The Concert Hall as Temple

The summer air wafts in through wooden screen doors, and the hall buzzes with the contained enthusiasm of a full house. I am familiar with the space; the ninety-four-year-old Music Mountain concert hall in Falls Village, Connecticut, is one of my favorite places to hear chamber music, both classical and jazz. Tonight we are here to see soprano saxophonist Paul Winter and Brazilian pianist Henrique Eisenmann present a concert called New Journey.

The two performers emerge from the green room behind the stage. Winter is dressed simply in trousers and a Nehru collared shirt of a gold shimmery fabric; his white hair and beard give the eight-five-year-old the look of a sage. He speaks like a sage, too, naturally and humbly, welcoming the audience.

Winter has devoted six decades to building a bridge between the natural world and music. Considered a pioneer of earth/world music, he has traveled the globe to record whales, birds, seals, and, most memorably in my opinion, timber wolves. Performing more than 3,000 concerts in 52 countries, he has served the cause of connecting people with the wider web of the natural world and building community through environmental awareness. He has produced fifty-three albums for his Living Music label, seven of which have won Grammy Awards.

At the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, the largest cathedral in the world, Winter has been artist-in-residence for over forty years. There he presents solstice and other celebrations and an annual ecological mass, Missa Gaia/Earth Mass. His musical output crosses boundaries as easily as he does: Brazilian, Celtic, Choral, Folk, Jazz, New Age, World. See more at www.paulwinter.com.

He gestures to the ceiling and walls, all made of wood, lending the hall a warmth augmented by shaded lamps over the stage. Constructed in 1930 when it was bought as a prefab mail-order concert hall, it remains the only one Sears designed and produced and is on the National Register of Historic Places. The shoebox-shaped hall mimics the form of an inverted violin. In his comments to the audience, Winter refers to the space as a temple.

Although the comparison to a temple is new to me, I have long thought of concert attendance as an act of worship, a gathering of people who turn their attention toward the music and absorb the musical vibrations with an open, receptive attitude. Like churchgoers, we come together to face figures elevated on a stage with an expectation of both a private experience and a communal one. Irish poet and writer John O’Donohue calls a church “an intense threshold where the visible world meets the ultimate but subtle structures of the invisible world.” A fair description of a concert hall.

The program opens with the “Well-Tempered Wood Thrush.” Winter introduces us to the wood thrush who visited his Litchfield property year after year, how he recorded hours of the bird’s song, determined its key, analyzed its harmonies, and found them identical to Bach’s “Prelude in C.” You’ve heard this piece from the Well-Tempered Clavier and that particular chord progression in “Ava Maria.” Against the recorded voice of a wood thrush, Eisenmann weaves in the prelude opening as Winter’s soprano mimics then elaborates on the bird’s melody, described in bird guides as “ee-oo-lay.” Listen to a recording here on the ensemble’s newest album, Concert in the Barn.

Winter’s sax resonates deep and sweet in this temple and the piano sounds warm and rich, so much so that my piano technician husband leans over and says, “I’ve never heard a better prepared piano.” Thanks to piano tech Terri Flynn for his careful attention to the nine-foot Steinway.

Winter shares the stage graciously with Eisenmann and together they bring a purity of purpose and execution to their work. When Eisenmann plays a solo, Winter leans against the back wall, his head tipped down, actively listening to the pianist’s selections, which are built on fantastic technique and laced with a Brazilian flavor.

A few selections later, the second bird-themed piece appears: “The Winter Wren Goes to 52nd Street.” This little bird has a complicated song, so much so that Winter had to slow down the tempo to crack its code. To his delight, he found a swing rhythm imbedded in the flurry of notes. When I later pulled up the recording on the Cornell’s Merlin app, I noticed how much the recording resembled musical notes. Winter spent hours transcribing the melody then wrote a piece in a slower tempo and made a medley with “Sweet Georgia Brown.” Does that tiny wren ever swing!

In many concerts, there is a moment which occurs about halfway through when the audience melds. The musicians are warmed up, the audience has relaxed into the program and released any initial caution. Attendees have inspected the performers both aurally and visually and found them worthy of their trust. I love to look around at this point and collect expressions: eyes closed or alit, a relaxed smile, a happy word or gesture shared with a seatmate, a tear escaping a corner of an eye. The audience seems to become one body. Tonight, this moment arrives with “Wolf Eyes.”

The inspiration for the piece arrived on a camping trip Winter took to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to visit a biologist friend monitoring the last timber wolves in the continental U.S. One night they recorded the wolves howling deep into the night and sat in wonderment listening.

After an opening recording of that wolf cry, Winter matches his saxophone to the haunting sound in a way the calls up an ancient response buried in our collective cells. The fact that these magnificent and maligned creatures have been on the earth for 30 million years moves me every time I hear it. He stops midway to invite the audience to join in a “howl-elujah” chorus with the temple lights turned down to blackness. Listen here on the Wolf Eyes album. Prepare for goose bumps as Winter’s sound soars. 

The concert ends with ovations and the two performers play a short encore, “Icarus,” from the self-titled 1972 album, to an ebullient audience. We spill into the summer night, our faith in humanity revived.  

“To survive the daily trials and tribulations of life, each of us must find at least an occasional thread of the divine, some ray of meaning to moisten the soul,” writes spiritual teacher and Jungian Robert Johnson. “It serves as a reminder that there is something enduring, some essence that is only hinted at in ordinary life.”

These musicians tapped into something greater than their own egos and with their creativity took us with them. Music, in its ability to communicate beyond the scope of words, allows us to dive deeper into places not available in our daily lives. It may open our minds or break our hearts with its beauty. We leave the hall elevated, at least for a moment greater than how we entered.

The concert hall is a place where we can be awed together, and in that space, be lifted into the presence of the mystery of creation itself.