Fragrant

The story of the woman who washed Jesus' feet with her tears and anointed his feet with perfume has been a favorite of Mark Dorn's for as long as I've known him. It wasn't a surprise, then, when he asked me to write a piece using this story as the central part of the music. The narrative (found in Luke 7, Matthew 26, Mark 14, and John 12) tells us that Jesus is dining at the home of a Pharisee when a woman, "who lived a sinful life" (Luke 7:37 TNIV), entered the room and began crying over Jesus' feet soaking them with her tears, which were tears of remorse and repentance. The woman used her hair to wipe clean Jesus' feet and when she was done she poured very expensive fragrant oil over his feet, anointing him. There is much to learn from these passages, but three things that stand out are that the anointing oil was extremely expensive, it appeared to be used wastefully, and as the Apostle John observes, "the house was filled with the fragrance of perfume" 12:3 TNIV). Music, in many ways, is like the jar of perfume. To begin with, it certainly is not cheap. There are material costs wrapped up in instruments and their maintenance, the purchasing (or commissioning) of music to be performed, and the overhead necessary to store, practice, and perform music. Of more value are the human hours spent developing music. Not even considering the weeks, and often months, it takes to compose a new work, musicians spend years honing skills. Some authorities in the field of human performance claim that it takes a minimum of ten thousand hours of diligent, focused practice to achieve expert levels of performance. Certainly music is very expensive. Music can also appear to be used wastefully. Music performed live happens once and then it is gone. It is the most ephemeral of the arts. Today we can recall and enjoy almost any piece of music because of recordings. We have found a way to fix the ephemeral quality of music. Yet recorded music is but an image of a performance, and like Paul says about our understanding of God, the image of music portrayed through a recording is similar to "a reflection as in a mirror" (1 Corinthians 12:12 TNIV). Identical to the jar of perfume, once music is poured out it can never be returned and once the sound dissipates it is over forever. And yet, like the perfume, music has the ability to fill a house with its fragrance. In short, it becomes a blessing to all. Whether the dinner party members at the Pharisee's house realizes it or not, they too, were blessed with the fragrance of Jesus' anointing. I believe music has the ability to bless those who hear it even if they weren't listening. So I had to ask myself, "How do I go about expressing all of this in a new piece of music?" Rather than composing a programmatic work I chose to focus on the perfume as a character of the narrative contained in all four gospels. Most apparent to me were the qualities of perfume. Perfume goes out {it fills a room with scent), it is expansive, and it was given as a gift. It draws in by being seductive and sensual and it invites intimacy. for me the similarities between the perfume and music only have gotten stronger. My goal was to reflect these qualities musically. There are moments of simplicity and moments of complexity; there are moments of introspection and moments of extroverted energy; and there are moments of remorse and repentance balanced with moments of joy. There are four major sections to the form for the most part Fragrant moves from darkness to light throughout.