Jeff Key
Lemon Cantata (in B-flat Major)—Music for Revival
Cantata—a narrative piece of music for voices with instrumental accompaniment.
“Music does a lot of things for a lot of people. It’s transporting, for sure. It’s uplifting, it’s encouraging, it’s strengthening.” — Aretha Franklin, Queen of Soul, Winner of 18 Grammy Awards, (1942-2018)
“Music is life itself”. —Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, Jazz trumpeter, composer, vocalist (1901-1971)
We danced in a new decade and then fell into the black hole of a catastrophic pandemic, economic despair, the devastation of racism and police brutality, raging wildfires, torrential hurricanes, and petty sniping surrounding the upcoming election.
It’s been a difficult road and we are far from recovery…..but it might be time to pause, take a deep breath of the waning summer breeze, and sing….
…a cantata for healing, compassion, resilience, revival—and the coming of better days.
J.S. Bach wrote cantatas for spiritual awakening. Lukas Foss, who escaped from Nazi Germany, adapted Carl Sandburg’s Prairie into a cantata to commemorate freedom. South African, Philip Miller, composed REwind, a cantata based on testimony from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
If we were to compose a cantata for the troubled days of 2020—what would it include? Would it be filled with fear, frustration, rage, and grief? Would it address nature’s invasive destruction, inept national leadership, systemic inhumanity?
Yes—to all of the above….
….but it should also be uplifting and remind us of the simple wonder of “watching dawn linger and the moon slide into place.”
As Bob Marley said, "One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.”
