The Composer The Poet and The Script

[Bahaichap]

THAT WONDROUS SCORE

Poets, as few others, must live close to the world that primitive men are in: the world, in its nakedness-birth, love, death, the sheer fact of being alive. -Under Discussion: On the Poetry of Galway Kennell, The Wages of Dying, editor, Howard Nelson, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1987, p. 170.


There’s a beauty and form here,
an order, harmony and direction,
as if a great conductor begeming,
brightening the notes to a pace,
a precision, an incision, a sweetness,
a lushness, arranging a dance like
the infinitude of immensity with the stars
as they shine from their vast emperean.

As Toscanini was bringing his wondrous
virtuosity and grand music to the masses
in 1937,1 another music was crossing the
world, bringing heavenly outpourings and
radiant effulgences to the hearts, resuscitating,
making flowers of divine mysteries grow
luxuriantly and illuminating the world.

As Fritz Reiner, the great stick technician,
was enthralling the lovers of music in Chicago
in 1953,2 the Kingdom of God on Earth
was making its entry and I was learning
to become a heavenly farmer, to scatter
pure seeds and to conduct my own life
with the aid of a great musical Score
written by that wondrous Composer.

1In 1937 the international teaching plan was launched and classical music was brought to the mass of citizens over radio on a regular basis in the USA.
2In 1953 Fritz Reiner took over the Chicago symphony orchestra. The temple in Chicago was completed that year and, the Guardian informed us, the Kingdom of God on Earth began.

Ron Price
3 November 1996

 

[Bahaichap]

More on the composer, the script and the poet...

BIRTH PANGS AND DEATH KNELLS

The web of our life is of a mingled gain, good and ill together.
-William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well.

As this(1) Order was being born
generations of artists had to toe
a line, some neo-orthodoxy that
kept millions under artistic lock
and key and other millions in death
lock. But even in those darkest hours,
when this new Order was taking on its
first shaping, for an international
teaching launch, Shostakovich told
of the death-knell of another order
and Bartok the birth of a new dialogue.(2)
A whole world was being born in music
and the arts, some aesthetic reflection
of a spiritual shift that was taking this world
by storm, with a vibrancy and a true liberty.

Ron Price
14 October 1996

1 The Baha’i Administrative Order took its first shape in the years 1921 to 1936. The consolidation, the fine-tuning, of this initial form has been taking place in the remaining decades of this century.
2 These composers wrote symphonies that expressed the death of the communist regime and the birth of new kinds of worlds.