I made the mistake of reading the news on my iphone the moment I woke up this past New Year’s Day. The world before and after midnight, January 1st was the same cesspool of misery and meanness that my most ardent magical thinking failed to transform. Wars, threats to democracy and plain old nastiness between people dominated every inch of my screen as I doom scrolled the articles on My New York Times app. I barely caught my breath before viewing the flood of viral live updates about the terrorist truck ramming in New Orleans in the earlier hours of that morning. Horrified as I was about this latest assault on innocent revelers at a street party, I felt more horrified by the ease with which I dissociated from that news, reasoning that such evils happen far away in other people’s backyards, not my own. As the morning wore on, I sought blissful respite in a fire pit, bagels and booze brunch hosted by friends; this was followed by yet another party and finally a New Year’s Day concert featuring all six of Bach’s Brandenburg concertos.
I have been listening avidly to the Brandenburg Concertos in one sitting for many years. The music calms my anxieties and buoys me emotionally when I feel myself sinking under the weight of sadness. I have no deep knowledge of its composition or history, and I regret not having paid more attention to those details when I was younger. I appreciate that the more understanding I have about a piece of music, the richer my experience of that piece can be. However, on New Year’s Day, I was looking to be eased, not educated. As I waited for the Berkshire Bach Society to start its annual Brandenburg concert at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, all I cared about was sating my desperate hunger for uplift with Bach’s auditory comfort food. The world’s bad news would still be waiting for all of us when the music ended. For the next couple of hours, I just needed Bach to help me to escape all of it.
The first movement of the exhilarating first concerto is traditionally played in allegro, at a lively and joyous pace. It has never failed to put me in a much happier and more hopeful frame of mind, and that afternoon was no exception. Yet the movement ended all too soon. I suddenly found myself descending as the orchestra began the somber and pensive second movement, an adagio, at a slow and expressive pace. Yet this movement also ended too soon, giving way rapidly to the third movement, again in allegro, then followed by a fourth movement, a collection of slow dance melodies.
Fast and slow, up and down, resting and dancing, exuberant and restrained. Listening with greater care than I had in the past, I realized that this is the recurring pattern of all six Brandenburg concertos. We soar with speed and joy at the beginning, we descend slowly, becoming pensive, even brooding in the middle, then we soar again at the end. Rather than helping me to escape the world temporarily, the melodies and tempos of Bach’s music dragged me along on a dizzying emotional roller coaster.
And perhaps this is precisely one lesson I’ve learned from these magnificent concertos. Reality before and after each January 1st is never any different, whether out in the world or within each of us. Humankind soars and descends, tastes sweet joy and bitterly grieves, brings blessings and curses upon itself, in an endless paradoxical loop of perpetuity and fluidity. Nothing remains the same, yet the more things change the more they remain the same, at least in human affairs. Threading seamlessly between the disparate, ever-changing pieces of everything is our music which we carry with us from age to age, and which carries us as each of us ages. Sometimes it is actual music like Bach’s concertos; other times it is the creativity that emerges tenaciously from human endeavor, insight, and inspiration; still other times, it is simply our will to live and give voice to our deepest convictions, pain, joy and visions. This endless striving to compose and play the melodies that are persistent human expression is what I heard in the concertos that afternoon. They bring me this greatest comfort: no matter how ugly and uncertain the world can be, we humans possess a timeless power to express beauty that points us toward hope for a very different world.
An old Israeli folk song reminds us that each day passes us by as each year fades into the next one, yet the melodies remain forever. As I begin 2025, with all the beauty and beastliness it might throw at us, I’m inspired to keep playing the music that gives us the courage and compassion to engage with the days to come. Happy new year.
Dan Ornstein is the rabbi of Congregation Ohav Shalom and a writer living in Albany, NY. Check out his writings at danornstein.com
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