Bread and Butter

At about minute 26 of the Gubaidulina - Sonnengesang CD I was ready to cash in and be done with choral music altogether. Not because the piece was bad; Sofia Gubaidulina is an accomplished and talented composer and her music becomes, after a few hearings or performances, rather amazing to listener and performer alike. But on its first hearing, this piece was, for me, a bit inaccessible. It was forty minutes of highly technical cello playing, glass harmonica, celeste, and disjunct seeming outcries from the chorus. It certainly wasn't why I got into choral music back in 8th grade with Ms. Kempf.

But this weekend had some "bread and butter" choral music experiences as well, not just the temporarily estranging ones. Friday night: performing Beethoven's 9th Symphony with the Yale Philharmonia, Camerata, and Glee Club. Sunday morning: Anthems and beautiful organ music at Christ Church. And in between, the slightly disconcerting Berio and Gubaidulina on Saturday.

The bread and butter wasn't just on my choral breakfast plate, so to speak; it extended to the final week of regular-season baseball. What could be more bread and butter than Craig Biggio, in the final game of his 20-year, one-team career, hitting a classic "Craig Biggio" double down the left field line and later scoring a run. After a season in which the Astros narrowly missed last place in baseball's weakest division - a season in which our former All-Star second baseman missed hitting .250 by a single point - a 3-0 win over the Braves and a final, classic, 3060th hit were just the kind of bread and butter I had been hoping for.

So I suppose the lesson of this weekend is that in the midst of frustration and unfamiliarity come moments of repose in which we can reconnect with our true selves - the selves that love Beethoven and Craig Biggio in his prime. These anchor moments keep us centered, I think. And at their best, they can be like John Donne's compass from A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, always connecting us to our homes, no matter how far we wander, no matter how airily thin our gold is beaten. They make our wanderings tethered and therefore safe.

And who knows - someday Gubaidulina and Berio may, with enough time and patience, be a new loaf of bread, a new stick of butter.