Dear Marion,

Thank you for your letter. I agree that the sing-along
is an effort to establish community: a characteristic of all
passionate participation in music, be it as conductor,
as orchestra member, as member of the chorus or, not least,
as listener.  For my parents, for Klemens, and for myself,
music, specifically the music of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart
and Schubert has been the most effective of common experiences
(Erleben). Margrit, on the other hand, seldom manifested
a passion for music. Memorably, a day or two before her
last departure from Belmont, when I required her attention,
perhaps for swallowing some medication, while she was
listening to her modest portable radio, Margrit asked me to wait
"until I have finished listening to my Brandenburg Concerto."
Community in music, even with me, is remarkably important
to Nathaniel and Benjamin, who while in Konnarock would
ask me several times a day to listen with them to some
passage of music that enchanted them: Beethoven, Mozart,
Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Richard Straus, Wagner. Less so Leah,
and Rebekah not at all.

The sing-along was music of a different order.  In the
context of funeral rites, it was the blasphemous travesty
of a memorial service. The ballad of Clementine makes mockery
of all remorse and sorrow at Margrit's death; the mindless
ditty of coming 'round the mountain when she comes, makes
reason ridiculous. For the rest there is shallow bumper
sticker propaganda, cheap, scurrilous patriotism, the
exaltation of nonsense, trivia and banality.  The argument
that Margrit would have relished this intellectual and
spiritual depravity: if false, is the ultimate defamation,
but if true, it is the ultimate insult to her memory.

Jochen