my heart, whether I admit it or not, I'll think of Durufle's Requiem. How I discovered that music and how it affected me paints a portrait of the author as a young gloomy man.
I bought my first CD my freshman year of college. Does this make me a late adopter, or just old? Actually, both. I was taking Columbia's required music history course, and knew already that I liked old religious choral music, though back then I seriously doubt I had a good handle on
just why. And somehow--a review somewhere, I suppose--I ran across a CD titled
"Brother Sun, Sister Moon," by the Cambridge Singers, a New Agey compilation (the title refers to something St. Francis wrote), but a well done one. You'd think a CD of early Christian music would be antithetical to being New Age, but this disc manages it. Honesty compels me to admit that before I got darker and more pagan, I had a pretty strong New Agey streak. What can I say, the misadventures of youth so often embarrass us in our maturity.
In any case, it was (and is) a beautiful CD, and it provided me with some needed calm and focus during the latter part of my far-too-uptight first year of college. Which was followed, unfortunately but unsurprisingly, by far-too-uptight second, third, and fourth years in college, and so forth. And, lest you think this walk down memory lane is going nowhere fast (I guess it is at that), alongside music mostly from the 16th century or before, there was a motet,
Ubi caritas, by Maurice Durufle, b. 1902-d. 1986. Even more than the older pieces, this one grabbed me. It's really quite lovely, and it sounded kind of like it could've been contemporary with everything else on the album, but also like it couldn't. And it impressed me that the guy who composed it died just a few years before I was listening to it; in my mind all later 20th c. art music was either Philip Glassy (which I liked) or Arnold Schoenbergy (which I didn't).
Although I was intrigued by Durufle, somehow I never made it to the music library to track down any of other pieces, and it never even occurred to me to go to Tower Records and just buy something as a shot in the dark. I knew the one piece of his, and that was it.
Flash forward to that summer. I was back home in the middle of nowhere in Hawai'i, feeling bored and (remember this was pre-Google, and everything else) thoroughly isolated. I actually
wrote letters to people. That I put in the mail. With stamps. Our ways were indeed strange back then. Fortunately, though, that summer the local public library got wired up to the statewide electronic catalog, so at least in one way my hometown was a little more connected.
One day, around the end of June, for no good reason I typed Durufle's name into the library catalog, and was surprised when a requiem on LP (LP!) came up, located I forget where, somewhere in Honolulu. I knew what a requiem was of course, but weirdly given my morbid streak I don't think I'd ever heard one before. But, excited by the idea of hearing something else (and something death-related at that) by this interesting composer, I requested it. And sometime in late July, after long enough that I had nearly forgotten about it, it arrived.
As I was excitedly checking out, the librarian (who had known me for ages, given that I spent a lot of time there as a teenager, mostly wishing I was elsewhere) looked at this odd requiem by this very obscure composer, and asked me, "What IS this?" To which I replied that I wasn't sure, but I liked other pieces by the guy who wrote it.
Things and people intervened, so it wasn't until late that evening that I plugged my headphones into the crappy family hi-fi, turned down the lights in the living room, and fired up Durufle's Requiem. I don't remember if I bawled or not the first time I heard it. Probably at least a little; only a particularly deaf chunk of granite could listen to Durufle's
In paradisum and not shed a tear. Regardless, I was transformed by the experience.
Durufle's version, like all requiems, is of course about death. But whereas I, like most young people, tended to think about death in only the most dramatic terms (from a requiem perspective, in a very Mozart- or Verdi-esque manner, though I wouldn't have known to phrase it that way at the time), Durufle's version creates a sense of death as peace. While it certainly portrays death as very sad, it also makes it very lovely, and very natural, and very serene.
That record, in that moment, changed the way I think about mortality. More than that, Durufle's sad, serene music made me feel worse and better about life simultaneously. And, while I love ironic contradictions, there was nothing ironic or contradictory about that, it was just the way I felt.
I try not to listen to Durufle's requiem too often, for fear that familiarity might erode its power. But when I do, it always takes me to that unique emotional place, and links me with that innocent young soul I used to be.
haiku review: rachmaninoff's vespers @ st. ignatius loyola
