Brilliant Songs #62:
Jake Runestad’s “Let My Love Be Heard”

After a couple of years of what has felt like an extraordinary period of loss, I’ve come to realize, in that forehead-slapping “Duh!!!  kind of way signifying I’ve been a bit slow on the uptake, that there’s nothing “extraordinary” at all about people dying with regularity at my age, all through my family and friendship circle.

It’s just the way of things, a pure math and probability issue, that a certain percentage of people die at rates that increase with each decade.

Just a few tragic unfortunates suffer their demise in the early decades, but the trend line goes steadily and then precipitously up past the half- and then three-quarters of a century mark where I have now found myself—almost shockingly—perched.

This is the magic of music, when it does what no other art form can quite manage to do.

All the cool, data-driven objectivity in the world about that matter can’t obscure the somberness of beloved people vacating your life, no longer lending their indelible, utterly unique stamp upon your days. The memory of that particular person, rich and consoling as it may be, inadequate to fill the void their absence creates.

Into that void, we look to those who remain, huddling with them in our sorrow and memory, and to the solace of the heavens in whatever form those heavens speak to us.

One of those forms, almost unfailingly, is the music that consoles, inspires and lifts us beyond words, to the very root of full-hearted, wholly embodied emotion that makes us feel so thoroughly human, vulnerable, and almost counter-intuitively, alive.

There we are, and there the departed are, too, the sounds of this peculiarly human activity wafting through us, from us, binding us to them in solemn regard.

And here is a choral song from a contemporary classical composer that perfectly exemplifies all the above.

***

***

Jake Runestad was born to musical parents in the American heartland of Rockford, Illinois, and carries about himself now, barely past his 40th birthday, the polite, approachable persona so identified with that part of the world. Primarily a composer, he also conducts and teaches, having obtained a bachelor’s degree in music education from Winona State University and later a master’s in composition from the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

He composed “Let My Love Be Heard” in 2014 at age 28, and released it the following year—when all the events the You Tube selection details above vaulted the song and its composer into prominence as an indispensable addition to the repertoire of grief. Part of the credit goes to the text, a brief poem entitled, “A Prayer,” by the English poet and novelist Alfred Noyes. It first appeared on the front page of “The Congregationalist,” a weekly newspaper of the Congregational Christian Churches in America, in 1928.

Here are all of its eight lines:

Angels, where you soar
Up to God’s own light
Take my own lost bird
On your hearts tonight;
And, as grief once more
Mounts to heaven and sings,
Let my love be heard
Whispering in your wings.

That’s fine as far as devotional grief poetry goes, but Runestad breathes life and all its longing for the departed other into the poem with a composition that makes something far more compelling than those words can ever be on the page. This is the magic of music, when it does what no other art form can quite manage to do.

Runestad begins in a mood of almost hushed contemplation, the choir maintaining a humming melodic line for a full 40 seconds. Then the poem commences with the tenors and bass, as altos and sopranos stay with wordless vocal harmony.

The next minutes bring texture upon texture, the harmonies expanding and the grief intensifying, the song no longer about grief but grief itself, embodied and enacted in a great upwelling until it spends itself at about the 4:40 mark.

Then the in-gathering starts, the volume and pace slowly ebbing in the final minute, the title line—“Let my love be heard”—standing alone as pure incantation. No more “lost bird” references, the grieving mourners’ pleas making clear that the now lost human-to-human relationship is the cause, the beauty, and the very center of their prayer.

***

***

It’s a sublime work, worthy of the finest musical lamentations in any repertoire or genre. And it achieves that status by the technical artistry and internal sensibility of the composer, whose task is not simply to add music to a poem, but to make a completely new work of art after taking the poem in hand.

Modern classical composer Ned Rorem (1923-2022), much the elder of Runestad but whose music also borrowed poems and occasionally appeared on the same programs as his much younger colleague’s work, described it this way in his essay, “Poetry of Music”:

“Song is the reincarnation of a poem that was destroyed in order to live again in music. The composer, no matter how respectful, must treat poetry as a skeleton on which to borrow flesh, breaking a few bones in the process. He does not render a poem more musical (poetry isn’t music, it’s poetry); he weds it to sound, creating a third entity of different and sometimes greater magnitude than either parent.”

Renowned 20th century French composer Francis Poulenc put a perhaps more poetic and evocative spin on that thought, noting in his “Diary of My Songs”:

“It is not only the lines of the poem that must be set to music, but all that lies between the lines and in the margins.”

Runestad looks to have plenty more to say both in and between the lines he has not yet set to music in his flourishing career. Though firmly in the classical mold with this and other choral works, he is wary of labels, once protesting to an interviewer who used that “c” word about him that “music is music,” probably a wise stance if he is to avoid being pigeonholed as composing strictly for white-haired audiences, with music of men dead 300 years.

He taught himself to play piano as a child, after all, by copying Elton John and The Beatles songs from records. It’s also no small matter that he broaches topical themes close to his listeners’ lives (war, suicide awareness, poverty, climate), all of it wrapped within a warm cocoon of hope and reverence for the creation.

It should thus hardly surprise us that his former teacher and still mentor, the composer Libby Larsen, says of him, “Jake believes music can change the world.”

***

Making music with students: another world-changer…

***

And the poetry of Wendell Berry…

And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

***

If you’re a serious music nerd who might enjoy a highly technical academic analysis of “Let My Love Be Heard,” click here.

Looking to subscribe to this blog’s pretty much weekly posts? Top right of this page, just plug in your email address (never shared or published) with a name—full, first name only, or pseudonym—and you’ll get email notices with each post.

See and hit the Follow button at https://www.facebook.com/andrew.hidas/ for regular 1-minute or less dispatches from the world’s great thinkers, artists and musers, accompanied always by lovely photography.

Deep appreciation to the photographers! Unless otherwise stated, some rights reserved under Creative Commons licensing.

Elizabeth Haslam, whose photos (except for library books) grace the rotating banner top of homepage. https://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhaslam/

Library books by Larry Rose, Redlands, California, all rights reserved, contact: larry@rosefoto.com

Gull and sky by Sanni Sahil, Mumbai, India https://unsplash.com/@sannisahil

Spanish broom by Andrew Hidas https://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewhidas/

Jake Runestad and students by Rob Davidson, from the composer’s website, see: https://jakerunestad.com/

Related Posts

The Dignity of
“The Dutchman” (and His Wife)

January 4, 2013

Imperfect Interpretations: When the Song Sung Isn’t What the Song Said (Part 1)

June 1, 2015

Brilliant Songs #42:
Duke Pearson’s “Cristo Redentor”

November 19, 2023

Brilliant Songs #40:
Jimmy Buffett’s “Trying to
Reason With Hurricane Season”

September 9, 2023