So last week I was talking with my mum, who lives in very wet Cheshire, UK, and she was asking about the bush fires and especially about all the people who have lost their homes. Her voice was full of distress and she asked the simple question that should never need to be asked:
“But what will they do? What do you do, when you’ve lost everything?”
The question too many people are having to find an answer for now.
After the terror of the firestorms has gone, how do people feel safe again? What shelter can they have, beyond the physical? At what point does physical shelter need to be added to with other types of shelter?
One of the world’s greatest musicians, Norbert Brainin from the Amadeus Quartet, said that being a musician was so important because once the emergency services have saved lives, music can then help with people’s hearts. Music can’t heal burns or bring back the dead or provide a house but eventually it might assuage the pain and provide its own type of shelter.
Shelter can take many forms — physical, spiritual, emotional, historical, financial, educational, material. And music can help with a few of those.
During the Second World War, Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote a piece that gave succour, hope and a type of shelter to the people of Britain. His fifth symphony remains one of the most sublime pieces of music ever written because, as you listen, you feel something inside you bend and release.
Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings became the hymn for the fallen after 9/11.
Peter Sculthorpe and his masterpiece Small Town draws profound emotion, especially around Anzac Day. The trumpet with its simple tune allows us to weep for who we lost, because the music has no words to limit our minds.
And there are songs... years ago a listener wrote to me and said how listening to Charles Trenet sing La Mer brought back the shelter of memory — sitting on the doorstep with her mother, lost in the music.
Beethoven. The Ode to Joy that we sometimes listen to with tears of misery in our heart but the music wrings them out and transforms them into tears of hope. All that, from what is essentially a scale up and down.
Arvo Pärt, and his Spiegel Im Spiegel. Music could hardly be any simpler, but somehow that rising arpeggio of tones in the piano, the entry of a long, long, long note, hardly moving, like the gentlest breath on water, that music gives us space to stop and rest. It is one of the safest of musical shelters.
So in the long months and years of recovery ahead, music will have a role. Music can offer a shelter of memory and hope. And that shelter can be rebuilt time after time after time.
Ed Ayres presents Weekend Breakfast on ABC Classic (Saturday and Sunday 6am – 9am).