By Caroline Manring
Warning: this first part isn’t going to be fun.
Imagine losing someone you love. Imagine losing your hearing. Imagine being whipped, starved, handed a gun before you’re 12, watching a city burn or seeing your brother march toward you in battle. Imagine being mocked because you are poor, degraded because of the color of your skin, despised because of your heritage, killed because you do not agree.
Nobody wants to imagine or remember these things. They are fountains of suffering. It’s all too horrible.
But even in that utter darkness, there are points of light like stars.
“At the end of my suffering / there was a door,” writes poet Louise Gluck in “The Wild Iris.”
Enter the artist.
First, the composers. During Week Two of the Skaneateles Festival, themed around the heartening assertion “We Shall Overcome,” the music arises from suffering — whether it be that of a single heart or an entire people.
J.S. Bach lost both of his parents when he was young and 10 of his children died during his lifetime. Countless African-American slaves in this country created soulful, powerful music to provide hope, direction, coherence and relief, in a cruel and unjust life. Beethoven considered taking his life after he began to lose his most critical sense, his hearing, at just 26. Bedrich Smetana was a revolutionary in the beseiged city of Prague. And the list goes on.
What these composers, as well as Bloch, Schumann, Wolf, Valerie Coleman of Imani Winds, and others lined up for this week of the festival have in common is a remarkable ability to take the experience of suffering and allow that darkness to exist as a backdrop against which the human spirit can rise like a star.
And then there are the performers. Featured during this week is the Imani Winds, whose name derives from the Swahili word meaning “faith.” The musicians come from Afro- and Latin- American backgrounds and bring intensity and vitality to issues of faith, heritage and social injustice.
In Gluck’s poem, she also writes, “whatever returns / from oblivion returns / to find a voice.” These performers, these composers, are that voice. Come to hear it, come to join it.
Caroline Manring teaches at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She is the granddaughter of Skaneateles Festival founders Louise and David Robinson.