Further musings on the Re-sacralization of Music
Part 2: The "Duc in Altum" of the arts, and why we must recover it.
In a time where reading the great novels of the 20th century can potentially land one on an extremist wathclist, the music which accompanies this worldview is certainly worth exploring. Yet more than at any time in history, the prospect of being a full-time musician or artist of any stripe has become decidedly impractical. In a certain sense such things are nothing new: cultures have often evinced a rather hypocritical relationship with music, often refusing to materially and morally support what they actually value tremendously. We can go all the way back to ancient Greece, and the crowds who loved their theatrical spectacles while still holding actors in no higher regards than common prostitutes, or forward many centuries to classical era Europe, where mega-geniuses like Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven still needed to hold day jobs to put food on the table. Our own time is hardly better: the very same people who adore music would often resist letting their children study it in college (as if their favorite tunes were not created by lifelong dedicated craftsmen), while even the high-rolling pop industry seems intent on building massive profits on the backs of its creators, as the immoral streaming industry aptly demonstrates. And so we end up with an absurd situation where only the Taylor Swifts of the world can make a living off of the replaying of their own creations, while artists of far lesser commercial stature (including yours truly) must stream music in order to exist, but (barring a sudden explosion of public interest in serious music) will not make more than a few pennies for their efforts in the digital domain. Things have always been tough for musicians, but never quite this absurd.
It can seem like quite the thankless existence, and on the days where your first love of music fails you, it can bring its own anguish. And lest we are too harsh on the concerned parents who would not let their children study music, perhaps we can admit that they have a point? Music is a harsh mistress and a sometimes unbearable vocation, and comparisons to a secular priesthood and its sacrifices are not too far exaggerated. (An aside for life advice: My own suggestion in recent years, at least to those who are not able to be admitted into the top music programs in the nation, is to consider a second major in something more practical to help pay the bills on the way to building a deeper music career. Remember: Bach humbly held a full-time day job, so there is no shame in this. If I were not in academia, I’d probably be a truck driver or real estate agent or perhaps some manner of entrepreneur, as there is almost no way to make a full-time living on classical composition alone. Therefore those who receive “the call” to do so cannot follow this real spiritual vocation while having a family and not consider the ways in which their responsibilities must be fulfilled. Arts education, for its part (and education in general) must do a far better job at inculcating economic knowledge and common sense. But I digress).
So what is it that makes music anything but a hobby that some people get lucky in, as in the vision that popular culture would show us? And why would any sensible person suffer through so much uncertainty for so abstract an idea as organized sound? Henryk Gorecki once jokingly remarked:
"For quite a few years, I was a pedagogue, a teacher in the music academy, and my students would ask me many, many things, including how to write and what to write. I always answered this way: If you can live without music for 2 or 3 days, then don't write...It might be better to spend time with a girl or with a beer...”
More recently, off in a small corner of the Diocese of Bismarck, the prodigious Dr. Jennifer Donelson-Nowicka has a valuable lesson to teach us:
“Lord, teach us to pray.” Christ responded to this request of His disciples by teaching them the Our Father. As the catechism reminds us, this prayer becomes deeply embedded in our hearts, not only through rote repetition, but by its persistent presence in the Church’s liturgy. Our Lord teaches us to pray, “for we do not know how to pray as we ought” so the Holy “Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness” (Rom. 8:26).
Pop culture is glitzy, attractive, and as certainly lucrative as a rare winning lottery ticket, but it’s been wrong about almost everything important since the beginning of the modern era. It’s a wrongness machine, and (as I plan on discussing in a future post) it creates the antithesis to authentic culture, religious or otherwise. Dr. JDN gives us a picture of music as a spiritual path, while in our own time, the very same distributive technology which makes everything from private low-cost book publishing to low-cost professional audio/video streaming possible extends the promise of such a deeper aesthetic and spiritual path into our daily lives, if we would only click on what is available to us.
I always think of Christ’s command to Duc in Altum - put out into the deep. Music is so much more than a pleasurable accident of evolution, or an interesting theoretical construct, or a form of potent entertainment, while evolutionary and biological explanations of its potency always fall pathetically short. Music may be audiated structural theory and it may be potent entertainment and it is certainly wedded to emotion, but it is in reality capable of far more than this. Music is, most fully realized and perceived, a potent spiritual path, capable of leading us either closer to the objective reality of beauty and its source, or deeper into a state of spiraling perdition. It is Jacob’s Ladder, extending upwards and downwards in equal measure. Plato rationalized this all the way back in his Republic, but the Incarnation gave his concerns a realistic span. The liturgical arts, when they are employed well (and nowadays, this is rarely the case), lead us towards a fuller participation (in the spiritual, not modernist happy-clappy sense) towards liturgical transcendence. Outside of the liturgy, music exists most fully to help us continue the liturgical rhythm in our every day. Busy as I am, I don’t really have time for much else. Mortal as I am, I fear to waste musical time on anything else.
