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The French composer Camille Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre or “Dance of Death” consists of drama and darkness. There is, at times, a lightness, a playfulness, and a sweetness, but always a dark undercurrent, an undercurrent of urgency and gravitas.
While performing at NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concert, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma explained, “I’ve lived with all of this music all my life so actually embedded in the way I play is actually in many ways, everything I’ve experienced which is kind of interesting. It’s like forensic musicology. You open up the cadaver, you could see what happened, you could see what bones they chewed on.” Prior to playing Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Sarabande” from the Sixth Suite, he also explained, “I’ve played this piece at both friends’ weddings, and unfortunately, also at their memorial services so it has a dual purpose.” The strangeness of this being played at weddings and memorial services is striking, yet Yo-Yo Ma’s explanation certainly provides context and a better understanding of what this music means to his friends and how they interpret it. His idea of forensic musicology also comes to mind since he must interpret and play “Sarabande” from the Sixth Suite during good times and bad times, with new meanings of what everlasting love for better or for worse means as he hears wedding vows and says a final goodbye to his friends who have already departed this world. “Sarabande” from the Sixth Suite in this context…
