In preceding days I must have heard fragments of the Mozart Requiem and the Barber Adagio more times than I can count. As Polish media outlets struggled to find music to frame the astounding events unfolding on their screens and a nation came to grips with their tragedy, a predictable thing happened:
They reached for the greatest music possible.
Inasmuch as terrible tragedies have a way of revealing truth for a short period of time, so too do they lead us to the greatest artistic expressions available to our society. I couldn't help but feel, as I mourned along with my kin and country, that it was truly sad that this tenderness, mutual understanding, and outpourings of faith would soon be gone from the public square. With nothing to sustain them in everyday life, such noble passions fade away in the onslaught of our modern relativistic culture.
It is also deeply unfortunate that a nation's collective good taste -- and mutual seeking after the infinite -- lingers only so long as the tragedy is present. Can it be that the very music which we use to help us cope during difficult times can be -- by virtue of its unparalleled depth and expressive power -- capable of helping us retain the best sentiments brought about by tragedy? I firmly believe that God calls artists to create works to help us penetrate more deeply into the fiber of reality, in the process seeking greater meaning and depth to each and every day.
Rather than write further on this impossible loss, I offer two more pieces to help us cope not only with an international tragedy, but to take with us into everyday life, to use as tools of deeper spiritual communion with the ultimate reality.
The first work, by Wojciech Kilar, is one of the most moving renditions of Agnus Dei I have ever heard. It is written in the new contemplative spiritual style of other composers like Henryk Gorecki and Arvo Part.
The second work -- Memento Mori -- is from the progressive klezmer band the Bester Quartet. Beginning in a modernistic noise sculpture meant to evoke a physical crash, a heartbreaking melody emerges from the wreckage to bring sense to the difficulty encountered.
As to the Poles lost, I can only say: "Hail the Victorious Dead -- may Christ bring them to their eternal rest."
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