Awe

Today, Diana’s award-winning music follows the forms of the Mexican troubadour and ranchera songs of her childhood, mixing in sounds of the cello and her classical guitar playing, which she learned while finding her voice as a student in the United States. Her songs symbolize the concerns of immigrants from Mexico and the life patterns of exploitation and being away from home.

Upon getting a green card, Diana was allowed to return to Mexico after sixteen years and tour her home country (captured in the documentary Dear Homeland). Below are her musically rich impressions of that return while in the central zócalo, or square, of Mexico City. There she found awe in many of its sources: in walking with people; in the faces, voices, and colors of a place; and in music and a song her grandmother used to sing:

I can feel it now. Estoy aquí. I am here. I am finally here in Mexico. All I had to do was turn them off—my phone, my thoughts—and deeply breathe. Deeply feel and listen. Really listen. And see, truly see. I recognize these voices, they speak my mother tongue. I recognize these colors, I was brought up by them. I recognize that song, it’s the one my grandmother used to sing in Torreoncitos, Chihuahua. I recognize myself in this place and these sounds, on those walls, and those faces, on that flag. Y ahora soy una con ellos. And now I am one with them. It has finally sunk in. I am here in my dear, dear homeland. Mexico. Y me siento inmensamente feliz.

And I feel immensely happy.

In musical awe we hear the voices and feel the sounds of our culture. We recognize, we understand, our individual identity within something larger, a collective identity, a place, and a people. We find what is often seemingly far away—home. In this, we can find an immense happiness. This can be true in hearing music that has deep cultural roots, and in music we might not immediately understand.

Laughter in the Rain

The night I heard Yumi on the cello in Philadelphia, the orchestra played a piece John Adams composed, Scheherazade.2

. Scheherazade, you may recall, told the thousand stories that make up Arabian Nights, a collection of folklore, legends, and myths about local gods—archives of awe at the heart of Middle Eastern culture, and inspiration of films and books throughout the world.

The tale begins with the king Shahryar, who has discovered that he and his brother have been cuckolded by their wives. Dishonored and enraged, Shahryar marries a virgin each day, ravishes her at night, and beheads her the next morning. Scheherazade intervenes (in Old Persian, “Scheherazade” translates to “world freer”). Well read and knowledgeable of myths and folklore, she volunteers to be the king’s next wife.

On her first night, she regales the king until dawn with a story (one of the thousand myths of Arabian Nights

). The king is moved to awe and begs for an ending to the story. And then another the next night. Scheherazade is saved by telling stories of awe. She repeats this pattern for one thousand nights, and the king and Scheherazade fall in love. He marries her and makes her his queen, and they have three children. For Adams, the story is about oppression, the violence women face at the hands of men, and the power of the female voice.

That night of the performance, Adams arrived onstage, followed shortly thereafter by the violinist Leila Josefowicz, whom Adams had in mind when he composed the piece. She played standing close to Adams, in a flowing, diaphanous outfit (with biceps bulging). The symphony has four movements, charting how Scheherazade tells her first story, falls in love, fights back against the threats of men, and flees and finds sanctuary.

For most of Scheherazade.2, I struggled to find my feeling. Like many, I love specific veins of music but can’t explain why. Listening to many contemporary composers leaves me in a wordless state, lacking concepts and language to discern what life patterns may be symbolized in their sounds.

As the symphony begins, the voice of my default self is loud: it nags me about why I never wear the right clothes, how I’m a fish out of water at highbrow events like these, what time my flight departs tomorrow, or how in seeking to feel awe in music I undermine the very possibility.

The piece starts with loud drums. They hit me like the sudden strike of a breaking wave or roar of thunder. My heart slows—the orienting reflex to the new. I am still, transfixed, silent, motionless, and aligned with the people next to me. Our porous bodies have shifted, our shared attention fixed on the stage.