CONCERT IN MORELIA

CONCERT IN MORELIA     Written in 2008

     By Travis M. Whitehead

     Four men appear on stage to play three violins and a cello. The music begins with a slow

murmur indented with pensive sighs emanating from a violin. The sadness grows, wistfully

evoking a disturbed memory crawling to the surface through the consciousness, shuddering,

quivering, then falling into a slow moving stream.

     Suddenly it awakens, frustration rekindled, the dissonances pushing against each other into a

tragic harmony, sorrowful and conflicting emotions fusing, then separating, hovering in the

background through the stream of consciousness, pondering, falling into nothingness, dissipating

to the outlying boundaries of the musical landscape, the notes coalescing into a tragic whole.

     They rise with a renewed vitality, dashing about, rushing in a frenzied determination for

satisfaction, shrill notes jumping, seesawing like the psychotic anger of a distressed soul, now

resolute in its quest for justice, a woman humiliated into fury. She dashes from one precipice to

another within sight of the glory of madness, as though insanity is seducing a tortured soul into

the realm of universal justification. Now each musician takes turns plucking strings as the

insanity crystallizes into focused and calculating barbarity.

     In the second piece, notes slide around ill-defined, the cellist bouncing his bow across the

strings. The musical artisans venture toward the precipice of discovery, musical possibilities

dangling from a cliff, a spider dancing from a single thread over a candle. Chords are ripping

together, clashing, compromising, exhausting their own dreams, resurrecting anguished notes,

dragging them across their conscious lives, stretching the limits of their musical language. They

squeak, pour, slide, struggle for actualization, racing toward a harmony that lingers beyond

reach, sad and dissonant notes struggling to find agreement. And then finding none, they resign

themselves to their dissonance, then rush suddenly, irrevocably into nothingness.

     More dissonance arises in the third piece, with violins and cellos becoming percussion

instruments, bows bouncing off strings like the hum of bumble bees, thump, thump, thump,

thump wrenching from the very abyss of the instrument's consciousness to borrow from some

other musical alphabet, a tortured soul. High-pitched notes cut into the air, then all four charge

onto the stage, shrill notes and a bass line like the galloping of two terrified horses thundering

through a dark wood. \

     It slows, as if the riders, lost now in an exhausted ecstasy, stop to discover their fate. Two

lovers seek each other out - this is their meeting place. They've dismounted and they sneak

through the woods, looking around trees and over rocks. They spy one another but, alas, soldiers

have come seeking their beloved princess and the pauper who has captured her heart, the music

rising in a crescendo of distress. He takes her hand and hides with her in a ravine until slowly, as

the music fades, they are alone, the soldiers vanishing into the darkness.

     The musicians have stretched themselves beyond the limits of their own auditory dialect,

slicing prior knowledge, cutting through the layers of mundane musical dogma, rearranging their

musical alphabet, peeling away layers of obsolete revelations. The music has rushed toward

listeners with hearts flung wide open, filling the vacuous depths of their souls with an agonized

wonder, morphing their clouded perceptions into a speechless clarity.