and he lost the orchestra

bruckner eight is a shitty symphony, i said
i said bruckner is a composer who writes shitty music

i said to my coworker, who is a chorister
it's like what people who aren't musicians hear, i think
it's not talking to me. where is it. where is it

harry potter and walt disney and prokofiev
but that's not what he wanted, said the conductor
not that it was about what he didn't want

he was a deeply religious person and he spent his whole life looking
in his symphonies (his shitty music) he did a lot of looking
he constructed these scaffolds into the mines of the universe

god is nearby

he knows. he thinks he knows. he is all building
he is building, building, building

two cymbal crashes toward dissonance. a new amalgamated version, in solo violin against selected wagner tuben, with false treble and h transposition to the side.
(is that a half step? no, it's a tritone, it's a fourth's augmentation, it's the diminishment of a fifth)

but we have no cymbals. god is nearby

what is it? it's not talking to me. but if this is the closest he ever came to finding it
this shitty symphony. i said. imagine

the apocalyptic. god is nearby. and there is not time to waste, in the apocalypse, is there? but if god is nearby and the world is already ending then you may as well spend thirty-two measures questing for the content of four

god is nearby

this would be an augmentation, wouldn't it? where i draw out a phrase into further forms, as we sag and storm and stress. not diminution. and what i hope: that we cannot diminish the power of those three words, god is nearby

i've heard conspiracy theories that the beings in the next higher dimension are floating right around our heads, where we can't see them. and so i imagine that god is nearby. and he knows everything we have ever done. yes, the perfect record. he has not lost the orchestra, i'm sure. the orchestra may well have lost him, but he yet remains nearby.

stealing a slow oboe and a tremolo thousandfold, to find god. to find god on this stage and in this church divorced of its significance (a hall, it's just a hall, in the township, can we get in the school if enough of us are in the township, or nearby), with major league material and the most minor of second sets

the movie interstellar has a utterly iconic and aurally iconographic soundtrack made up of augmentation, a tragically weighted thing rolling through fear in its message almost as distantly, stalwartly, adamantly as hope is meant to pulse there, and they talk about how love may be the only force, vis-à-vis gravity, that transcends dimensions. love is friendship set to music, they say, and music may be the only language of god. i think i do believe it

perhaps god can only be found, in such an imminent way, through music so staggering and massive and unbalanced. who could claim to truly find god in a tchaikovsky symphony? he has touched it, but i'm not sure that he's there. mozart is the description of a white-halled heaven but there's naught to say that he is there, there there. and brahms...i'm not sure brahms is concerned with looking.

but bruckner is. and that makes bruckner neither especially shitty nor especially wonderful music. it shakes a person, however. touches them with the finger of the trembling hands that cried with discovery. god is here! god is here!

what effort, from the orchestra, to commune with bruckner. what greater effort, from the audience, to even try. to pray.

friendship set to music. but who sets out to be friends with god?

bruckner revised compulsively, indecisively. in that material, we might suppose, he detected those threads of a pulse. he could not throw aside his themes, his rhythms. god is nearby. god was nearby, and through embrace of this message already spoken god will become here again.

and what do i mean by all this, in the end? i'm sure i won't enjoy every second of arduous rehearsal of the eighth, just because the conductor said god is nearby. i'm sure it will be just as mundane as every other rehearsal at which i entertained the personal space of a deity encompassing in form and function a community's shared love.

bruckner is a composer who writes shitty music, i said, but then i played his music and it was, among tremolo, a collection of savoral lines.

music's social function, through performance together: what we say about it, what we believe about it, defines nearly half of what it, indeed, is.

one of the second violins said he thought the first rehearsal would be mostly the conductor talking about the symphony. certainly, it was the conductor believing about the symphony, and playing his interpretation with us. and so maybe it was.