Late Thursday night, five singers, students at IU’s Jacobs School of Music, were killed when their plane crashed coming into Bloomington’s airport. It’s a terrible loss not only for their family and friends, but for all those who knew them at the music school. The students were bright and talented and full of promise; I had heard several of them sing in various productions here, and one of them, Robert Samels, was familiar to me as a voice on IU’s public radio station, an announcer and the producer and host of an excellent weekly show about vocal music. I am not formally connected with the music school, but I spend plenty of time at concerts here and feel like a distant member of the music school family that has suffered this loss. The young people were all similar in age to my sons, and my heart goes out to their parents. (My sister once said of parenthood that it was 18 years of worry, but in fact you are always vulnerable to that unimaginably horrible phone call.)
This evening the music school is going to perform Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with its stirring choral ode to joy. I had been looking forward to the performance, and two of the students who were killed in the crash were going to be part of the chorus. My first reaction after the crash was that this joyful music would be as jarring right now as the cruelly lovely April weather we are having this weekend. I had no heart for such a thing, but still it seemed important to go. I remember September of 2001, when the Lotus World Music Festival came less than two weeks after the 9/11 attacks. I felt similarly heartsick then and almost decided not to go. But in the end I went and was glad I did; for one thing, I didn’t want for Bloomington to be collectively terrorized into losing this wonderful mingling of world cultures. I didn’t want the bad guys to win that one. But this is different; there are no bad guys, other than the immutable fact that all we hold dear is painfully transient and fragile.
I’m not the only one who thinks this performance tonight is important, though; it will be offered as a tribute to the five young people who have died, and I’ve heard that additional singers are asking to participate so that they can also be part of the tribute. I expect it will be a powerfully emotional performance. One of the things that draws together the people at the university and in Bloomington who value all the wonderful live music we have here is, I think, expressed in the phrase “the love of unseen things that do not die.” (The quote is from an inscription in a lecture hall at Princeton, and is attributed to Princeton alumnus H. E. Mierow.) That’s why the concert tonight is important. Despite, or maybe even because of, everyone’s grief at the loss of these five students, it’s important that the music they loved will continue.
