Writer of Fancy: The Playful Piety of Jane Austen

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Music: Music and mysticism

Music is often considered the most mystical, ephemeral, ethereal of all arts.  For some, music is for this reason the most perfect, the most purely artistic, of all arts.

Maybe.

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Music: One Voice

Stapert points out that in the same motet, Bach breaks off the last part of Isaiah 43:1 (du bist mein -you are mine) when the verse is first introduced.  He saves is “until the point where he could introduce them as part of a brief dialogue during the chorale/fugue.”  “Dialogue” implies two characters; the soprano takes the chorale - with its repeated ich bin dein (I am yours), while the basses take the response, du bist mein.  The soprano chorale is the voice of the bride, the basses speak the voice of the bridegroom.

In the concluding phrase, though, the voices, having danced around each other for seven minutes or so, tie together in harmony.  All voices together sing the final “du bist mein.”  Who’s the “you” and who’s the “me”?  Take your pick: The voice of the bride and the voice of the bridegroom has become one voice.

Music: Ich habe dich erloset

The second half of Bach’s motet “Furchte dich nicht” (”Fear you not”) consists of a Paul Gerhardt chorale, sung over a fugue drawn from Isaiah 43:1. The fugue repeats its subject - ich habe dich erloset, “I have you redeemed” - 33 times. The Redeemer is associated with the number three. More, as Calvin Stapert points out (My Only Comfort), the music also depicts the manner by which this redeemer redeems:

“The subject itself is both striking and meaningful. It begins with three descending half-steps, leaps up a fourth, and then descends three more half-steps. Wherever they appear (and they are nearly ubiquitous) these descending half-steps always strike the ear and hence draw attention to the text. But they do more than simply call attention to the text; they also point to teh way the redemption was accomplished. During the Baroque period, a melodic line descending in half-steps was almost synonymous with lamentation; it has been called the Baroque ‘emblem of lament.’ More specifically, for Bach it pointed to the crucifixion.”  Yet, “after the descending half-steps, the melodic line turns upward and the rhythm enlivens to the eighth- and two sixteenth-note rhythm that had dominated the earlier phrase, ‘I also will help you.’”  Without every saying “cross” or “resurrection,” Bach has served as a musical evangelist.

What is the motet saying? Many things, all at once, piled on top of each other, inserted into and surrounding, enveloping and enveloped by, one another.  The words say “I have redeemed you,” while the music says “I redeem you through a cross” and “I redeem you through a glorification,” and then, since the rhythm recalls the earlier phrasing, “I redeem you, just as I promised to help you.”

It’s complex, but it’s not incoherent. Might a text also say many things at once, and remain coherent?

Music: Meter and tone

Victor Zuckerkandl contrasts post-polyphonic Western music with Gregorian chant.  In both there are longer and shorter tones in a succession in time.  But in “our music,” another layer is added: “the succession also gives rise to the metrical wave, whose uniform pulsation is perceptible through all the changes of the tonal surface.  Both are always present simultaneously – the uniformity of the wave, the variegated pattern of durations, of long and short, in the actual succession of tones.”  This is what gives “our music” its particular rhythm: “not the succession of longer and shorter tones as such, but their succession supported, borne along by, the regular rise and fall of the continuing metric wave.”  This combination of succession and meter is not separable from the pitch of the tones that make up the music.  The rhythm and melody work together. 

Citing the beginning of Chopin’s A-major Polonaise, he notes that the four sixteenth notes at the end of the first measure “would be quite inadequately described as four tones of equal length in rapid succession, together filling up the last third of the triple measure.  What we feel is, rather, four tones of equal length in rapid succession, carried along by the ascending phase of the wave to a goal, the wave crest.  The rhythmic quality of the tone at the beginning of the second measure does not rest upon its comparatively longer duration, nor upon the accent it carries, but upon the fact that in it the wave attains its goal, the wave crest, and at the same time is carried beyond the goal, to a new cycle.”

Music: Market Correction

In a long and informative essay review in an October issue of TNR, Richard Taruskin explains the apparent crisis of classical music as a market correction.  Between the early 1960s and 1987, lots of foundation and federal money flowed to composers and performers, inflating the numbers beyond what the market could support.  Audiences dwindled, but “as long as this gravy train lasted, the attrition of the audience could be overlooked.”  Recent “cutbacks that seemed to imply the sudden cruel rejection of classical music were really more in the nature of a market correction, reflecting the presence scarcity of patronage and a long-deferred confrontation with the changed realities of demand.”  Only in academia are classical musicians protected from the hard demands of finding a paying audience.

Music: Wedding sermon

I am reading a portion of the text from 2 Corinthians 4.

We have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves; we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. For we who live are constantly being delivered over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death works in us, but life in you.

May the Lord add the blessing of His Spirit to our meditation on His word.

