Correspondences: The Lark Ascending | Angelina D’Roza

I would tell you about the composer, who worked on his Lark
before and after a war, that between those years, between the original
and its revision, he drove a military ambulance. That each alteration
pasted over the previous notes, erased that old reality, as though
it never happened. Which of course, it didn’t. Or Schafer’s composition
of snow, his sketches of snowdrifts crossing a stave like memory traces
sung and settling through the winter trees. There’s comfort
in the weight of snow, the voices that layer and hum, a sudden dark
as they open their mouths – ah. All this time I’ve been waiting for dawn
when I already had what I needed. Do you want to hear how trauma
transforms the freedom of a lark? This lark that’s so in love with the land.
Perhaps the violin is the bird. The piano is the earth. The intervals
between them like an expanse of air that grows, diminishes,
equivocates. Or is the lark a projection of the earth’s subliminal self,
a haunting without significance beyond this reaching upwards?