update from sparkleup

diary/2022-01-21.html

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 <p>Movement four, &ldquo;Veni Sancte Spiritus&rdquo;, is a joyful, hymn-like invocation sung primarily in unison over an orchestral accompaniment of woven melodic lines. Despite being the longest text, the rollicking nature and quick tempo lead it to be the shortest of all five movements. As an invocation, each line comes as a request: &ldquo;O light most blessed, fill the inmost heart of thy faithful&rdquo;, &ldquo;Cleanse what is dirty, moisten what is dry, heal what is hurt&rdquo;, and so on.</p>
 <p>The final movement is another motet, about half of which is sung <em>a cappella</em>. The opening orchestral melodies finally return towards the end, building up beneath a text that echoes some of the first verse but relies primarily on the &ldquo;Agnus Dei&rdquo; hymn from the liturgy, which describes Jesus as the Lamb of God.</p>
 <h2 id="context">Context</h2>
+<p>I chose this text because one of the things that I&rsquo;d like to work on this semester is an essay surrounding the death of a poet friend of mine. I considered picking a setting of the standard requiem mass &mdash; something with which I was deeply obsessed in high school; my mom called it morbid &mdash; but when I think of Dwale, there are several reasons that such wouldn&rsquo;t be fitting. First of all Dwale was a Muslim, and picking apart a deeply Catholic work while thinking of it<sup id="fnref:pronouns"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:pronouns">1</a></sup> felt like incredibly poor taste. Even this non-denominational but still very Christian composition feels kind of touchy to me.</p>
+<p>However, one of the things I remembered of this piece was the note from the composer about writing it during the final days of his mother&rsquo;s illness and the ways in which large swaths of the requiem mass didn&rsquo;t fit the emotions he was going through or wanted to nurture through the process of grief. Dwale&rsquo;s death hit me particularly hard not just because we were friends, but because the last thing he said to me one-on-one spoke of a low sense of self-worth on its part. It felt that it couldn&rsquo;t understand why I was so supportive of it or what it did to deserve that support. The process of grieving while trying to process a last conversation like that turned an already deeply introspective act up to eleven. It wasn&rsquo;t a question of what I could have said differently in that conversation, as I think I handled it fairly well, but more a question of how I honor this person who meant a lot to me in the face of its death.</p>
 <h2 id="applicability">Applicability</h2>
+<p>Add in the fact of my dog&rsquo;s sudden passing in mid December and the whole last two years, and death and grief have been on my mind a lot. As I process so much through writing, I always try to be deliberate about tackling my emotions. This approach of acknowledging death while at the same time very deliberately doing so through the lens of growth (in Lauridsen&rsquo;s case, the rest and hope in spirituality) is something that I wanted to look into. With my essay this semester, I want to, yes, process my grief, but also to use it as a stepping-stone to becoming something better. That could be something as trite as becoming a better person, but there is no reason that it need not be becoming a better writer, too, especially if that writing is an emotional tool.</p>
+<p>Beyond the more intellectual take on this piece, one thing that I found useful about it was the shape of each of the movements and of the piece as a whole. As I plan on tackling the essay through the framing device of the four seasons, I also need to consider that shape-made-of-shapes in order to make for a more cohesive end product. There will be structural similarities between each of the sections of the essay &mdash; the poem and related works to dissect as well as my related thoughts in footnotes &mdash; which will lead to those inner arcs. It would be vanishingly easy to write four essays about related topics, but much more compelling to write a four-part essay that has an arc of its own.</p>
+<p>In particular, on listening to &ldquo;Lux&rdquo; with a more critical ear, I kept hearing various callbacks to the melody introduced right off the bat in the first movement, and finding a way to tie everything together at the end is something I&rsquo;m already considering.</p>
+<div class="footnote">
+<hr />
+<ol>
+<li id="fn:pronouns">
+<p>Dwale used it/its pronouns&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:pronouns" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">&#8617;</a></p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+</div>
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                 <p>Page generated on 2022-01-23</p>