Perhaps the reader will now indulge me as I look at three seperate non-liturgical pieces, and discuss how they liturgize the every day for me. First, I come to Henryk Gorecki’s String Quartet #3: Songs are Sung. For the theoretically inclined, the music quickly loses their interest: there is apparently “not much to it”, or so I have been told. No matter. Moving on, so much has been written about the affect of Gorecki’s music: certainly one hears the Tatra mountains, their fresh springs of delicious water, yes, but it goes much deeper. There is the essence of the Highlander peoples, their songs and culture, yes, but deeper. Their spiritual yearnings and struggles throughout the centuries, yes, but deeper yet. Ultimately, the mountains of the highlanders give way to the everlasting hills, and Gorecki’s composition allows you to glimpse a promised land not yet fully available to you. All of it is in there, and any sensitive soul can follow the path this deceptively simple music sets, leading to the same place Gorecki undoubtedly glimpsed while composing it.
It is a work of such mortal finality and glancing infinitude, Gorecki held on to the finished score for ten years before letting the Kronos Quartet finally premiere it. My personal theory is that he knew he had hit the peak of his powers and composed his own elegy, hence the reluctance of a generally reclusive man to let it audiate beyond his own imagination.
This is the miracle of deep music: it not only lets you understand the core of a composer in a way far more intimate than the most detailed biography can reveal, but it also allows that same composer to travel a path to the highest realities, with the work they leave behind for you becoming a new trail to glimpse the very same things, if you would willingly and humbly travel that same path.
Yet music is powerful on all of its levels. If you can enjoy music on a purely technical — or first level aesthetic — level of appreciation, you can enjoy it quite strongly, like a finely cooked meal. If you can go farther and approach it on one of these deeper paths, you will go farther still. Yet if you can follow to the deepest level — that of its spiritual mapping — you will understand why music itself exists. This, I think, is what our enemy is trying to obscure when we are assaulted with the nearly omnipresent streaming glitz of pop culture.
The perceptive reader may wonder why God would leave us a pathway which clearly requires enculturation and technical knowledge to fully appreciate. Perhaps one can think of professional sports as a metaphor: there is no shortage of non-fans who will nevertheless tune in to the closing minutes of a major championship game in any sport. Why? I think it is because they are eager to witness a moment of unbridled joy and shared accomplishment. Yet more than vicarious emotion, I think the vicarious witness on some level understands that the earthly celebration is merely a metaphor - or a pre-figuring - of our potential destination of permanent joyful victory. And yet there is no denying that as much fun and joy as can be gleaned from watching such a celebration, it is the die-hard fan who knows the rules, the drama of the games, the news stories, and who follows a team over the years who earns the most joy from the moment. In a sense, their dedication to the details of the game and dedication to a particular team is what makes the far deeper appreciation of the moment possible. Attention is important. Details are important. And scripture bears a similar pattern: it must be read or heard in order to resonate within us: language is always a pre-requisite to understanding and engagement, and music is no different.
As to musical composition, it ultimately is a spiritual calling to draw and leave maps to the divine and eternal. It is a vocation to help others not only to pay attention more keenly, but also to navigate and encounter the “thin spaces.” Beauty is not subjective, you see. It is the objective revelation of a loving God. God is objective, his revelation is objective, and yet he is eternal. One of the spiritual gifts of honest artistry — at least when one is called to it — is that you may be allowed just one personal glimpse of a portion of that eternity, and be able to then show others how to get to that same magnificent view. Before the advent of recording technology, high literature provided this aesthetic escape, and (when musical instruments were not available), poetry provided a deep internal music which could be accessed by merely opening a book and quietly paying attention to what was being slowly read. I do think there is a deep link between authentic poetry and authentic music, though I also think (with deep apology to my poet friends) that part of our current (and I hope, temporary) tragic decline of interest in poetry is that the need for such “internal spiritual and perceptual rhythm” is taken up by the availability of recorded music. As a composer, I’ve discovered that the place where I find the right notes resides close to the place where the right words are found, and so I often find literature and poetry helping me begin new paths of my own in musical work.
Moving now to concrete music examples, we can consider one of the world’s most performed composers, the Scottish Catholic James MacMillan. Certainly, there is beautiful technical counterpoint in what you are about to hear: the craft is flawless. Yet we go deeper. Certainly, there is a deep grounding in the British choral tradition, while the lines themselves are a great pleasure to sing. Yet we go deeper still. Certainly, it is a joyful and hopefull piece capable of lifting your spirits: deeper yet. Certainly, there is something of the Scottish Highlands here, and even of Scottish-ness itself. Yes, but deeper yet: MacMillan here is teaching you how to pray:
The proper spiritual posture for liturgical worship — the optimal attitude and orientation of soul — is here somehow captured as a map represented by little dots on the page, interpret-able by a skilled performer capable of reaching for transcendence, and understandable by a sensitive listener on various levels. And in this era of digital reproduction, it can certainly be brought with you into the mundane and every day, to liturgize your life.
We return to a similar example from Henryk Gorecki, whose luminous and nearly peerless choral output is (aside from his popular Totus Tuus) largely unknown outside of Eastern Europe. This piece is perhaps subtly political and certainly patriotic, growing out of a particularly tragic moment of Poland’s struggle to remove the Communist boot from its collective neck. And yet as every single Gorecki choral setting does, it moves from the immediate (in this case, a meditation on the slow rolling gray Vistula river) to the joy of everlasting hills. This movement from the temporal to eternal was how Poland ultimately shook free of the Soviet grip. The liturgical orientation followed people into their lives and ultimately into the streets, and for a brief moment in time, the world was entirely better because of it.