Music’s beautiful nudge

In the mid-1990s, I taught Correlated Language Arts, which was basically for students who did not, at the time, think they wanted to go to college. These small classes (at the most I had eight or nine students) used a textbook curriculum which was modified. However, my work expectations for the students in Room 29 were not. Shakespeare wasn’t going anywhere.

In 1992, my senior class of CLA was mostly boys. “Macbeth” was an easy sell: war, murder, treason, ghosts. After we finished working our way through the classroom reading followed by watching a dated stage production, these guys wanted more. They were in luck. British actor Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 “Henry V” adaptation of Shakespeare’s play was award-winning, so I rented the VHS movie for Allen, Billy, Jason, Juve, and Valerio.

I stayed close to the television to be able to pause the button (no remote) every few minutes to get feedback on what was understood and what needed clarification. Unlike the “Macbeth” stage production, this movie had music. And the choral/symphonic score was never more powerful than in Act Four—the Battle of Agincourt.

The underrated and smaller army of Englishmen had defeated the superior French forces. The bodies were strewn over the field as King Henry V, who actually fought in the battle, spoke to his longbowmen and other soldiers after their underdog victory. He gave the order to gather their slain and join him in carrying them through the village as a tribute.

Wisely, I did not pause the movie for the next eight minutes. The boys watched an evolving panorama of the bloody battlefield’s aftermath and heard the song “Non Nobis, Domine” as its backdrop. In this moment, musical instruments and a chorus were doing their part to educate far better than I could the historical significance of the scene.

Evenwithoutknowledge of bass or clef notes, major orminorkeys,weknowthat symbols on lined paper are powerful when transposed to voices and instruments. So how did a hearing-impaired eighteenth-century composer accomplish this? Beethoven did not have to hear music, because he had felt it in his soul long before the auditory decline began in his late twenties.

I like to think this soulfulness is part of what inspired his nine symphonies. I also like to imagine that there are five grown men who still remember the story of the Battle of Agincourt, all because of music’s beautiful nudge.

Note: the musical score to the film “Henry V” was written by Scottish composer Patrick Doyle.

Snyder, Texas, native Sue Jane Sullivan is a retired schoolteacher whose thought-provoking commentary appears occasionally in several West Texas newspapers, including The Texas Spur and The Caprock Courier.