By Renée E. D’Aoust
Funeral Playlist by Sarah Gorham
In her memoir-in-essays entitled Funeral Playlist, Sarah Gorham prepares an actual playlist befitting an intentional celebration of life. Gorham’s musical choices are real; her analytic response, contemporary. The result is an enthralling series of essays that evoke compassion, provide consolation, and—through music and writing—create art centered around death. Gorham’s exploration of the playlist she would want at her funeral is not morbid, though, and each essay is not necessarily part of the list as the collection is full of shouts and joy.
Sarah Gorham has previously published two essay collections, Alpine Apprentice, and Study in Perfect, which won the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction. She is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Sarabande Books, and with Jeffrey Skinner, the editor of the anthology Last Call: Poems on Alcoholism, Addiction, and Deliverance. She is also the author of four poetry collections.
In the “Author’s Note” of Funeral Playlist, Gorham suggests that her project is to use her “rather gloomy” practice of collecting “melancholy music” to examine “how music and mortality connect.” Nevertheless, her exploration here is not at all gloomy. There is freedom to be found in facing profound loss. For ballast, we need music; in Funeral Playlist the musical notes range from a mourning dove to the opera singer Cecilia Bartoli, from humming to the inimitable Nina Simone. The “sound of mourning,” suggests Gorham, is found in the quotidian, and in the sound of daughters (readers will later discover that one of these daughters is Gorham herself):
Four sisters, each of them, shy of adulthood, sit on the floor outside their mother’s bedroom. There she lies dying, there she has asked for a little solitude…. Outside her door, seated cross-legged on the wall-to-wall carpet, they carry on their chorus of sniffles and sneezes, stutters, and coughs. The air conditioner churns away.
In the initial essay “‘Perchoo,’ or the Music of Mourning,” a final breath, singing birds, and the insistent doorbell are discordant sounds that nonetheless occur almost simultaneously. Gorham’s mother takes a “last rusty breath,” and the doorbell rings. Even in death, dry cleaning is delivered. The mourning dove is the Wisconsin state bird of her mother’s home state, and the bird links winged creatures and final exhales. While the making of art provides hope, the act of reading also provides hope, as it does for the reader of Funeral Playlist. Although these musical works might be played at a funeral, what is more important is how we experience the music—and these essays—now.
In the fourth piece of the book, titled with the name of the work the essay explores, “Amarilli, mia bella,” by Giulio Caccini / Vocalist: Cecilia Bartoli,” Gorham describes how the process of listening is also a process of grieving:
‘Amarilli mia bella’ doesn’t wear thin with continual listening or bloat inside our brains until we sour and must break off the crush. It is one of many “art songs,” frequently extracted from the grandiosity of opera to stand alone in an intimate address and, like most such songs, it’s soaked with adoration or elegy, love and/or death, life in its most basic terms. Amarilli is music to close your eyes to, beginning with story, carried through unearthly melody, arousing a bevy of images in the mind. Listening, we have no choice but to dream.
Gorham makes palpable the personal experience of Cacinni’s song with her own amateur voice lesson: “There’s a stretch below middle F where I sing comfortably in what 13th century composers called pectoris, my chest voice—high tenor, low alto—why I stood between the two sections in college choirs. My hidden voice of little color.” How does one train to sing? Where in the body does a voice like Cecilia Bartoli’s come from? Gorham suggests art is made, but it is also born, practiced, crafted, and performed. Art is the ache to be alive.
Gorham muses in the Bartoli essay, as she attends voice lessons: “what is art but a yearning to be loved, accepted, to leave something of yourself behind for those present and those to be born?” This question connects to her central project: our own, imagined funeral ceremonies might include people we’ve adored, experiences we’ve filmed, and music we’ve admired. But unless we plan our own memorial services, the eulogies will be written by others and the music chosen for our final adieu will be an educated guess. We will have no say in whether the melodies come out of a tinny boom box, via a live chamber orchestra, or by way of a jazz band.
In “Black is the Color of my True Love’s Hair” we return to the earlier image of the four daughters—Gorham and her sisters—holding vigil during their mother’s death. This shattering event, in a roundabout way, leads to Gorham’s true beloved. They meet at the artist’s retreat Yadoo and hear Nina Simone on a “small boom box balanced on a chair”: “She was singing our song, but we did not know it was our song.” In Nina’s “state of grace,” the two writers find each other: “He introduced me to the sonnet, acrostic, villanelle, sestina, and other forms. Ironically, it was an opened latch, a discipline that steered me away from years of modestly successful free verse.” While major chords emotionally often imply joy, and minor chords tribulation, Gorham conveys the layers of a life with major chords as brighter sounds and minor cords as sombre ones. Simone’s song traverses the major and minor chords of Gorham and her partner’s long-married life: “To close, Nina resolves to a major key. It may be an attempt to oblige the audience, to lift the mood. All shall be well, we might be thinking, despite the time spent in a minor key. All manner of things shall be well.”
Gorham has a poet’s auditory facility, but she also has an essayist’s ability to follow curious pathways. Funeral Playlist—because of this musical curiosity—allows us to make connections between noise and the unexpected, between music and death. While Funeral Playlist is a collection of fascinating explorations, varied in length and reflection, it is happily not a linear memoir, and a musical crescendo never comes. There is not one missed note in this beautifully written, soulful collection.
Etruscan Press
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Before she became a writer, Renée E. D’Aoust was a dancer. Her memoir-in-essays Body of a Dancer was published by Etruscan Press. D’Aoust is an Adjunct Professor at North Idaho College. Her adopted dog looks like a very tiny Phyllis Diller and is named Zoë. www.reneedaoust.com