Tag Archives: Giuseppe Verdi

Lacrimosa

Lacrimosa – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

Today, one week after this city's great triumph and great tragedy, I've decided to reflect on the week now passed. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane

Today, one week after this city’s great triumph and great tragedy, I’ve decided to reflect on the week now passed.

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One of my favorite speeches of Peter Capaldi’s run on Doctor Who came at a moment when the Doctor finds himself in the middle of a war-game just beginning. On the one side are an alien species beginning their invasion of Earth, on the other the humans fighting for survival as we do. In a powerful bit of oration, Capaldi’s Doctor cries out that none of this conflict would happen if we would just sit down and talk with each other. I think of this scene often when I’m reading news analysis of our current moment in American history. We are at a point where we so vastly disagree with each other over the very facts of our nature and our world that we only talk with people with whom we agree.

Now there’s a key semantic note here: we talk to people with whom we disagree, yet we often only talk withpeople with whom we agree. One week ago, this city was filled with millions of people talking, cheering, laughing, and dancing with each other in our moment of jubilee. One week ago, this city basked in the bright, warm mid-February sky. 

I didn’t go downtown for the parade, instead choosing to watch the first hour of it at home before going to my parish church for Ash Wednesday Mass and a delightful afternoon walk on that warm day at the Kansas City Zoo. While I was at the Zoo, riding on the Sky Safari chairlift on the way back from seeing the chimpanzees, I heard over the staff radio that something was happening at the parade. A few seconds later one of my best friends, a regular Wednesday Blog reader no less, texted me about a shooting at Union Station. By the time I returned to ground at the other side of the chairlift near the cheetah enclosure I knew enough that I chose to cut my zoo visit short and return to the assured safety of home.

At that point, we didn’t know if the shooting, still ongoing, was a terror attack or a fight gone wrong. It turned out to be the latter, yet in the process 22 bystanders were injured and 1 bystander, Lisa Lopez-Galvan, was killed. Her name is now etched into the memory of this city. She is by no means the first Kansas Citian to be killed in a shooting in the past year, each Sunday at Mass my parish prays for the victims of gun violence killed in the past week, ultimately reading 184 names in the 12 month course of 2023. Still, this was the first time that such a shooting happened with elected officials from the Governors of Kansas and Missouri to the Mayor of Kansas City to State and County legislators from throughout our region were all present. There are reports of Chiefs coach Andy Reid and players from the team helping comfort other revelers shocked by the sudden shooting and leading many to safety within Union Station itself.

At the time of writing the Kansas City Police Department has reported that the two suspects in this shooting are juveniles who got into an argument at the end of the Super Bowl Rally and started firing at least one, if not two, weapons. These individuals weren’t talking with each other but instead were talking to each other. The circumstances of the laws which govern our society here in Missouri contributed to this situation, and I hope that the experience inspires change in the hardest of hearts in Jefferson City and Topeka. 

That evening, feeling shocked and dumbed by the experience of seeing our jubilee transform into a living nightmare I wanted to do something, anything that could help. At dinner, I compiled a list of all of the Members of Congress who represent the Kansas City Metropolitan Area with their DC office phone numbers and posted it to my Instagram story and Facebook profile. The following morning then, I dialed the three numbers of my Congressman Emmanuel Cleaver, and Senators Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt. I spoke with a staffer for the Congressman and left messages with the senators’ offices.

  • Sen. Hawley (R-MO): (202) 224-6154
  • Sen. Schmitt (R-MO): (202) 224-5721
  • Sen. Moran (R-KS): (202) 224-6521
  • Sen. Marshall (R-KS): (202) 224-4774
  • Rep. Cleaver (D-MO): (202) 225-4535
  • Rep. Alford (R-MO): (202) 225-2876
  • Rep. Graves (R-MO): (202) 225-7041
  • Rep. Davids (D-KS): (202) 225-2865
  • Rep. LaTurner (R-KS): (202) 225-6601

In each case, echoing what Jason Kander, a local veteran and sometime Democratic political candidate, said on Wednesday night, asked each official to consider the repeal of a law called the Protection for Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) which prohibits lawsuits against the gun industry over damages caused by their products. The judicial system is something which ensures consumer safety. Without this safeguard, we are at far greater risk as a society, and we’re a society with a government that has checks and balances built into our very DNA! Those checks and balances only really work if the different branches of government, and the people who choose those in government, talk with each other about the issues of the day which in some cases can determine life or death.

