The musicologist talks about poetry, music history and life in Big Sur in the ’70s.

A couple of themes run through musicologist Jean Widaman’s life: Very little has gone as planned, but she has no regrets. Twice, when her career plans crashed and burned, Widaman sought refuge in Big Sur to get back on her feet. Now, at 71, she works as music director at the Community Church of the Monterey Peninsula, and writes program notes for musical performances, most recently a detailed analysis of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem to be performed May 30 by the San Jose Symphonic Choir at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Saratoga.

Widaman, a Santa Monica native, started piano lessons at age 7, but was sidetracked from her plans to become a concert pianist. Instead she earned a Ph.D. in 15th-century music at Brandeis University. After that, she bounced to teaching gigs at four colleges in four years (none of them on tenure track) and came back to Big Sur. “For a long time I really felt like a failure,” she says. “I’m really glad it worked out the way it did, because life has been so much more interesting than if I’d just been a college professor all these years.”

She volunteers as a docent at the Robinson Jeffers Tor House in Carmel, guiding tours and educating visitors about Jeffers’ life and work, and produced a May 17 event at Henry Miller Library in Big Sur with readings and essays on Jeffers. Widaman spoke to the Weekly from her Pacific Grove house share, seated on her piano bench.

Weekly: How did you first get introduced to Robinson Jeffers’ poetry?

Jean Widaman: It was 1962 [the year Jeffers died] when our freshman speech professor at Occidental asked several students to his home to read Jeffers to us. He had a voice for Jeffers’ poetry; it rolled like thunder.

It’s difficult to read, but when you hear it read well, it’s so much more effective than it is on the page. Jeffers couldn’t read it worth a darn for himself. The one time he did, at the Library of Congress, he read it in a flat voice. It’s pretty disappointing.

His sense of rhythm was very subtle and complex. It takes somebody reading it in a way that gets all those nuances; the music is there. I’ve only gotten seriously into Jeffers in the past couple of years since I became a docent.

How did you end up in Big Sur?

I was teaching English in Richmond, when the vice principal saw I was doing a week of teaching on Vietnam. She forbade me to do it. I would have had tenure if I completed that year, but I dropped out.

There was one place in the world I wanted to go when it seemed like everything was crashing down around me. That was the Big Sur Inn. I sold everything that wouldn’t fit in my red VW convertible, and headed to Big Sur where I didn’t know a soul, New Year’s Day 1970.

I asked for a job. They didn’t have any. I camped out in the state park. Two days later, I went back, and they said, we have a job for you. We all did everything, and had room and board. Most people who worked at the Big Sur Inn were pretty introverted. All the extroverts were up at Nepenthe.

People say, “You were a hippie.” I was at the edge of the scene. I had a feeling that Grandpa Deetjen created a stage, and people came out and played different roles.

You lead a church choir now, and studied early liturgical music. Is it just because you love the music, or are you a person of faith?

Absolutely. That’s the music I most deeply affiliate with. I think something of me lived back in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance.

The old Medieval modes have the feeling of something very ancient. But my view is a broad one. I started to question everything once I got into high school.

Tell me about the War Requiem that you just studied.

It is the most profound statement about the futility of war, and yet the necessity of war. It’s all death and eternal hellfire and what’s going to happen to you – “Please deliver us from eternal damnation,” and stuff like that. By interspersing Wilfred Owen’s poems into that at just the right place, the poems are commentary on what is being said.

This piece not done very often, because it’s a very complex work to pull off. I’m imagining writing a book to go deeper into the meaning, of poetry and the music, combining my appreciation of both poetry and music.