On the re-sacralization of music
Modern music can frequently be found striving for beauty again. Sometimes it gets it right.
On his fascinating podcast “The Symbolic World”, Jonathan Pageau recently spoke about “The End of Desacralization in the Arts.” Needless to say it peaked my interest and is very much worth listening to. As a composer, I’m primarily concerned with the re-sacralization of music and the pursuit of Beauty as an objective aim, and as both a Catholic and an artist I’m very concerned with how this fits into our spiritual discernment, but also the direction of our culture as whole. As Pageau speaks primarily from the perspective of a (very fine) visual artist and scholar of symbolism, I thought a musical response or companion piece might be appreciated by some.
Over the past year I have challenged myself deeply with the works of Polish music scholar Antonina Karpowicz-Zbinkowska, who writes about ancient perceptions of music, sacred music, and specifically focuses on Augustine, Boethius, and how the ancients understood music very differently from us. She invites the reader to consider a simple question with profoundly unsettling consequences: does the modern composer, musician, or listener hear music as the ancients did? As the assumption is that we hear far more than the ancients - based on our immense musical vocabulary - is it actually possible that we are missing something essential in musical perception at the same time? Of course there is no putting the genie back into the bottle: short of a cataclysmic social collapse, the immense meta-vocabulary of music is here to stay, and is only widened as new cultural expressions enter the (ever flexible and welcoming, as Scruton used to point out) western vocabulary. (Of course it is ironic that the very same progressives who decry “appropriation” in the west entirely ignore how our pop music culture is literally acting as a shallow colonial agent unto the destruction of traditional folk musics around the world, but that is a different article for a different day). And yet Zbinkowsk’s deep plumbing of the ancient notions of musica universalis, musica instrumentalis, and musica humana invite us to reconsider the real thread which passes through from the creator through various aspects of His creation, reestablishing the notion of music well beyond its modern utilitarian (or naively self-centered) standards. Such conversations overlap with Pageau’s own concerns about how our perceptions and values may affect our reality in fascinatingly direct ways.
The popular line in music history scholarship (at least until thesmartestpeople(tm) decided everything old is phobic/racist) is that music has largely progressed through history, with each turn and development being generally good and interesting. The end result is that the average modern scholar will generally group the works of musical modernism and post-modernism – and now, increasingly, even the most vapid pop art – into a relativistic pool of general “progress”, while the thoughtful reactionary will look for the moment where things may have gone wrong (and on a deeper level: where we may have forgotten something essential in our perception). Along the way, I’ve met many religiously dedicated modernists who cannot admit that their scions hardly produced a single work to add to the canon (note: the canon is also apparently now racist, so no matter), while I’ve meet those in more traditional circles who insist that music went wrong in the romantic/classical/baroque era, or perhaps that one Gesualdo piece or perhaps even the moment chant was so pridefully harmonized. They are opposite viewpoints, yet both frequently silly and simplistic (and sometimes I suspect: gnostic and even solipsistic) positions to take, as human nature – and the culture which evolves from it – are deeply complex structures which often defy clear categorization, even if such categorizations are necessary to create the generalizations necessary for coherent historical timelines and necessary meta-understanding. In short, one learns their history, and then (sometimes) one begins to approach it critically. Generalization is the root of wisdom, yes, but it invites deeper reconsideration. We can and should do both.
Perhaps one way to understand the development and offshoots of various artistic movements is to think of one of the baseline aspects of human nature, which I explain to my students as the “Evel Knieval Principle.” (Sadly, students no longer remember Evel, so I may have to update the cultural figure. Perhaps the venerable Crocodile Hunter?) Knieval (1938-2007) was a stuntman who spent his career doing wild and dangerous (and ever wilder and more dangerous) stunt jumps on his motorcycle, from Snake River Canyon to Wembley Stadium to a Shark Tank. Amazingly, he lived to be 69 years old and died of natural causes, converting to Christianity in his last days. The point of the story, however, is that once an ambitious human being surpasses a barrier, he often cannot help but reach for the next one. Like Evel Knieval, human nature, both individually and collectively, is bound to push every boundary and barrier to the breaking point and beyond. It is a consequence of curiosity and ambition, yes, but also concupiscence. Yet we live now in a time of mounting degradation and social collapse, where our task seems to be to discern how to react to the society of disintegrated boundaries which we have inherited. Perhaps there is no use in wondering “where we went wrong”, as we were bound as people to collectively go in every possible direction anyhow. Perhaps the only thing we can do now is assess the successes and damages of these myriad approaches, and hopefully adjust into a better direction as we seek for a recovery of understanding.
