Schoenberg at the Grand Canyon

You know you’re middle-aged when you can recall a handful of superior concert experiences the like of which you doubt you'll ever hear equaled. My top concert memories tend to center on the New York Philharmonic, where I worked in the 1980s as a publicist; they include, but are not limited to, Mstislav Rostropovich performing the Tchaikovsky Rococo Variations and the Haydn C Major Cello Concerto on the same program, Leonard Bernstein conducting Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony, and conductor Pierre Boulez making radiant Debussy’s hitherto impossibly dense “Jeux.”

But another concert experience sticks out in memory for a very different reason. The piece was Schoenberg’s “Transfigured Night,” and the performers were a sextet of string players assembled from the participants in the Grand Canyon Music Festival. (I can’t recall the year, but it was sometime in the mid-to-late 1990s.)

“Transfigured Night” is a late Romantic piece that pulls at the emotions as if the soul were taffy, leaving you feeling dissolved into a million atoms. After the performance accomplished Schoenberg’s aim of reducing me to countless little pieces, the concert broke for intermission. It was late on a pleasant Sunday afternoon, so I strolled outside just as dusk was settling over the horizon.

And there was the Grand Canyon.

And suddenly I was a single entity again.

Nature had made whole in me what art had pulled to bits. Two contrasting forms of beauty had done their disparate, yet interrelated jobs.

"Art" and "nature" used to be easily paired in casual conversation. Today, with technology playing so large and ubiquitous a role in the arts, with most of our music and images being delivered to us via digital media, art is so separated from nature as to seem unconnected.

But if you want to understand again how art and nature are siblings, listen to live music in a beautiful natural setting. The created world and the world we create are forever locked in some dialectic we will never manage to fathom.

- Kenneth LaFave