“Music,” St. Augustine wrote, “is the science of moving well.”

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Music: Savant

In his wonderful Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks describes a patient named Martin, who suffered meningitis at the age of three and was never mentally normal afterwards. He spent hours listening to operas and by the time Sacks met him in 1984, he claimed to have more than 2000 operates memorized, along with Messiah, the Christmas Oratorio, and all the Bach cantats. Sacks writes: “it was not just the melodies that he remembered. He had learned, by listening to performances, what every instrument played, what every voice sang. When I played him a piece by Debussy that he had never heard, he was able to repeat it, almost flawlessly, on the piano. He then transposed it into different keys and extemporized on it a little, in a Debussyan way. He could grasp the rules and the conventions of any music he heard, even if it was unfamiliar or not to his taste.”

Music: Concert gnostics

In many cultures, music and dance go naturally together.  Music moves the body, and so bodies move to the music.

Not ours, or at least not in “high culture.”  Patrick Shove writes, “Many twentieth-century composers focus on sound qualities or abstract tonal patterns, and performers of their compositions often neglect whatever kinematic potential the music may have.  The absence of natural motion information may be a significant factor limiting the appreciation of such music by audiences.  While compositional techniques and sound materials are subject to continuous change and exploration. . . . the laws of biological motion can only be accepted, negated, or violated.  If more new music and its performers took these laws into account, the size of audiences might increase correspondingly.”

Increase, maybe, to the size of rock concerts.

Music: Chaos and order

Pierre Boulez’s total serialism depended, in the words of Jeremy Begbie, “on the rigorous organization of music through the use of strict mathematical patterns.”  The results were, Begbie says, “extremely dull, indeed, some of the most tedious ever written.”

Around the same time, John Cage was composing “chance music,” made, for example, through “random acts such as tossing coins” (Begbie).  Boulez was annoyed to find that Cage’s music sounded much like his own, a demonstration of Boulez’s own observation that “a surfeit of order [is] equivalent to disorder.”  The bid for absolute human control leads to chaos, a reality repeatedly demonstrated, as Begbie points out, by the past century’s political history.

Music: East Meets West

I’ve been listening all day to piano and orchestral music from several Chinese composers: Shande Ding, Yah-jun Hua, Wen-cheng Lu, Guang Ren, Bi-guang Tang, Lishan Wang, Jianer Zhu.  They combine traditional Chinese music with Western forms, and are far more accessible than many contemporary Western composers.  They are not naive compositions; the sound palette is formed by modernist dissonance as well as by traditional Western music.  But the music is not “challenging” or “subversive.”  It aims to be, and is, beautiful.

Another irony of twenty-first century culture: Just as we are relearning Christendom from Africans, we have a chance to relearn the riches of Western music from the East.

Music: Musico-theological speculation

In his book, Wiser than Despair, Quentin Faulkner traces the links between musical theory (musical speculation) and theological speculation. John Scotus Erigena’s views, for instance, were summarized by his pupil Regino of Prum, who wrote on music in a treatise on harmony, and the treatise has theological overtones throughout (not entirely biblical, some deriving from Plotinus).

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Music: Bach’s Bible

In his biography of Bach, Martin Geck quotes a number of notes that Bach penned in the “Calov Bible,” a copy of Luther’s translation that belonged at one time to the theologian Abraham Calov.

On Miriam and her singing women, he writes, “First prelude to be performed in two choruses to the honor of God.”

Regarding the Levitical chorus and orchestra in Chronicles: “This chapter is the true foundation of all church music pleasing to God.” (Unfortunately, Geck doesn’t tell us which chapter this is.)

Also on Chronicles: “A splendid proof that along with other institutions of the church service, music from the spirit of God especially was also ordained by David” and “In a devotional service, God is always present with his grace.”

Music: Retuning the world

From a sermon by John Donne: “God made this whole world in such an uniformity, such a correspondency, such a concinnity of parts that it was an instrument, perfectly in tune: we may say, the trebles, the highest strings, were disordered first; the best understandings, angels and men, put this instrument out of tune. God rectified all again, by putting in a new string, semen mulieris, the seed of the woman, the Messias: And onely by sounding that string in your ears, become we musicum carmen, true musick, true harmony, true peace to you.”

Music: Cosmic polyphony

Johannes Kepler wrote in 1619: “the movements of the heavens are nothing except a certain everlasting polyphony (intelligible, not audible) with dissonant tunings, like certain syncopations or cadences (wherewith men imitate these natural dissonances), which tends towards fixed and prescribed clauses - the single clauses having six terms (like voices) - and which marks out and distinguishes the immensity of time with these notes. Hence it is no longer a surprise that man, the ape of his Creator, should finally have discovered the art of singing polyphonically, which was unknown to the ancients, namely in order that he might play the everlastingness of all created time in some short span of an hour by means of an artistic concord of many voices and that he might to some extent taste the satisfaction of God the Workman with His own works, in that very sweet sense of delight elicited from this music which imitates God.”

