Bullets to ballads
Maye it’s that time of year, when we get all wishful and start asking for things that will likely never come or never happen – like peace on earth and goodwill to men – but it’s the wishing that keeps us human.
Two weekends ago, I had the extraordinary privilege of spending Saturday night and then Sunday morning listening to two different concerts. The first, at Manila Pianos in Magallanes, featured tenor Arthur Espiritu and soprano Stefanie Quintin Avila in a program that brought the audience to its feet and singing along at the end of many encores.
After that wonderful performance, I messaged my deepest thanks to concert producers Pablo Tariman and Joseph Uy, noting that they made “magical interludes like this possible in these stress-filled times. If only all those bombs and bullets in Ukraine and Gaza were music. Fire symphonies, concertos, fugues and cantatas across the border!”
The next morning, we drove out to Batangas City for another friend’s birthday celebration, which was heralded by a sparkling mini-concert with soprano Rachel Gerodias and tenor Jonathan Abdon. At lunch that followed, I sat down at a table with a renowned journalist, a composer-performer and a senator, and we were all breathless with joy at the music we had just experienced. It was the composer who put it best: “How can anyone argue with that?”
Indeed, in a world and at a time prone to argument and conflict, where even the most innocuous remark can ignite scorching disputation, the enjoyment of music seems to serve as a universal balm, a hushing power that creates a pause just long enough for us to remember our better selves – taming fangs, retracting claws, infusing tenderness into the coarsest of sensibilities. As William Congreve put it more than three hundred years ago, “Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast” (not “beast” as it’s often misquoted, although it could apply just as well).
As I’ve noted elsewhere, whenever I think of music as a discipline, what comes to mind is Leonard Bernstein’s description of it as “the only art incapable of malice.” That may or may not be true – music in specific historical contexts such as Nazi Germany and our own martial law has
