October 2: Cantatas (Bach-Ensemble; Helmuth Rilling, conductor)
Halloween, and how our broken culture deals with death
Halloween is a big deal in my NYC suburb. Decorations start appearing early in the school year — six full weeks of pre-10/31 lawn scenes. Add another week or two into November and that’s over an eighth of the year when my fancy neighbors showcase their inability to cope.
The fashionable Halloween trend has been to turn your front lawn into an ersatz cemetery, with plastic headstones and skeletal remains poking through the dirt.1 Of late, the skeletons have been doing cute things, too, like serving drinks?:
Here, the family posthumously continues its activities as normal. Photos in the yard with the (undead) dog:
(One upside to being dead: no more posing for pictures.)
The dead in the lawn below are slowly rising, and their ghosts are jovial. Also, that snake doesn’t look native to Westchester County.
Well, hiya there, ol’ fella!
There’s some health in publicly acknowledging that — in certain ways — we’re all just walking skeletons, here for a flash. But there’s also a cultural pathology in making our only public engagement with death so glib, so cute.
Death, for us, is kept far from life. We’re encouraged not dwell on it, and when we do, the message is clear: not to worry, everyone we love is going to die a very long time from now.
Bach’s wife of seventeen years, Maria Barbara Bach, died suddenly while he was away on a trip with the local prince. By the time of his return, Maria was already in the ground. Bach suddenly became a single father of four, while three of his children were already buried. Bach knew of death.
Death was ever present in all of human history before, what, a hundred years ago? A quarter of women in human history died in childbirth! People typically became sick at home, and were tended to by their families and community, and died where they lived—at random times and in awful ways.
I’m not nostalgic for suffering, but how atypical our lives are! An American death is generally managed by professionals, and we become amateur bystanders, steeped in our ignorance. People age and die in nursing homes, their families widely disbursed; people sicken in hospitals and die there. It’s a place apart from our daily lives.
Even my reform Jewish temple keeps it light on the scary stuff. The clergy seems almost apologetic ahead of the most unnerving prayer at Rosh Hashanah, the “Unetanah Tokef,” ("Let us speak of the awesomeness”) which is recited in unison by the congregation, as we recall our ancestors trembling before God in prayer:
On Rosh Hashanah it is inscribed,
And on Yom Kippur it is sealed.
How many shall pass away and how many shall be born,
Who shall live and who shall die,
Who shall reach the end of his days and who shall not,
Who shall perish by water and who by fire,
Who by sword and who by wild beast,
Who by famine and who by thirst,
Who by earthquake and who by plague…
Who shall be exalted and who shall be brought low,
Who shall become rich and who shall be impoverished.
But repentance, prayer and righteousness avert the severe decree.
This was devastating to hear at a synagogue in downtown Manhattan in September 2001, where several congregants had just been murdered in fire a mile away.
The “Unetanah Tokef” puts our incapacity center stage. Bach’s cantatas tell sacred stories in hopes of comforting us through song.2 We have nothing like this in contemporary American secular culture.
It’s a structural flaw of contemporary capitalism: our “you-do-you” culture can never acknowledge how much of our lives are utterly out of our control. Everything points to embracing (a pose of) maximal agency: find yourself (by yourself), optimize your health, and broadcast everything about yourself to everyone always.
Contemporary Halloween embodies a culture that’s ‘spiritual but not religious’ — a culture where you can be memorialized at a startup funeral home with an HTML tombstone, and where death is advertised as potentially solvable. Anyway, you’re likely to expire mostly unknown some day, soon forgotten, loved by a few people if you’re lucky, perhaps in the back of an Ambulnz.
Death is serious and should be talked about more. It’s not fun. It doesn’t sell much product. But it’s probably the most important and valuable thing you can consider every day of your too short life. It’s the surest path to imbuing your life with meaning.
Here’s the end of “Unetanah Tokef”:
The origin of man is dust, his end is dust. He earns his bread by exertion and is like a broken shard, like dry grass, a withered flower, like a passing shadow and a vanishing cloud, like a breeze that blows away and dust that scatters, like a dream that flies away. But You are King, God who lives for all eternity!
Shana tovah to my Jewish readers, from your agnostic correspondent! We fast approach the Days of Repentance. A sweet new year to you all.
Welcome to Q4 2024! I still have a lot more Bach to listen to. For this post, I listened to Helmuth Rilling conduct the Bach-Ensemble for another slew of cantatas: BWV 152-157, 159, 161, 162, 168, 180, 181, 183-5, and 187.
Highlights:
Funeral-level music, the opening of the sinfonia to BWV 152:
Some layered rhythmic melody lines from the same movement:
This is a remarkable bit of controlled singing from BWV 161. Our alto is the lovely Hildegard Laurich, RIP:
Beautiful song and orchestration in BWV 152:
The alto, tenor, and bassoon (-ish thing?) are all playing in a low register, singing ‘you must believe’ (BWV 155):
Quite a little harmonic ride for the bass here in BWV 155:
The sinfonia to BWV 156 is a cousin to “Air on a G String,” and was adapted later into a movement for one of the Harpsichord Concertos:
I love the alto and tenor exchanging very long notes in BWV 162:
The ending to the sinfonia of BWV 187 packs a four-part punch:
I have a life hack for Halloween: I walk around the neighborhood with the kids and handing out little plastic lobsters, as a little bonus treat. (Everyone loves it, and I get to feel like Santa Claus.) I’m trying to create levity and silliness beyond the comedic death tableaus that the kids trample on their ways to snag Fun Size Almond Joys. Anyway, highly recommended.
My post from earlier this year touches on this theme:
January 8 Cantatas 106 ("Actus Tragicus"), 21; Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra / Ton Koopman
Ton Koopman is a Dutch conductor who has recorded all of the extant Bach cantatas with the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra. The recordings of Cantatas 106 and 21 I listened to for today’s post are confident and direct and unfussy.
A thoroughly enjoyable side trip.
This sounds like a snarky comment, maybe, but it is not - there is almost nothing like listening to a lot of Bach to make you think about death, your own death, and with seriousness, even if you are not at all a religious person. And that soprano entrance at the end of the fourth example above is magical, and very hard to pull off.