Remembrance Day, 11 November: our little Monday afternoon music group. After the
morning’s mournful recollections of war, cheerfully we’re comparing notes about our lives,
friends, upcoming events in town. Then we settle back in our armchairs, ready for the music.
Our hostess, Gretel Kempster, presses the button.
The chance synchronicity is like a wallop to the head. Remembrance Day. 20th
Century World Wars. Hatred; vicious human cruelty; intolerable sorrow. And now…
Bach! The B Minor Mass: one of Germany’s—and the world’s—mightiest and most
uplifting works. The living, sweeping essence of goodness and hope, beauty, love and
forgiveness…
And who is singing this Mass with such holy, musical grace? (Even with impeccable
Latin pronunciation!)
The choir of the Bach Collegium Japan… that’s who! Founded and directed by
Masaaki Suzuki in 1990, it consists of a marvellous prize-winning choir of young Japanese
singers, with an orchestra of musicians playing original instruments.
‘The music of JS Bach is part of the joint patrimony of mankind’ declares the Bach
Collegium Japan website.
The synchronicity of it all can only bring a living surge of hope. So it seems we
humans can rejoice in friendliness after all! Germans; Japanese; Australians: we all share so
much! We can come to like—even love— those we’ve sniffily despised, snarled at, or even
brutally attacked. The “not like us” are miraculously like us after all!
Bach’s music, and the very words of the Mass that he envelops in his surging
melodies, urge us to seek peace and love above all else.
For more on this topic, P&I recommends:
Frances Letters is the author of ‘The Surprising Asians’, studied by a quarter of a million NSW School Certificate English students in the 1960s and 1970s, and ‘People of Shiva: Encounters in India’. After studying in Switzerland to become a teacher of Transcendental Meditation, she taught for several years in Barcelona. Her memoir ‘Razor-wire round our hearts: But truth-telling can help set us free’ will soon be published.