Serenity

David Playing the Harp Before Saul, Rembrandt van Rijn, c. 1656

The second movement of this piece has been one of several earworms for many weeks. As we in the United States are beset by those who would destroy everything we hold dear, the sound of a boy singing the 23rd Psalm in Hebrew has come to me again and again.

It turns out that many of us are conservative if "conservative" means hanging on to the things that make us feel safe, the ways things have always been done (when those ways work), the things that make us feel simultaneously connected to one another and most like ourselves. Our national character, if you will.

The current regime cares for none of those things. They intend to make a wreckage of our country, and skip out without paying the bill, leaving the staff to pick through the debris.

All around us, the guns go off; power-mad Congressmen heave TVs out the windows; and the leaders drive their Cadillacs into the hotel pool, nose first.

Whether you believe in God/Goddess/gods or not, something is with us as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death. It's in this music and this performance. I hope it stills and comforts you -- even if you're going through a personal crisis very much like America's political crisis.

Here's Leonard Bernstein, conducting the Boys' and Men's Choir of the Poznan Philharmonic in music he composed for a 1965 commission by Chichester Cathedral -- The Chichester Psalms.

Here are the Psalms from which the text is taken:
00:06 I. Psalm 108 (verse 2); Psalm 100
03:43 II. Psalm 23; Psalm 2 (verses 1-4)

09:24 III. Psalm 131; Psalm 133 (verse 1)