Kirke Mechem - From The Composer

From The Composer

"As a child I often went to sleep listening to my mother practice the piano. She played at least one recital or concerto every year and we children understood that these were important events. She was a devout Presbyterian, my father an atheist, and they respected each other's beliefs unreservedly. The common spiritual force in our family was music. In my adolescence, my confusions or griefs were assuaged by putting on a record of Ravel, Rachmaninov or Bach. Though I do not share my mother's religious beliefs, the great poetry of the Old Testament and the great music it has inspired through the centuries touch the deepest part of my being because it connects me with my mother. But it also connects me with my father, who was a fine poet (I have set many of his poems to music), and who loved my mother through music just as all of their children did.

"Is it any wonder then that I should regard music as something almost sacred? I do not mean sacred in a religious sense. I mean it in the sense that one would say truth is sacred, life is sacred. They are not to be mocked. While I love to laugh at hypocrisy, and love humor almost anywhere I find it, I am overly sensitive when I hear what I perceive as the trivialization or brutalization of music, or what was common practice in the 20th century — deliberately making it unintelligible to most music-lovers. This wonderful art has room for endless variety, from lighthearted to tragic, from Western to Eastern and everything in between. Each person has a right to his or her own taste, and I recognize that just as we all come from different backgrounds, we all have different ways of listening.

"And so I readily admit that my own background has conditioned what I look for in a new piece of music, whether my own, or someone else's. I don’t want to find new music "interesting" in a purely intellectual way; I am impatient with novelty or experimentation for their own sake; I am too old to be taken in by trends or jargon. Been there, heard that. I want to love a piece of music, to be delighted by it, to be moved to tears or laughter or in some way taken out of myself. At the very least I must want to hear the piece again, the sooner the better. We composers are speaking a very old language. The new ways in which we speak must be understood by our contemporaries. Otherwise, we are simply spinning our wheels, and music becomes just another plaything, a hobby, an elitist way of putting down the uninitiated. I prefer it to be the magnificent source of joy, consolation, beauty, ingenuity, and inspiration that it has been for generations, and was in my own family."