If I ever leave New York one memory will burn in my mind. It’s an October night, cool and clear. I climb from the 66th Street subway station, cross Broadway and leap up a flight of shallow steps. I’m in the courtyard of Lincoln Center. The Metropolitan Opera House is lit up like a jewel box. A fountain leaps and hisses. Someone’s waiting beside the fountain. It’s Kate. She looks lovely. We’re meeting after work to go to the symphony. We’re newly married, just moved to the city, and on this night everything is perfect and perfectly wonderful.
Every year we’ve lived in New York Kate and I have subscribed to the symphony. Even with two small kids we corral babysitters and take the subway to Avery Fisher Hall several times each fall, winter and spring to listen to music in our cheap (the cheapest you can get, actually) seats far above the stage.
Why? Everyone says classical music is dead. It feels like an old-person thing to do, or maybe self-indulgent. But of all our nights in New York, especially all our nights out, these are the ones I will remember. The sky opens out in that Lincoln Center courtyard, the city seems endless against it. We gaze at the ranks of lights, listen to the furious scrum of Broadway, watch the ladies in furs and the shambling classical music lovers, hair combed from neck nape to forehead, and we think, This is our home.
And the music revives us. It’s always a mad dash to the concert hall, getting kids settled, babysitters instructed, navigating the subway, pressing through the crush. Finally we settle into our seats. The orchestra tweets and honks below, warming up. The day’s stress quickly slides away and my mind fastens on what we’re about to hear. It’s a miracle to me, who never learned to play an instrument, that all this physics of sound becomes a thing of such great beauty.
We have weird taste. Mozart, no. Bach, yes (as much math as music). Romantics, no. Elliot Carter, anything new or hard to listen to, anything from the west coast (John Adams especially), absolutely yes. The concerts we go to never sell out. Once we watched as half the hall walked out on a John Adams piece that had us transfixed.
Another night we heard Britten’s War Requiem, absolutely shattering. Last time we went, in January, we heard a John Adams piece called “The Wound Dresser.” Haunting, coaxing music played while a baritone sang lines from a Walt Whitman poem about a Civil War medic.
These are the words from the poem that seized me: “With hinged knees and steady hand to dress wounds, I am firm with each, the pangs are sharp yet unavoidable. One turns to me his appealing eyes—poor boy! I never knew you, Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that would save you.”
We sat in that dowdy concert hall and heard about sacrificial love. The vast space around us seemed filled with holiness. I know of no other experience quite so grandly and yet so intimately nourishing.
Does music do this for you? Where? When? It’s no accident we’re told to sing to God. He is, always and everywhere, singing to us.
Jim Hinch is a senior editor at GUIDEPOSTS. Reach him at jhinch@guideposts.org.