As the week drew to a close, I set into a new task and worked a good 21 hours this weekend at the Kauffman Center in what was truly a wonderful antidote to the grief I felt after the events midweek. To me it seemed that many people choose to come see the Kansas City Ballet’s production of Peter Pan for the escapism that the boy who never grows up embodies. We did our part, however small, to help heal our city and restore some of that jubilant spirit to our lives. Even so, on one of those nights after a long shift I drove home down Main Street and stopped at the Pershing Road light just before midnight. Even then, days later, with St. John of the Cross’s dark night of the soul feeling ever present around me at that scene, the red and yellow confetti still gently fell as it had on Wednesday morning.

On Saturday afternoon, I attended with my parents and grandmother a rally held by the gun control organization Moms Demand Action in Washington Square Park, located across Main Street from Union Station. It is a site I know best as the annual home of the Kansas City Irish Festival’s arts area, where among other works of great imagination, I talked myself out of buying a beautiful painting of the USS Enterprise-Dfrom Star Trek: The Next Generation during the last festival over Labor Day weekend. The speakers at that rally included Moms Demand Action organizers, Missouri State Representatives, Jackson County Legislator Manny Abarca IV, and our mayor Quinton Lucas. All of the speeches I heard were stirring, and like my relations there I felt the same call to action, even as the same confetti fell around us blown on the wind from the west across the park.

Writing this on Monday night just before bed, I’m surprised to think that by the time you read this blog it will have only been 1 week, a mere 7 days, since our jubilee became our nightmare in the place where our city celebrates great triumphs. To me, this last week has felt more like two weeks, the emotions have been too great to be contained by a single week alone. I sit here, writing, hoping these words speak with you, while listening to Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic’s 2015 performance of Verdi’s Requiem. It seems to be the best soundtrack for this week’s edition of the Wednesday Blog, something which evokes the inherent conflict and paradox of human experience and human emotions. Giuseppe Verdi was, after all, noted for his anti-clerical views, yet his spirituality can be heard in every note of this great Mass of the Dead.

I thought briefly on Wednesday about what I would say if I were in the room with the two suspects in this shooting. Yet after a few moments, after all the anger, all I felt was sorrow that they made their decisions which led to the nightmare they wrought. When I listen to the Lacrimosa in Verdi’s setting, I think not only of Ms. Lopez-Galvan, but of those individuals as well who caused her death. How can we heal if we cannot recognize each other’s humanity? This prayer then, the words which Verdi set to music, as Mozart and Berlioz did before him, speak to both the victims and the perpetrators:

Lacrimosa dies illa

Qua resurget ex favilla

Judicandus homo reus.

Huic ergo parce, Deus:

Pie Jesu Domine,

Dona eis requiem. Amen.

Full of tears will be that day

When from the ashes shall arise

The guilty man to be judged;

Therefore spare him, O God,

Merciful Lord Jesus,

Grant them eternal rest. Amen.

Postscript

Dear Reader, this is now the second week in a row that I’ve released a follow up to the weekly edition of the Wednesday Blog, a sign perhaps that this format does not quite work as well for current news as I might wish. About 20 hours after I wrote this week’s post and an hour after I sent the recording off to Spotify to be published at midnight Central Time, I read a story from KSHB, Kansas City’s NBC affiliate which confirmed the two main suspects’ names, their charges, and some of their testimony from their own hospital beds where they are recovering from their own gunfire.

What struck me the most about this story, which has since been updated with more information and a mugshot of the suspect whose bullet killed Ms. Lopez-Galvan, is that the man in question’s testimony shows some sense of remorse. Quoting from the article written by KSHB’s news staff, “‘Just pulled a gun out and started shooting. I shouldn’t have done that. Just being stupid,’ Mays said.” Knowing some of the humanity of this suspect speaks to me of how broadly this shooting has hurt so many.

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Classics

Classics – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week I'm discussing what the word "classical" means to me in musical as well as historical and political terms. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

During my high school years in Kansas City, I would often listen to either NPR or 1660 AM, the local classical music station, on my 30 minute drive south to St. James Academy. In those years I continued to embrace Classical Music, especially opera, as an art form that remains a particular passion of mine, even to the point of several ill-fated attempts at composing.

Still, it strikes me that our term classical has a rather complicated set of meanings and uses. In the musical sense, it’s used to refer to the most highbrow of our genres, the rare musical tradition that still sees performances of music composed within the last 400 years rather than the decade-based music that usually makes the Pop and Rock charts. Classical Music tends to embrace the trappings of old European and American elite while also providing a gateway for the rest of us to enter that refined space and hear the radiant melodies and harmonies that have been the soundtrack for generations.

