COURAGE, DISCOVERY, AND FAITH

Sunday, APRIL 19, 2020
8:30 PM Perelman Stage / Stern Auditorium at Carnegie Hall

CoUrage, Discovery & Faith

Drawn over five hundred years ago, Leonardo DaVinci’s The Vitruvian Man has come to symbolize a certain confluence of mathematics and beauty. It’s a pen and ink idealization of the human form, a signpost, a map. It brims with optimism. The original Renaissance Man, Leonardo’s whirlwind discoveries would seem to have nothing to do with those of Alois Alzheimer. The good doctor was born four centuries later on the other side of The Alps. His life’s work was devoted to the horrifying disease that bears his name, a condition that can dash any illusions of transcendence or perfection as far as our earthly vessels are concerned. Yet they were both ahead of their time, forming theories there was no way to test. The instruments simply hadn’t been invented yet. Almost impossibly, Leonardo’s notebooks claim that sound diffuses itself as circles in the air … like ripples on the water, intuiting that sound moves in waves long before there was any way to prove it. And Dr. Alzheimer insisted that presenile dementia wasn’t simply madness. It was caused by plaques and tangles, he found, physical anomalies in the brain. His diagnosis meant there could one day be a treatment. The texts you’ll hear sung tonight are inspired by the work of courageous thinkers. Two men who had the faith to reach into the unknown and pull out something rare: hope.

Jocelyn Hagen, Herschel Garfein, and Robert S. Cohen have give us works that tackle the puzzle of humanity from either side of the abyss, each of them employing the power of numbers, statistics and ratios, imbued with measure after measure of storytelling and incidental poetry. They form a kaleidoscope of lives laid bare, heartbreaking and exhilarating all at once.

Music is always about discovery, and there is an inherent faith that binds the singer to the song, the composer to the conductor. To sit in an audience is an act of trust. And still—as sure as we can all appreciate the illumination of harmony—we will eventually come face to face with dissonance and decay. There will be darkness. If you’re not sure where the courage is going to come from, just sing, as the final act tells us. Sing anything. Love and music are the last things to go.

-Mark McAdam
Songwriter & Producer