This is yet another of those songs everybody sings and nobody thinks about. Come on, now. Have you ever asked yourself this question? I sure hadn’t.
Once again my good friend Wikipedia put me onto the right track and I’ve gone on from there. As with so many wonderful songs that are entrenched in American music, this one stems from slave spirituals. And, as with the meaning of so many spirituals, it’s a mix of biblical and historical ideas.
When contemporary composer John Muehleisen set Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “A Psalm of Life” to music, he knew that the poet was not talking about actual weeping numbers in the first line, perhaps a number 7 with tears dripping from the end of the top bar. No. Here the word “number” means a piece, selection, or verse. When we refer to the songs in a Broadway show, for instance, we often call them “number,.” as in “a showstopping song-and-dance number.” Therefore, if we piece together the title, “A Psalm of Life,” the subtitle, “What the heart of the young man said to the Psalmist,” and the first two lines (“Tell me not in mournful numbers/Life is but an empty dream”), we get a message of hope, optimism, and action.
We know that any true folk song will always have multiple versions, since they weren’t composed in any formal way and were passed down orally for some time before being written. One aspect or the other of the original may be prominent in each variant. “Cindy” has an almost infinite variety of verses and also has the characteristic of having been built at least partly from “call and response,” which in this case has someone start out with a line and then others in the group have to come up with a second line that rhymes with the first, whether or not the lines add up to a coherent story. (This type of activity is also common in some churches in which the preacher says something that is clearly asking for a response, even if it’s just “amen.” My favorite such line is something I heard at a wedding I attended many years ago; when the preacher performing the ceremony started to feel that he wasn’t getting enough feedback, he’d say, “Am I talkin’ to anybody out there?” which would be greeted with a chorus of “amens.”)
Short answer: It’s not the destination but the journey. (You’ve read that on a poster somewhere, haven’t you?)
First some information on Norman Dello Joio (whom I was at first confusing with Ola Gjello). Dello Joio had a fascinating life and career. He was descended from an Italian family known for producing church organists, and he himself became one at age fourteen at the St. Mary Star of the Sea church in the Bronx. (Isn’t that a cool name for church? If you’d like to read an explanation of why Mary would be associated with this title, go to my post here.) His father was a teacher and performer, and his childhood was full of music and also musical glamour, as some of his father’s voice students were from the Metropolitan Opera and would arrive for their lessons in their Rolls Royces. Dello Joio was given a scholarship to Julliard and then went on to graduate studies there, ultimately deciding that he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in church organ lofts. Instead he pursued a career as a composer, studying composition in 1941 with the great German composer Paul Hindemith at Yale. (Hindemith had emigrated to the US from Germany in 1940.) Hindemith encouraged Dello Joio to remember that his (that is, DJ’s) music was “lyrical by nature.” Dello Joio said that he hadn’t understood Hindemith’s statement at the time but realized later that he meant, “Don’t sacrifice necessarily to a system, go to yourself, what you hear. If it’s valid, and it’s good, put it down in your mind. Don’t say I have to do this because the system tells me to. No, that’s a mistake.” (This information is from the Dello Joio official website; you can read more about his life by going here.) Dello Joio went on to have an extremely successful career as a composer, with his latest work dating to 2003, five years before his death, when he was ninety.
The meaning of the Requiem text, part 6:
Isn’t it interesting that the first creative act of God recorded in the Bible, in the book of Genesis, concerns light? “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light” (Gen. 1:3 KJV). When we get to the last book of the Christian New Testament we see the same idea: “And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof” (Rev. 21:23 KJV). This bookending use of light imagery also plays out in the Requiem. Its very first line is: “Grant them eternal rest, Lord, and let perpetual light shine on them.” The title of the last section? That very same perpetual light, “Lux aerterna.” Just in case we didn’t get the drift, both “eternal” and “perpetual” are used.
The meaning of the Requiem text, part 5:
You, who absolved Mary,
and listened to the thief,
give me hope also.
The meaning of the the Requiem text, part 4.
Last week I wrote about animals in the Requiem. This week I’m concentrating on one person mentioned one time in the Requiem text. I guess I’m constitutionally unable to just go through the text line by line. You wouldn’t enjoy that anyway, would you? I’ve already talked about Abraham, David and the Sybils, so they’re covered. But that still leaves several other individuals or groups who should get an explanation, and that endeavor will take up this post and at least one more after that. In the “Recordare,” we have the lines:
Qui Mariam absolvisti
et latronem exaudisti
mihi quoque spem dedisti.
The meaning of the Requiem text, part 3:
There are four different animals (by my count) mentioned in the Requiem. What’s their significance?
I’ll just go in order. The first two animals are sheep and goats, mentioned in the “Recordare” section sung by the quartet. “Recordare” means “Remember,” with the line as a whole reading “Remember, kind Jesus.” So here is the relevant section:
The meaning of the Requiem text, part two: