Music of the Night

Last night we enjoyed hearing The Carolina Master Chorale’s first concert of the season, Life’s a Beach...and Then You Sing! Tim Koch is the music director and conductor and Andrew Fowler is pianist and composer-in residence of this chorale . What a talented pair of musicians! Each selection evoked the sights, sounds, memories and emotions of the beach and ocean. We heard the first performance of Andy Fowler’s Over Yonder’s Ocean. This is a suite of six Murrells Inlet spirituals created from a very early recording of these Gullah melodies. Pure delight! The main selection was The Outermost House. The text is from the book of the same name written by Henry Beston about his year long stay at Eastham Beach at Cape Cod. Through his well-written reflections of nature's seasons and the musical composition by Ronald Perera, I could easily sense the power that the beach holds over us. These final lyrics were especially inspiring:

"Hold out your hands over the earth as over a flame. To all who love her, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor of dark life. Touch the earth, love the earth, honor the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth’s and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and dawn seen over ocean from the beach."

My soul was fed. The only disappointment of the evening was that there were not more present to hear this music performed so very well. My guess is that the World Series and college football games are tough competition. The need to support the cultural arts is certainly another topic for another day.