David Janower has spent much of his life bringing beauty, inspiration, passion, hope, vision, integrity, knowledge and community spirit to thousands of us living here in the Capital Region and beyond.
Through his remarkable life of service as the founder, artistic director and conductor of Albany Pro Musica and also as the director of choral studies at the University at Albany, David has enriched our lives abundantly.
Last week, during surgery for a different condition, David suffered a massive stroke. The shock waves are still surging through David's community of family, friends, singers, students. During the next weeks and months, as the waves become ripples, what will be so alive in the stillness of the healing waters will be the powers of hope and faith to help David know that he is treasured and not alone.
I'm one among many who are connected to David by knowing his essence but not the details of his life.
We are the kind of friends and colleagues who bump into each other at a community event, say hello and goodbye with a big full-armed hug, do a quick catch-up in the code language that is spoken when time is short, and promise to set a time and place for the lunch date we've been intending to make happen for decades. We don't know what kind of food the other likes but I'm guessing our choices would be similar in the way that we both love people and music and doing what we can to make the world right.
In the spectrum of how I am connected to David, I'm part of the group that is sandwiched somewhere between the intimate circle of David's closest friends and family, and the amorphous web of people who only know David through what they've heard since news of his stroke became known.
However any of us know David, let us in our imaginations sit down together at the Help-David-Know-We're-Pulling-for-Him table and focus our loving thoughts his way. Pulling for David means that we wish him profound peace and freedom from pain as he travels his journey from recovery from surgery and massive stroke, to whatever his future will be.
For now, David is unable to pick up the baton to enliven the power of music that opens our hearts and stirs our souls. The show must go on, so let's collectively pick up David's baton and direct the magnificent echoes of his music to him where he lies in a bed in a room at a local hospital.
This weekend, Albany Pro Musica is performing two concerts called "If Music Be the Food of Love." David will not be there to conduct, but Albany Pro Musica will carry on by gracing us with the sustenance of theirs and David's music.
Let us join them at their table of song, either in person or in spirit, as together we sing for David and send the powerful intentions of our healing harmony his way. "If Music Be the Food of Love" concerts include a newly commissioned piece built upon verses from scriptural passages in "The Song of Songs."
Ruth Pelham is founder and executive director of Music Mobile Inc.
The concerts will be heard Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at St. Paul's Church, 21 Hackett Blvd., Albany, and Sunday at 3 p.m. at Key Hall at Proctors in Schenectady. For more information, contact: info@AlbanyProMusica.org.