The Honey Town

December 22, 2007 at 4:46 AM

During my freshman year at Alfred University, I took an FYE (First Year Experience) class called Music Appreciation. We had 8 students in our class. As you can imagine such a small class gave birth to moments of drop-dead amusement and laughter.
One class session, our professor assigned interesting dorm-work. We were told to listen to the Beethoven Symphony #9, then write an account on the sensations we felt, images we saw, the textures we tasted, and technical beauty we heard when listening to the music. I wrote a nice seven-page essay on how I traveled back in time, met Beethoven, fell in love, went through some challenges in order to obtain him, and then, of course, we were married in a nice little home on the seashore of Africa.
Thinking back to that class, I will now take this time to write an account on the following piece, explaining any images/sensations and technical aspects I hear when listening to the piece.

Elgar Salut D’Amor
Violinist, Kyung Wha Chung

The piano waltzes in and I automatically feel my heart conform to its rhythm and my breathing slows in delayed inhalations and exhalations of bliss. When Kyung melts in, I taste sweetness and automatically I am thrown into a honey bowl, conflicted with a slight sadness but an “oh-so-yummy” sensation lightens most of my discomfort.
But even though I am surrounded by honey, I can not help but feel an underlying sadness throughout the whole piece as if something within me is unrequited. I do not think this is a blunder on the part of the performer or composer but simply a love song which hints at untold anguish. But I guess love is like that, honey and bitterness all mixed into the same dish.
On to what I see. Bees buzzing baffled in Bearland upon the bare honey lakes of beaver… Just kidding. Actually, I see…a town…within a…glass globe and people…walking in—honey. A postal man’s hand pushes through the air to grasp the handle of the mailbox door, and he pulls the door open to insert the mail, all at a slug’s pace or as if he were in space. He smiles throughout his task, a handsome face with bright teeth. Small children play and fight in the schoolyard, jumping off jungle gyms and hitting the ground minutes later, licking their tongues through the honey tainted air all the while—the girl’s faces blush with smiles at little cool boys who wish to put on such a pretense.
Just around the corner down on Sweetdripping Lane, Mary Caster waters her flowers with a look of gloom when from behind, her love calls her name and she turns at an annoyingly slow rate to behold the man with the familiar voice. She drops her watering bottle which does not hit the ground until she has collided with her love’s body in a clutch of tearful excitement and love and all that jazz.
And through this vision, I have identified my own underlying sadness. Although, the circumstances of a town plagued by slow movement is not as tragic as John Keats’ poem, “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” in which lovers in a piece of art are frozen in the peak of their desires, lips puckered to kiss, and will never have them fulfilled since they are—well, maybe not frozen, because they will never be thawed, so a better word or phrase is probably, forever-stationary, I feel hopeless—irritating impatience—for everyone in my honey town. The postal man’s work day is extended to hours upon minutes of endless work for just one envelope. The children will never learn the lesson of all play and no work. And Mary Caster must have waited eons for her dear lover to return to her. And even when he did show, it took her some time to receive the touch which already in imagination had bore great feeling.
As far as technicality goes, Kyung creates a beautiful honey town with her syrupy tone and perfectly timed rubato. When she and the piano slow down to accent a particular part, I feel suffocated and after the piece goes off, has finished, made its way to the end, I take in a large breath, sigh, then stubbornly release myself back on to the normal cycles of body and mind, breathing to uniformly and thinking too much…

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The Honey Town

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