Brooke Joyce

The Call to Remember

by BROOKE JOYCE, Professor of Music and Composer in Residence SEPTEMBER 10, 2021

Isaiah 65:17-18 (NRSV) 17 For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. 18 But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight.

As I began preparing for this chapel service, I became fixated on verse 17, “For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.” At first, I was reminded of Julian of Norwich, my fourteenth century theologian friend whose writings have been a source of inspiration and wonder for me over the years. She writes that God will do a great deed, that the world will be mended, and that no matter what challenges we face, we will not be overcome. That sounds like a new heaven and a new earth.

But then there’s the second part of verse, about former things that shall not be remembered or come to mind. After speaking with Pastor Amy Larson and reading earlier passages of Isaiah, I understand that “former things” refers to the sins of those who followed false prophets and worshipped other gods. From verse 11-12: “But you who forsake the Lord,who forget my holy mountain, who set a table for Fortune and fill cups of mixed wine for Destiny;I will destine you to the sword, and all of you shall bow down to the slaughter.”In the words of a nun I interviewed a couple of years ago, “God is pissed and ready for retribution.”

If these former things shall not be remembered or come to mind, perhaps Isaiah is inviting us to let go of our guilt, to not dwell on our past shortcomings. But should we also forget the lessons we hopefully learned? What, exactly, is worth remembering? I’ve been thinking a lot, recently, about what we remember, and what we take with us. I think about Afghanis, fleeing their country with practically no possessions. I’m reminded of our former colleague in the music department, Michael O’Brien, who asked his ethnomusicology students what music they would take with them if they had to flee their homeland, probably never to return. And what about our own histories? What parts of our past do we seek to remember, and which parts do we actively forget? I recently traveled to my parents’ hometown of Appleton, Wisconsin. During that trip, my sister and I met my mother’s cousin for the first time, a person from a branch of the family we barely know. As it turns out, the ancestors of that branch of the family are all buried in one section of the same cemetery in West Bloomfield, Wisconsin, and just up the road, in an old, overgrown cemetery barely visible from the road, are even more distant ancestors, the ones who came to Wisconsin from the Pomerania region of Germany in the early 1800s. But most shocking to me was the discovery that my greatgrandfather’s farm, on the north end of the town of Berlin, Wisconsin, is still a working farm, and that the original farmhouse, built in 1911, still stands, virtually unchanged. I don’t think there is any significant reason why I didn’t know about this cousin or my great-grandfather’s farm until recently. My mother was closer to

Brooke Joyce other relatives whom we visited more frequently, and I think this part of the family simply fell off the radar. I’m sure this happens in many families. But I can’t help but think that had my family chosen to stay connected to this part of our family tree, it would not have been difficult to get to know those folks and the stories they knew. We just made other choices. We chose not to remember. But that choice, I’m coming to understand, is a form of privilege I enjoy. What if my family history wasn’t available to me? What if it had been destroyed, or stolen, or lost? What if I wanted to remember, but couldn’t? In my role as a music teacher, I often think about what music and what musicians I should encourage my students to remember. Over the past couple of years, I’ve made a concerted effort to include the music of more Black Americans in my music courses. Florence Price, for one, was the first woman of color to have a work performed by a major American orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, in 1933. She wrote four symphonies, but only three of them

survive. The bulk of her musical output was rediscovered, by accident, in the attic of a suburban Chicago house in 2008. Why was her music, her sketches, her correspondence, her history, not better preserved? You may not know the name Florence Price, though we heard a beautiful composition of hers performed at our opening convocation by Spencer Martin and Nicholas Shaneyfelt, but you undoubtedly know the name Scott Joplin, the king of ragtime, the most well-known American composer of piano music. He left us with 38 spectacular piano rags. But did you know that he considered himself an opera composer? His crowning achievement was his opera Treemonisha, not performed during his lifetime and only reconstructed in 1972. An earlier operetta, “A Guest of Honor,” was confiscated when Joplin was unable to pay his performers. That music has never been found. Only three photographs are known to exist of Joplin, and not a single piece of musical manuscript has ever been found in his own handwriting. We don’t need sketches or manuscripts to enjoy or verify the accomplishments of these two artists. Enough of their work survives to give us a window into their artistic achievements. But I can’t help but wonder how the stature of these two composers might be viewed differently if we had more of their history at our fingertips. It has been an unfortunate tendency of academia to assume that those artists who are most discussed and written about must necessarily be the ones we should most teach and learn about—or in the case of composers, the ones we should perform the most. This self-perpetuating cycle has kept so much wonderful music out of our music classrooms, studios, and recital halls. Just to cite one particular area of music pedagogy, of the seven most frequently used music theory textbooks in the US, which account for 96% of the market, 98.3% of the musical examples in those books are by white persons.

“For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.” The burden of our past can be stifling. We have fallen short in many ways. That guilt, that paralysis, can be set aside and not come to mind. What is important, though, is to remember, in all senses of the word—to be mindful, to call to mind, to preserve. Especially for those communities whose history is in danger of being lost, or whose history is not given the same consideration as others, we need to remember. That will be the new earth we all need.