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Sunday, February 27, 2005
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ONE OCTAVE DOWN Pam Bricker, a well-known local jazz singer, as well as a voice instructor and member of GW University’s music faculty, killed herself a few days ago. Bricker helped organize a Friday afternoon jazz session on campus that a number of UD’s students, knowing UD to be a singer, urged her to attend. Had she gone last week, she’d have met Bricker; but UD, still suffering from a bad cold, didn’t go. ‘Always the professional,’ one of Bricker’s students remembers, ‘Pam once gave me a mild reprimand for trying to reschedule a [voice] lesson [with her] because of a cold. “Come on, Chien, you can sing through a cold. You can’t cancel just because of that. Colds can make people sound better, sexier.”’ UD knows what Bricker meant. With her current cold, for instance, UD’s singing has gone all dusky, and though she’s eager to regain her soprano, she finds this one-octave-down sound interesting too. One octave down. At the moment the phrase seems a way to capture both the sequence by which a singer descends into serious depression, as Bricker apparently did, and the way one ought to sing, now, in memory of her. ‘Let it be told,’ writes another contributor to her memorial website, ‘that sometimes our song is stronger than the spirit that writes the melodies. The human musical conversation that makes our artistry so special can be the very thing that is our source of pain.’ This rather enigmatic comment put UD in mind of a poem James Merrill wrote in memory of a friend. FAREWELL PERFORMANCE Art. It cures affliction. As lights go down and Maestro lifts his wand, the unfailing sea change starts within us. Limber alembics once more make of the common Lot a pure, brief gold. At the end our bravos call them back, sweat-soldered and leotarded, back, again back - anything not to face the fact that it’s over. You are gone. You’d caught like a cold their airy lust for essence. Now, in the furnace parched to ten or twelve light handfuls, a mortal gravel sifted through fingers, Coarse yet grayly glimmering sublimate of palace days, Strauss, Sidney, the lover’s plaintive Can’t we just be friends? which your breakfast phone call Clothed in amusement, This is what we paddled a neighbor’s dinghy out to scatter - Peter who grasped the buoy, I who held the box underwater, freeing all it contained. Past Sunny, fluent soundings that gruel of selfhood taking manlike shape for one last jete on ghostly - wait, ah! - point into darkness vanished. High up, a gull’s wings Clapped. The house lights (always supposing, caro, Earth remains your house) at their brightest set the scene for good: true colors, the sun-warm hand to cover my wet one … Back they come. How you would have loved it. We in turn have risen. Pity and terror done with, programs furled, lips parted, we jostle forward eager to hail them, More, to join the troupe - will a friend enroll us one fine day? Strange, though. For up close their magic self-destructs. Pale, dripping, with downcast eyes they’ve seen where it led you. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Update: The Washington Post's obituary. |