Siri Vik: Laments at John G Shedd Institute for the Arts

Lament. “A passionate expression of grief or sorrow.” -- Oxford English Dictionary

An evening of dirges? Well, no -- despite my own admitted obsession with suffering in song! Since the idea arose, I've been rolling these questions around: can a lament be joyous or funny? When did it become a thing, a sub-genre, a musical form? How far back in history does it go? What is was its function? In asking these, I've discovered that lament, at least in art and music, suggests quite a lot of things and is a vast and fertile ground for creating a diverse, yet deep and juicy collection of songs. ...

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Lament. “A passionate expression of grief or sorrow.” -- Oxford English Dictionary

An evening of dirges? Well, no -- despite my own admitted obsession with suffering in song! Since the idea arose, I've been rolling these questions around: can a lament be joyous or funny? When did it become a thing, a sub-genre, a musical form? How far back in history does it go? What is was its function? In asking these, I've discovered that lament, at least in art and music, suggests quite a lot of things and is a vast and fertile ground for creating a diverse, yet deep and juicy collection of songs.

From a musical view, lament is a simple bass line that organizes the most raucous and celebratory tunes as well as more maudlin ballads. From a lyrical angle, laments can fall under narrative verse: less, strictly tragedies, than storytelling of heroic people, almost a musical bildungsroman.

And as for passion and sorrow: taken at its barest roots, “lament” is a shout; the sound of trauma, or triumph---a cry. Through the ages a lament or lamentation was the physical act of confronting loss and grief, a physicalizing and a vocalizing of life’s cycles, precisely in order to transcend the dwelling in grief itself. Just as an animal physically shakes in the forest to heal from an injury, it is what we humans have done for centuries to transmute loss into wisdom and strength and survival. Lament is the ritual keening of primitive Ireland, the woman’s burial song of ancient Greece, it has even sometimes the sound of blessing and thanksgiving.

It is early in our exploration of this wide, savannan Veldt of a theme!!! I can say with giddy certainty, though, that the evening promises adventuresome in mood and genre. Truly, I imagine our program to be a cri du coeur, with perhaps a shade of Dylan Thomas' "Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,...Do not go gentle into that good night..." and... a drop of Sophie Tucker's sass and the snarl of Cinderella's stepsisters thrown in for kicks. I'm so excited to share with you this eclectic and rich territory!

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