My place in the picture

Celtic Christmas III; A Windham Hill Sampler

That picture on the cover of Celtic Christmas II has power over me. I knew it when I purchased the CD so many years ago. What I didn’t realize at the time was how much the emotion elicited by the photo would influence how I listened to the music.

The image of the castle with its snow laden walkway, the background panorama enshrouded in fog and mist and, most of all, the tree behind the turrets without its summer green or autumnal coat of many colors, seemingly sapped of all life; all of these elements engender a feeling of desolation, of loneliness, a feeling that abandonment now reigns where certainly once a courtly way of life provided a hub of activity for royalty and its subjects, like nostalgia of something never experienced. I look at this picture and I can feel the cold, I can hear the wind, and I can sense the isolation from the niceties of common civilization. Some might label this scene and these feelings as depressing, somber, even gloomy. I don’t discredit that assessment.

But I see a real place in this photo. And I encountered real sentiments from studying this photo. I can’t ignore that. I saw the picture on this CD in the store and knew that I had to purchase it, with a hope that I would enjoy the music therein.

From the beginning, from the very first time that I started listening to the tracks selected for these Windham Hill samplers, I found myself subconsciously listening to the music as if I had a place to stand in this picture. The musical performances played like echoes, timeless reverberations from a regal era of yore, forever captured by the snow, the cold, the wind, the hibernating tree and the lifeless grey of a frigid winter afternoon.

Surely, when you read a novel, or even a newspaper article, you place yourself in the scene that the author describes and inspect the location as the writer has chronicled. I have done here the very same thing, except that I hear music while standing in a picture.

Credits: To photographers everywhere, who can tell a story with a scene but allow the viewer to supply the plot.