Monadnock Music: Other Events

A WELL-PROPORTIONED MEETING PLACE
an essay by Jonathan Bagg

Oxford’s famous Holywell Music Room (ca. 1750) is said to be the oldest in Europe designed specifically for concert music. It is also one of the best. When I played there several years ago I was prepared for something new in my experience. But on entering the hall I felt right away as though I had been there before: the interior ambience, its wooden benches, high ceiling and balcony, and the altar-like stage at the front were close kin to the churches and meetinghouses I played in each summer at Monadnock Music. I realized that the 18th century buildings that surround our New Hampshire village greens are a product of the same culture, age, and ethos that produced the stately Holywell room, an age when even a humble farm community would declare its civic life worthy of the most well-proportioned meeting places. Builders understood that acoustics were as integral to design as anything else, for it was an age before PA systems and electric lighting could force even dull cinder-block to become functional. Just as we value the artistry behind a two hundred year-old cello, today we see these rooms in Nelson, Harrisville, Jaffrey, and Francestown also as well-tuned instruments, whose fine acoustics contribute to our pleasure when we fill them with music. I like to think that when Monadnock Music inhabits them on a summer evening, each one unique to its setting and community, their builders’ original purpose is truly fulfilled, though they may never have imagined such a thing as Monadnock Music. It’s no exaggeration to say our festival owes its existence in large part to these old halls, which stood through the decades, in some cases semi-dormant, as if waiting for Jim and Jocelyn Bolle to found their festival with the unique idea that on a given night the doors would open in one or another of twenty Monadnock towns, and all could enter freely to hear music of high accomplishment.

Just as the buildings themselves speak to us from an earlier time, often from a secluded place at the end of a long country road, so our programs may call for effort from the audience and performers to travel a certain distance and span a divide: between the familiar and the foreign, the concrete and the abstract, the mellow and the hard-edged. At its most entertaining, a concert should arouse rather than appease our sensibilities; as listeners we should feel we have been active rather than passive. Any long time audience member will have a few aha! moments stored up in memory, when one’s notions about music grew to accommodate something unexpected and wonderful. For this to happen, the quality of both music and performance must be high. All our efforts in preparing for this summer have been toward making such moments possible. There is much that competes these days for our attention in the world, and those of us that commit our lives to classical music understand that it is our care, understanding, and talent that will keep this strand of our culture vigorous, and worth the effort that it demands from all involved. Like the townspeople who every year come out to paint, repair, and restore their meetinghouse so that it’s beauty lives on, we come also to fill the room with our music, so that its beauty remains alive and penetrates the lives of all who hear it.