Devonne Brown

Gabrieli Monteverdi, Canadian Brass, Vespers of the Blessed Virgin..antiphonal music.  Echos and answers from one end of the universe to the other. Back and forth. The music of angels…brass. I couldn’t take it all the time though…it’s just too intense. 

I play the Brass loud and proud to invoke the muse of legend and lore. The Brass play the stories we write. Each selection is a tale that has scenes with twists and turns, climaxes with  fires that burn. We live through story, each of our days has a denouement. 

When the boys were little I told them the Canadian Brass Vespers were about King Arthur’s Coronation so they’d listen in the car.

We’d listen and see a coronation of the ghost king. The apparitional entourage ride through a canopy of gossamer flags and banners. All the ghostie loyal subjects come to see the horses and the flags. The pomp and circumstance doesn’t even interest the spirit world much, but their presence is appreciated. The scene builds to a magnificent crescendo with the band doing a perfect, straight line gate turn onto the drawbridge. 

There are five guys in the Canadian Brass…five dudes. If you want to feel power sometime, go into a space with four or five people playing horns at the same time. Do it, I triple dare you. Have your mind blown,

An alchemist made the first brass instrument when witches were being burned. I hope they were dealt with accordingly. What must the first beautiful sounds made by a human have felt like? 

I just read that cats don’t like music. According to the article, noise, like music, makes cats freak out, so do cucumbers. I didn’t quite believe either one. I didn’t have a cucumber to test that theory, but interestingly enough, one of my favorite works popped out of the cd player.

Most surprisingly, Norris interrupted his bath for a classical music interlude. Norris sat squarely facing the speaker of my obsolete, yet still functional and booming Bose Compact Disk player as antiphonal brass heralded the “Vespers of the Blessed Virgin,”  through the horns of the Canadian Brass. He stopped taking his bath and sat up straight, militarily  straight, really. Norris gave as much attention to music as he did a wiley catnip mouse. He acted awfully  weird even for him. Norris seemed especially attentive to the weaving, “call and response” trombone bits. Those men of brass and spit blew out a new spin on the phrase “breath of life,” not that Norris understood nor cared about that. When that one helluva crescendo of brass and wind lingered and sustained its own echoes, he returned to paw licking and head rubbing.  His taste in music was exquisite, and perhaps his only redeeming quality.

Many years ago I played the Vespers for one of my classes. They enjoyed it and explained it to a latecomer to class, “Yeah, it’s cool, by Monty Somebody.”