PROGRAM NOTES

DEBTS

CATHY - For your mentorship, wit, kindness, empathy, patience, generosity, and unfaltering dedication to your pupils.

TORI - For your warmth, inclusivity, professionalism, talent, musicianship, and unwavering attention to your craft and its practice.

COLE - For your humour, your loyalty, and your enduring rhythm.

LESSONS

I. FROM WHICH ALL THINGS SPRING

Introit

You have functioned as a part of something; you will vanish into what produced you. Or be restored, rather. To the logos from which all things spring. By being changed. (IV.XIV)

II. ONLY NOW

Kyrie

Forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and remember it: Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see. (III.X)

III. TO SEE THE NATURE OF A SUNBEAM

Lux perpetua

We speak of the sun’s light as “pouring down on us,” as “pouring over us” in all directions. Yet it’s never poured out. Because it doesn’t really pour; it extends… To see the nature of a sunbeam, look at light as it falls through a narrow opening into a dark room. It extends in a straight line, striking any solid object that stands in its way and blocks the space beyond it. There it remains—not vanishing, or falling away… What doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness. (VIII.CVII)

IV. THE CITIZEN

Sequence (Dies irae)

You’ve lived as a citizen in a great city… And to be sent away from it, not by a tyrant or a dishonest judge, but by Nature, who first invited you in — why is that so terrible? Like the impresario ringing down the curtain on an actor: ‘But I’ve only gotten through three acts…!’ Yes. This will be a drama in three acts, the length fixed by the power that directed your creation, and now directs your dissolution. Neither was yours to determine. So make your exit with grace — the same grace shown to you. (XII.XXXVI)

V. A DANCER FOR THE DANCE

Agnus Dei

You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for the dance, the miser for money or the social climber for status? When they’re really possessed by what they do, they’d rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts. (V.I)

VI. COLOUR UNDIMINISHED

Lux æterna

No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be good. Like gold or emerald or purple repeating to itself, “No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be emerald, my colour undiminished.” (VII.XV)

VII. RECOMPOSED

In Paradisum

To decompose is to be recomposed. That’s what nature does. Nature—through whom all things happen as they should, and have happened forever in just the same way, and will continue to, one way or another, endlessly. (IX.XXXV)

All excerpts quoted above are taken from:

Aurelius, M. (2002). Meditations: A New Translation, with an introduction, by Gregory Hays (1044488633 798710884 G. Hays, Trans.). New York, NY: Modern Library.