The arts mirror society, and society mirrors the arts, and this strange circular relationship (and sometimes firing squad) leads the arts down fascinating and often disconcerting paths. In music, one area in which the reactionaries have been increasingly coherent, and in turn morphed into agents of potential recovery, regards the assessment of the fruits of musical modernism. Composers today bear the direct baggage of the scions of modernism, and it usually means our careers are more difficult than they need to be. As a musical professor once put it to me: “Composers today are people whom 99% of the population doesn’t know exist, and the remaining 1% largely do not care.” It’s not an easy way to put bread on the table, and requires an entrepreneurial zeal unmatched in other fields simply to scratch out a bare subsistence. No wonder so many composers are perpetually single and childless.
Why did composers lose their audiences? While blame can be an unhealthy game to play, modern composers today who are being honest with history can indeed place the blame for this current state of affairs with the musical modernist and post-modernists which occupied seats of power from about the 1920’s through the 1990’s. (What follows is a very curtailed and inadequate history, but one which I hope is sufficient to orient the non-music specialist reader to some of what has transpired during recent history.) During this time, we began with Arnold Schoenberg’s observations that musical tonality was somehow tapped out, which was followed by his attempts to move music beyond tonality into purely atonal (and then serial, or “planned/patterned atonality”), resulting in the serialist movement taken up by his students Berg and Webern, and then throughout the halls of musical academia worldwide. The assumption here should ring familiar: that all music (and really, all culture) was an artificial construct which could simply be changed. It’s a far cry from the universal appeal to aesthetic truth offered by Boethius and Augustine, and ultimately lead to many fascinating experiments which all ultimately crashed into a self-made brick wall. To give the devil his due, these three really were excellent composers, and they were just going somewhere where we were bound to try to go (see: The Evel Knieval Principle). Indeed, if you look at at a Schoenberg score and squint, you see the shapes and movements of the greatest composers from Bach to Mozart. And yet there can be little denying that whatever the intellectual rigor and merits of their approach to “assure the supremacy of German music for the next 100 years”, the aural results were something else than what typically made people interested in composers and their new works:
Perhaps his most famous work, and one which despite its aural difficulty still qualifies as a masterwork of construction, is his Pierrot Lunaire. Indeed, it made the “Pierrot Ensemble” a permanent fixture in new music, a configuration (generally flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and sometimes including percussion) which can pack a far bigger and almost chamber-orchestra-esque punch than its small stature could suggest. In its initial use, however, Schoenberg uses it in a more pointillistic fashion, plumbing the sounds of madness in the process.
Various composers took up serial, or twelve-tone music – often referred to as Dodecaphonic music – in the coming decades. Perhaps its greatest scion and champion was that great bad boy of modernism, Pierre Boulez. Boulez is credited with a number of colorful quotes, such as:
“Any musician who has not experienced… the necessity of dodecaphonic music is USELESS. For his whole work is irrelevant to the needs of his epoch.”
-and-
“It is not enough to deface the Mona Lisa because that does not kill the Mona Lisa. All art of the past must be destroyed.”
-and, most tellingly:-
“More and more I find that in order to create effectively, one has to consider delirium and, yes, organize it.”
He was reportedly this charming most of the time, and it is not difficult to believe the apocryphal story that he once made Stravinsky cry. And what did this scion of the useful’s music sound like? Like this:
<Story break:> When I was still a student at the Cleveland Institute of Music, we had the opportunity to sit down for a Q & A with the great Boulez himself when he was visiting the Cleveland Orchestra. I had always wanted to encounter and challenge the man who had spoken so derisively of so many of my favorite composers… And yet when the time came, my more natural gentility took over, and I asked him a simple (but admittedly loaded) question:
“Maestro, you have so long been a voice for new music. I do wonder, these days, who do you think the most exciting composers of new music are?”
