Justice O’Connor fails to make case

Laws govern music. Harmony and counterpoint are rule-bound. File swapping can land you in jail.

But what about the law? Can it sing?

That was the fascinating question brought up by La Jolla Chamber Music Society’s SummerFest on Thursday night, and it was brought up by someone who should know -- Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. In a program titled “The Music of the Law,” soprano Heidi Grant Murphy sang Schubert’s song “Die Forelle” (The Trout), performers from the festival roster played the composer’s “Trout” Quintet, and then O’Connor, who is known to sprinkle her public statements with musical allusions, offered a dubious discourse about judges and musicians.

The venue, in keeping with the dignity of the guest, was lofty: the neo-Alhambran, multi-arched Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice at the University of San Diego. Though the event was open to the public, the auditorium was small, the ticket prices high and the audience heavily weighed toward the legal side of things.

O’Connor kept her remarks light, but her very presence was perhaps a statement about the independence of the judicial branch of government. Whereas the White House and Congress these days seldom seem to recognize the essential value the arts play in fostering dialogue, the Supreme Court courts music. Several justices are known to be music lovers, and the court hosts occasional private concerts of which O’Connor is music director.

Linking music and the law, though, is a stretch. O’Connor began her remarks by humorously noting how poorly lawyers fare in opera. Sure, there are a couple of high-minded operas about Moses by Rossini and Schoenberg, but what about the lawyer in “Die Fledermaus,” who manages to get his client’s sentence increased? The justice also duly noted the composers -- among them Stravinsky, Sibelius and Handel -- who studied law before embarking on careers in music.

But mainly O’Connor came to celebrate the traits she said are shared by the best musicians and the best judges and lawyers. For her, life in law is a public life. However esoteric her legal reasoning, she must be able to make a clear and convincing case to a general audience. Like a musician, she is judged by what she does publicly.

Observing how composers such as Beethoven and Stravinsky were ahead of their times, O’Connor insisted that the great judicial minds must also anticipate a future for which the public may not be ready. Here she pointed to the similarity between Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” which bewildered its first audience in 1913 but is now part of the standard repertory, and a Supreme Court justice who spoke out against racial segregation at the end of the 19th century, when the concept of a colorblind Constitution seemed impossibly dissonant.

O’Connor also observed that, as a member of the Supremes, she works in a nonet, and that like a chamber musician’s, a justice’s job is to find a way to maintain an individual voice while still blending into a unified whole. And that can only be done because of what she termed the fourth and final parallelism between music and law: Both represent “a fusion of reason and passion.”

Throughout the evening, idealism ran high, especially when O’Connor ended on an inspirational note. Music can lead to childlike innocence, she said, and reveal a world where the lion lies down with the lamb. The music of the law is equality, justice, fairness.

Still, there was at least a hint of the differences between legal lions and lyrical lambs. O’Connor is no performer, and her uninflected delivery of her remarks did not reveal a musicianly preparation.

The crowd, meanwhile, was legal-minded and liked resolutions a lot. When good, strong cadences regulated the musical structure of the “Trout” Quintet, some listeners did not hesitate to applaud in the middle of a movement.

And then there were the wily musicians. In the quintet, the players’ on-the-spot strategy to outwit clever lawyers’ mid-movement applause was to add fluidity. And here the interaction proved fortuitous, because an otherwise dutiful, if well-prepared, performance by Andre-Michel Schub, David Chan, Heiichiro Ohyama, Gary Hoffman and DaXun Zhang got a lyrical impulse and spontaneity it otherwise lacked.

Murphy, accompanied by her husband, Kevin, sang “The Trout” prettily. But what about the song’s text? Against one of Schubert’s most charming melodies, it tells of a fisherman, unable to snag a beautiful trout in a clear stream and needing to muddy the waters in order to make the kill. That’s hardly the kind of analogy with which the Supreme Court likes to be characterized.