I began to explore Classical Music in my middle school years, like many Americans my introduction to this wide scope of music was through jazz and Gershwin’s blending of the classical and jazz orchestras. I’ve been wanting to write a blog post all about my appreciation for Gershwin’s music, though my continuing uncertainty regarding copyright law has kept me from ever publishing it or trying to record a podcast version of it. From Gershwin I jumped backwards to Mozart, Beethoven, and the other big names before settling both in the Baroque world with Lully and in the realm of the Romantics with the likes of Johann Strauss II, Verdi, Wagner, and Mahler. Today, I still love the music from all of those composers, yet I’m also drawn to more recent works written by the likes of Debussy, film music that fits in the 20th Century late Romantic tradition embodied by Prokofiev and the German film composer Gottfried Huppertz, who longtime Wednesday Blog readers and listeners will remember is the composer of the score for Fritz Lang’s 1926 science fiction film Metropolis. 

In the last couple of years, I’ve returned to my first unwitting introduction to classical music through the film music of the likes of John Williams and Elmer Bernstein and found myself drawn to electronic-classical compositions of Vangelis, which inspired the theme for the Wednesday Blog, and the choral classical-crossover albums of Christopher Tin and 2022’s The Moons Symphony written by Amanda Lee Falkenberg. I’ll gladly spend an afternoon listening to Jerry Goldsmith’s themes for the various Star Trek series and Mr. Williams’s compositions for Star Wars as much as I’ll choose to hear a Mozart piano concerto or Bernard Lallement’s Missa Gallica.

I’ve long thought that classical music saw its greatest innovation in the last century when its venue diversified from the concert hall alone to include the sweeping compositions that breathe life into films. Film music to me fits in the long tradition of ballet music. This comes out of the great silent film tradition of a century ago which reached its zenith in the late 1920s with epics like the original Ben-Hur and Phantom of the Opera films as well as with Metropolis and the other great German expressionist films. Sound film took some of the storytelling need off of the music as now the characters on screen could too be heard, yet the power of music in film was already clear. I relish the chance to hear the Kansas City Symphony perform a concert of film music, because even when it’s disassociated from the pictures that score was originally created to accompany that score often holds up on its own as a concert piece.

It is interesting then to consider that within the world of Classical Music the term “classical” generally only refers to a short span of musical composition within the long history of the wider “classical” genre. The Classical Period in music matches up with the Neo-Classical Period in art, architecture, and literature that ran from around 1750 to 1820. This period includes great composers like Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, all of whom worked in Vienna the beating heart of Europe’s music industry in this period. Yet by this definition the word classical implies a separation from the present, clear limits to its scale and span, and an air of antiquity.

In many other contexts the term classical refers to the far older Classical Antiquity of European History, the centuries during the height of Greek and later Roman civilization from around the 8th century BCE to the 5th century CE. When I write about the classics in my work, I am most often referring to people and ideas conceived during this 13-century long span of time. The classical fathers of Western philosophy––Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle––continue to be required reading in modern philosophy studies, while Aristotle and Pliny the Elder have a foundational role in my own discipline in the History of Natural History. Those two, Aristotle and Pliny, were central influences for the naturalists who defined the Americas in the sixteenth century, people like the focus of my dissertation André Thevet, as well as Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo and José de Acosta who both wrote natural histories of the Spanish Americas, and Conrad Gessner & Carolus Clusius whose works were written about distant worlds from the comfort of their own homes back in Europe.

Classical is a tricky word because it can be interpreted as something which is removed from common life. It stands apart from popular things because of its high status. I’m often struck by the adoption of mannerisms and norms from the classical music world in popular music, there was one concert I attended nearly a decade ago where the musicians on stage went from dancing in circles playing their violins to suddenly, briskly, taking chairs and sitting in a neat orchestral row in them as though playing the part yet ever with a wink and a nod about it. There has been a general loosening of expectations and normalities in our culture, a sort of reaction to the manners of past generations. I tend to see our present moment as responding to the norms of the 1980s and 1990s, politically we are in a period of unstable transition from the Reagan Conservativism and Clinton centrism of the 80s and 90s, though that needle continues to move forward in time and it does feel now that American conservativism and liberalism now seems to be working in response to the policies of the Bush and Obama Administrations as our youngest generation of voters now were born after the Millennium. I’m happy to see more classical musicians on social media releasing short videos of their performances, rehearsals, and daily practice for all to see. That’s one way for the classical to remain vibrant in the present moment. Still, it worries me that today in 2023 classical and jazz tend to be the exception in popular performance compared to pop, rock, and country.

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