Music of the Plagues
Music of the plagues:
There are some interesting thoughts about the response to music and its relationships to our perceptions of sin and popular understandings to medical science:
Hundreds of years ago, many associated dance and music with sin. Because of interpretations concerning why people were dying in such large numbers devoid of any social-standing barriers (the plague was killing the rich, the poor, the priests, and the nobleman, as well as the peasant) many people began to associate the moral conduct of an individual. The public attached seemingly sinful behavior such as music and dance to the reasons for their afflictions. Old paintings and drawings depict the specter of death as one that carries a musical instrument, like the lute, or the tambourine, as if to suggest that those who play music are those who "dance with death".
The dance macabre (The Camille Saint-Saens composition), originally derived from an old poem written by Henri Cazalis, which tells of the gruesome goings-on in the churchyard of a French village on Halloween. It is a captivating example of how music acts as a vehicle for our ability to reconcile traumatic events that impact our daily lives, often without any sense of reason. It is one of my favorite pieces of music.
Here is the poem:
Zig-a-zig-a-zig it's the Rhythm of Death!
Death at midnight playing a dance tune,
Zig-a-zig-a-zig on his violin.
The winter wind whistles and the night is dark.
The winter wind whistles and the lime trees moan.
Weird white skeletons streak across the shadows
Running and leaping wrapped in their shrouds.
Zig-a-zig-a-zig the dance grows even wilder
You can hear the eerie clatter of the dancers' bones
But wait! Suddenly they all stop dancing.
They scatter, they vanish for the cock has crowed.
Now lets all sit back and enjoy some tri-tones with our diseases, shall we? Enjoy the listening example of Camille Saint-Saëns - La danse macabre as performed by the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, (Andrew Wan, Kent Nagano), and thanks for reading!