Thanksgiving Thoughts from a Pianist Composer

Post date: Nov 25, 2013 9:51:28 PM

THANKSGIVING THOUGHTS

FROM A PIANIST COMPOSER

Like Franz Liszt, Ignace Paderewski, and Sergei Rachmaninoff, the English pianist Stephen Hough is a concert pianist who not only plays an exhaustive repertoire of piano works at the highest level but also composes his own works and arrangements to include in his recitals as well. This ranks him as one of the most unique classical performers of his generation, but his talents do not end there. He is also a columnist in the London Daily Telegraph and his intelligent musings on a wide variety of topics are always worthwhile. Sometimes it takes an outsider to offer the best analysis of a different culture’s festivities and rituals, as Hough’s thoughts about the American Thanksgiving shows. This essay first appeared on his website in 2012.

Thanksgiving, Willa Cather, and the Soul of America

“I recently re-read Willa Cather’s My Antonia. Cather is one of my favourite authors and one of the few who can bring tears to my eyes. I think that we can understand America much better after reading her, not just because she writes about pioneers and the rich land for which they felt the compulsion to be ‘thankful’, but because she highlights important aspects of the American experience. One of the common themes she returns to with great fruitfulness is the poignancy of leaving a small community (village, town, city) and moving to a bigger one….and then going back to the old one again as a changed person. Lucy Gayheart is a late novel dealing specifically with this topic, intriguingly combined with a musical theme. Simplicity or sophistication; the world of soil and sweat or the subtlety of intellectual and artistic pursuits; salt of the earth or spice in the sauce. It ends up an analogy of the universal experience of leaving the parental home, finding our own more ‘sophisiticated’ way of doing things, and then (sometimes too late) realizing that there was wisdom at the old hearth after all. And yet…all of these emotions are intertwined in Cather with a complex poignancy and searing melancholy. Nostalgia (a principal “character” in her novels) is not on the stage like Dickens, but instead in the pantry, often unaware of the cause of such sweet sorrow.

It is common to hear disparaging remarks about the boring Midwest, even (especially) by Americans. The two coasts are glamorous, their history stretching back in the West to the Spanish missions and in the East to the pre-Revolutionary settlers. Movies, finance, intellectual pursuits, tourism, museums, government, beaches. The middle seems dull, conventional and provincial in comparison. In reality there is something of a foundational significance about the Midwest. It is the bread basket, the reservoir, feeding not only stomachs but somehow the soul of the entire country. Its determined, heroic spirit is filled with a goodness which is at the roots of America itself. Cather understood this profoundly and although she lived most of her life in the very centre of New York’s intellectual hotspot, Greenwich Village, she wrote with passion about the heroism of ordinary folk. Thanksgiving is one of those occasions which even the most confidently, cynically urbane can celebrate without embarrassment-a return to basic values. Parents teach us to say ‘thank you’ from an early age and it often becomes a habit, a turn of phrase with little meaning. But Thanksgiving is an annual opportunity to discover once more that gratitude is not only a matter of justice (everything we have in life is a gift) but of joy.

Dignum et Justus est—it is right to give thanks, and it makes the gift itself more precious.