Music: Sacred music

Levine again: The German pianist Hans von Bulow toured the US in 1876. At one location, he was preceded by Emma Thursby who sant Schubert and Schumann, and then a popular song by Franz Abt: “Von Bulow’s ‘rage knew no bound’ at this ‘desecration’ of a program composed of the works of great masters. When von Bulow came out on the stage, ‘he deliberately took out his handkerchief and carefully wiped the keys of the piano up and down in a noisy glissando scale and then began to improvise on the recitative from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Oh friends, not these tones.’”

Music: Music and Spirit

A couple of interesting lectures on Music and Theology in the Christian Systematic Theology group of AAR. Nick Adams offered a very detailed and technical discussion of Messiaen’s Messe de la Pentecote in order to explore some issues in doctrinal change and continuity. He noted that Messiaen employed plainchant and Hindu rhythms in the piece, and raised the question of when a stretch in a tradition becomes a break with tradition. Messiaen is not simply quoting plainsong, but it’s deliberately and recognizably there (or recognizably once a well-informed interpreter like Adams points it out). He also noted the importance of the fact that music does what it does non-representationally, and raised the question of what that might mean for the ways we do theology, especially in Protestant churches where representation is either downplayed or outright prohibited.

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Music: Music and communion

Ian McEwan’s Saturday is from one angle a novelization of Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” which also figures prominently (if improbably) into the plot. The book begins with neurosurgeon Henry Perowne looking out a window early on a February morning on a world where ignorant armies clash by night, and ends with him kissing his wife Rosalind’s neck and declaring “There’s always this, is one of his remaining thoughts. And then: there’s only this.” Come, let us be true to one another.

McEwan always writes beautifully, and often with remarkable insight. One of the most arresting passages in this novel occurs as Henry bathes in the sound of his son Theo’s blues band during a rehearsal: “There are these rare moments when musicians together tough something sweeter than they’ve ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything you have to others, but lose nothing of yourself. Out in the real world there exist detailed plans, visionary projects for peaceable realms, all conflicts resolved, happiness for everyone, for ever - mirages for which people are prepared to die and kill. Christ’s kingdom on earth, the workers’ paradise, the ideal Islamic state. But only in music, and only on rare occasions, does the curtain actually lift on this dream of community, and its’ tantalisingly conjured, before fading away with the last notes.”

Music: But for Luther

In his Teaching Company tapes on Bach and the Baroque (recommended), Robert Greenberg suggests an historical sequence that accounts for the development of German music:

Music for singing, which in the period was largely church music, must take account of the language in which the music is sung.

German is punchy and sharp, with abrupt vowels - quite unlike the languid, liquid, langorous phrasings of the Romance language.

In Germany, Protestant church composers composed for German singing rather than for Latin, and that meant that the music took on a “Germanic” feel.

Choral and other church melodies shaped the melodic sensibilities of German composers, even when they were not writing for the church.

Hence, without the Reformation, no vernacular singing in church; without vernacular singing, no melodies like these melodies; without melodies like these melodies, the German musical tradition would have been very different. But for Luther, no Bach - but also no Beethoven.

Music: African Polyphony

In a brief article in the August 6 TLS, Stephen Brown reflects on the influence of African music on the music of America and Europe. Until WWI, he writes, African music had little impact on the wider musical scene, but after the war “there was no popular music in the United State ?Ewith the possible exception of Jeannette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy ?Ethat did not bear witness to the transformation wrought by black musical culture.” He compares the African impact on American music to the influence of Florentine and Baroque painting styles in teh Renaissance and the 17th century respectively. It is not merely that jazz and blues became more popular but “there was a new vocabulary, a new syntax, a new grammar.” In particular, it was a new rhythm: “Rhythm in African music is a composite of simultaneously occurring layers; polyphonic textures of rhythmic patterns. . . . African polyphony requires that different rhythmic layers should maintain their independence, should be heard as distinct, and yet in combination should create a rhythmic whole greater than its parts.” Gershwin’s “Summertime” provides an example; in the Louis Armstrong/Ella Fitzgerald version, “the rhythm of the accompaniment (actually consisting of at least three rhythmic strands) plays with an independent consistency, while the trumpet and then the vocal lines play freely above it.”

Music: Why Music?

Why music? Well, for instance: What I want my life to be is better expressed by a 2-minute segment the Canzona of Beethoven’s A minor string quartet than by any words I could ever speak or write, expressed all at once in multiple registers and nuances. To say it all would be to try to say something infinite; but it can be expressed musically with a few stringed instruments in a couple of minutes.

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