My tone was deferential, but my Dean – a woman of dubious distinction and a shrewd politicker whose history of administrative crimes is not worth mentioning here – perceived my game immediately, shooting me an icy glare. Boulez himself looked as if I had spit in his soup, and sputtered out an answer:
“Well, um, ahem, yes, well… you would have to look at my programs to answer this question!!” He practically shot back.
Satisfied with my brief moment, I went and looked at his programs, and the answer was clearly: “no-one.” </end story break>.
Boulez, aside from his career as the arch baddie of new music, was also a prolific conductor of the great Romantic and late-tonal masterworks, and was also responsible for starting IRCAM in France, a center of music technology research from which many of the tools now used across the music industry first emerged. His was a complex musical life, yet he was very much a child of his post-war disillusioned times.
Of course an entire school of composers, from Sibelius to Diamond to Part, carried on writing beautiful music with tonal centers, somehow unaffected by the declaration that nature itself was maxed out (and tonality does, at its foundation, find itself represented in nature). The great composition teacher Nadia Boulanger taught what could be considered the alternative school to the Schoenbergian position. Indeed, much of 20th century music history could be re-written along a Schoenbergian/Boulangerian divide. Boulanger, also a complex figure, was also a Catholic convert and a daily communicant. I met the nun who converted her during a conference of former Boulanger students at the University of Colorado in 2004. The archives for this event are are the American Music Center at UC-Boulder, and I keep intending to go back there and plumb them once again in the future. As to the alternative history of more approachable modern music, it has already been definitively written by critic and social commentator Robert Reilly. His excellent and luminous book, Surprised by Beauty, is enough to get even the most jaded anti-modernist cynic to revisit modern music with fresh eyes. (And if you look on the back cover, you might recognize a few of the book’s reviewers. My enthusiasm remains fresh to this day.) Indeed, I think that if you hand a confused young composition student a copy of Reilly’s book along with Roger Scruton’s “Understanding Music”, a great deal of understanding could be allayed. (Runner up: Scruton’s Beauty: A Very Short Introduction.)
No, I am not merely a dedicated Scruton fanboy and yes, I can summon many more sources for such metaphysical sources, all the way back to the aforementioned Augustine and Boethius (and even Plato, as things would have it). It’s fun to mention Scruton however, at least in part because he has committed the Cardinal Sin of being a conservative, which means that his work may have to wait for decades before the mainstream music establishment works through its current ideological confusion enough to be able to fairly assess his work.
<Story break #2> Recently I was on a flight to San Francisco, to work with The Benedict XVI Institute on the premiere of a new choral work (the results can be viewed here, though better audio is forthcoming!), and found myself sitting next to a very masked and frightened-looking woman who - when I finally engaged her in calming conversation during some significant turbulence - told me that she was a professor religious philosophy, and was worried that I was reading Scruton. While I inwardly shuddered at what kind of religion could be taught by somebody who reacted viscerally against such a luminous thinker, I outwardly enjoyed expressing how incisive Scruton’s thoughts on music and aesthetics really were. Of course I believe in civility, and she certainly had her suspicions about me as well, and so I hope I left a pleasant memory of “the other side” before our conversation ended. </End Story Break #2>
Of course nobody save one man is right about everything, and one does not have to agree with every conclusion in Scruton’s text. (I recall Scruton attempting to create distance between theology and music during his visit as keynote speaker for the Catholic Art Institute, and by my estimation facing right pushback for this unnecessary magnanimity) And yet it is encouraging that he ticked off all the right people, and was perhaps as affirming as it was difficult for him that he was an early casualty of cancel culture, which he lamented shortly before his death. The mainstream music establishment also expressed no lack of opposition to his aesthetic ideas.
In that last linked article, there’s more of that familiar modernist lament - couched in borderline Gnosticism - again: Scruton criticized modern music because he just didn’t understand. Certainly the author is of a particular political and aesthetic bent and is entitled to his viewpoints, just as are those of us who understand the difference between humble retrospection and regression (and reject the presupposition behind the latter term). Yet what is perhaps most interesting in relation to this article is the challenge to Scruton’s idea that the Schoenbergian ideal was a failure in listening. And while I cannot deny all of his criticisms of Scruton, this one sticks out to me as wrong, as I find it one of Scruton’s better observations, while it relates most cogently to the idea of re-sacralization in music, let alone the difficult process of reconsidering modern assumptions under the knife of ancient ideas.
