Now has become that time of year when I listen obsessively to Rachmaninov’s Vespers (op. 37; more accurately, they say, called “All-Night Vigil”), and wade around in autumn, knee-deep in nostalgia. There’s something about the autumn—whether it’s the quality of the air or the quality of the colors (mostly yellowing birches here in the 60°s N)—that gets me nostalgic. The changes, the leaving (my favorite aural metaphor), or, as Hopkins put it, the unleaving, the sensation of floating in a yellow wood, what with all those choices made to wade through, and none to change. Only this.

The first time I ever visited Norway was twelve years ago, in 2003, on a tour of Scandinavia with the Luther College Nordic Choir. I sang a solo, during that tour, in the Oslo Cathedral (the song was the classic Norwegian tune “Aftensolen smiler,” or “The Evening Sun Smiles”). What an honor it was, and memorable . . . for more than the setting and occasion: I remember vividly (as do the sopranos, surely) that I had missed my cue to sneak out the side and make my way to the balcony from which perch I would sing the solo, sending the tune over the crowd in just the way, as the song says, the evening sun smiles over the earth below. (Sorry.) So, to avoid prolonging the uncomfortable silence of the audience waiting for the song to begin, I had to run, quietly but quickly, from the altar, where the choir was, down the side aisle, up a spiral staircase, and down to the front of the balcony. I heard the opening pitch from afar, and being somewhat winded and a little discombobulated from the awkward, rushed journey to the loft, I began the solo a minor third higher than I should have. The sopranos thus had to match my key, rather than the written one, and a minor third is no little leap when you’re already in the stratosphere. Oops.
Moreover, Knut Nystedt, famous Norwegian composer, was in the audience. Ouch. But then, here we are, and we’re all ok.

In college, a few of us choir folk, still some of my dearest friends, lived in a house we affectionately named The Outhouse (it was just outside of Decorah). We’d spend nights listening to the Robert Shaw Chorale recording of Rachmaninov’s Vespers and get high on the tones Shaw could draw out of his chorale. We would fawn over the last few bars of the second movement, “Bless the Lord, O My Soul,” where the basses descend stepwise to finish on a low, low C, far beneath the earth (though we were tenors mostly). I do the same now, years later, and marvel at the impeccable voice-leading, especially in the alto line, throughout that second movement—those Russian chords a thicket of roots and stone. I did so just now, in fact, while I walked from a Bruktbutikk—a thrift store—here in Hønefoss, having bought a pair of salt and pepper shakers for my apartment, a tiny convenience that has been sorely lacking (hardly a sore worth writing about, I know!). But I guess this is part of my point: the juxtaposition of Rachmaninov’s Vespers with the unremarkable: a sort of bridge to span the gap between reason and what else there is. Between the historical context in which Rachmaninov wrote such music—those unworldly tones, that seep so certainly from the earth—and the unremarkable: the salt and pepper shaker in a thrift store run by a talkative Swede, who I could understand surprisingly well, as he waxed (quite thoroughly) nostalgic about the old days of MS-DOS—”det var enkelt, men det fungerte” he said, “it was simple, but it worked”—as opposed to all the fancy graphics, the complicated programming, the mouse with so many buttons, the mash of possibilities that we endure today (he had noticed my iPad in my shoulder bag), and even offered a critique of Steve Jobs, who, he suggested, simply took the best parts of everyone else’s stuff and put them together; I can’t really disagree. Nostalgia whips us all.

All of these roads, two each, at every moment, diverging. So much to wonder at while the birches unleave and the Norway pines keep their all-winter vigil.

Meanwhile, the presentations are going well, and although some groups of students are strict adherents of janteloven, others surpise me. I visited a class of music students yesterday afternoon; they were the liveliest bunch of Norwegian students I’ve encountered so far, I’d even say far and away so.

Ah, performers. Ah, humanity.