Notre Dame Reopening Concert
An Ode to Craft
Yesterday evening, I watched, on STAGE+, a live broadcast of the multi-genre concert at Notre Dame Catherdral in Paris, one of the events to celebrate its opening after rebuilding from damages wreaked by the fire in 2019.
I enjoyed the music, and the views of the restored cathedral, but what moved me the most, and inspired to write this post, were short documentaries, collages of snapshots, displayed in the intervals. They showed various craftsmen, in fragments of action at their work, during the five year restoration.
Perhaps, nowadays, it would be faster and easier, to prefabricate segments of a thoroughly new roof, blocks made from aluminium rafters and glass panelling, and assemble these segments on the top. But the rafter framing was rebulit as it used to be: of wooden beams, joists connected to rafters with wooden pegs, the joints cut to fit with axes and hand saws.
It was the skill of craftsmen and artisans: carpenters, stained-glass artists, sculptors, painters, restorers, which stirred my emotions. It was a festival of defiance against destruction, but also—as I read it—against the blandness of artificial production. The mosaic of photos of skilled people at work filled me with new charge of hope that the real world, the world of human imagination, ingenuity, craft, skill, and art, is irreplaceble, and inconquerable by any dystiopian algorithm.
Then, at a distance from other people gathered inside the cathedral, Yo-YoMa performed solo on his cello. He played one of Johan Sebastian Bach suites. The cellist did not need to look at his instrument; his hands knew their positon and movements better than the sight could track. If only people did not give up on learning, and cherishing artisan skills, from generation to generation, we would be safe.
8 December 2024
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