- Sky Study: with Storm
Since I last wrote, Pierre and Chloe and I have become old friends. You move fast when you’re only in a place for a short time, and several nights I’ve gone over to their house for dinner and to play music. It’s not like interactions in my normal 21st century life – I don’t have their phone numbers – but I’ll stop by their house on the corner of the square after my late afternoon bike ride and see if they’d like to have dinner together a few hours later. They remind me of people I would befriend in Austin: they’re part of a Community Supported Agriculture group and have a fabulous backyard garden. They give me an aperitif from Pierre’s home village and after I show them how Alice Waters improved ratatouille (cook the eggplant separate!) and we eat a cut of meat I’m pretty sure I would find under the moral age limit, we finish the meal with homemade yogurt and a preserve made of some untranslatable wild plant. I blithely ask them if they’d like to visit America, and am surprised by their almost hostile disinterest. Pierre is very argumentative and loves to hate on America – but I’ve learned to dish it out from my years in Paris, and we end in a truce.
We enjoy improvising music together, and Chloe, who used to work for the local tourism bureau, suggests we go to an abandoned medieval cathedral on a cliff to hear the sound. We can ask for the key at a café in a neighboring village and hike a few miles out into the wilderness to play in a setting of which Bach would have approved. The village itself, Las Plancas, died out a century ago when the inhabitants contracted leprosy. After the last were gone, the place was pillaged for stone to build other towns, but the cathedral was left. We make a date to go there Saturday, my last day.
When I mention the adventure to Rob and Els and the other residents, everyone decides they’d like to come to the “concert”, and a picnic is planned. Saturday morning is hot, and we trek out early with cello, violin, two guitars for Pierrot (excessive for a hike, no?), and a little wooden folding chair for me. Els and the residents follow with candles and picnic.
The place is magical. It’s immense inside – a real cathedral, with vaulted ceilings a mile up and light streaming through skinny stained glass windows. The nave is caked in parts with the crumbling remains of a fresco, only ghostly apparitions of saints and apostles, and the floor is dirt.
The sound is breathtaking, as our strings reverberate off the tall, dark walls of dusty stone. The second-guessing that usually accompanies my improvisation is replaced by disbelief. Music tumbles out freely as we respond to each other and the magnetism of the moment. At one point as we finish a piece, we look up to find a dozen hikers with poles and cameras applauding. They never expected to find music in the wilderness, and we know we will never repeat that composition again.
I am grateful to have some remnants of the experience to share – here is a video recorded by fellow resident Charlena Miller that captures one of our improvisations and the space itself.
Caroline, Chloé and Pierre: Improvisation in Chapelle Las Plancas from Jason Marlow on Vimeo.