Back to Schoenberg’s revolution: Predictably the movement to serialize every last aspect of music – harmony, melody, and rhythm – lead to new attempts at modernist (or was it post-modernist by this point?) composition, such as the famously irreverent and aleatoric works by John Cage. In one famous internet example, an unearthed copy of a clip from the show “I’ve Got a Secret” saw Cage perform one of his works, Water Walk:
Years later, composer Daniel Asia would write a piercing re-appraisal of the critical adulation often heaped on Cage, in his The Put on of the Century, or the Cage Centenary. Predictably, the modernist establishment jumped down his throat, even going so far as to attack Asia personally and undermine his credentials for daring to question their treasured presuppositions. (The critical sword, you see, is not allowed to cut both ways). Leave aside the obvious distasteful nature of ideological raging, the type of which has only ramped-up since this controversy in a small corner of the classical music world took place. Lost upon all of them was the double-meaning in Asia’s assessment, as Cage himself was a prodigious jokester who would probably smile at such a criticism, and react no more than with a shrug of the shoulders: such militaristic reactionism was about as anti-Cageian as one could imagine. And indeed, even among those who question the results of the modernist and early post-modernist musical experiments — which I simply dub “the era of unfettered musical experimentation” — you’d be hard-pressed to find even a very reactionary composer who has not used some modernist conventions, be it writing Pierrot Ensemble pieces, finding haunting tones through plucking piano strings, or being more free to use dissonance to express deeper categories of fear or grief or rage. Again: it’s not about reactionism, but honest re-assessment.
Returning to Cage’s era: so you’ve run away from tonality and tradition for decades by this place in time, up to the point of randomly generating pieces by throwing dice and divining structures from the I-Ching. What else can you possibly do to keep running? In Eastern Europe, the answer came in the form of Sonorism, who most famous scion was the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki. His Sonoristic masterwork, Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, is a deeply unsettling and difficult work which is worth listening to:
So we had Sonorism. A new path, right? Full of astounding new sounds, right? And now what? What else could we possibly do? And how and why did Penderecki go from his famous Threnody to the kind of music he wrote in 1996, the Seven Gates of Jerusalem?
While he never spoke directly to this to the best of my knowledge, it is clear that he took an aesthetic turn around the time of his composition of the Saint Matthew Passion. I wish I could ask him if it was the pursuit of the sacred ideal within the modernist framework which revealed the inherent limitations of the new(er) style.
Whatever the causes, the manic grip of modernism could not last for long, and composers around the world began to chip away at its walls of ice as early as the 1960’s. Composers such as Phillip Glass in America were taking a new route into minimalism at this time (which ended up being the last great dramatic turn in American modern music, even if Glass himself resents the term applied to his style). Composers behind the Iron Curtain were reacting more religiously, perhaps in part because religion and religious music were officially censured by the mediocre atheist socialists who ruled those societies. It is instructive that in the places of the world where the human spirit was most crushed, a dedicated group of musical modernists – Penderecki, Henryk Gorecki, Giya Kancheli, Arvo Part, Sofia Gubaidalina, and others – reacted with a deeply spiritual rebellion. The story of this is a fascinating one and perhaps one that I will one day address in a book, but nevertheless this inconvenient (for secular modernists) fact of modern music stands, along with the fact that many of these composers – especially Gorecki and Part – enjoyed the type of commercial success and international appeal which was the envy (and often the scorn) of their modernist contemporaries.
I first encountered Henryk Gorecki’s iconic – and controversial – Symphony #3 at a Borders Books CD display. I was a composition student at a state university, and such apparently plebian and intellectually unworthy efforts were unmentionables in our environment. I was a dedicated young modernist intellectually and rather quite taken with the rigor of such super-professor musical work, and yet I was beginning to doubt the entire façade. I was also going through a slow religious conversion, and my soul was being torn in various directions. At this time I was beginning to search for a new identity, exploring Polish composers in the process. And so seeing this Gorecki CD on display, I put on the headphones to sample it, hit play, and soon found myself struck to the core. I stood there, listening to the entire CD in the store, with tears streaming down my face. In the heart of commercial America, in a place as shallow as one could hope, my soul was torn asunder.
It turns out that by this point Gorecki’s symphony had become the very best-selling modern composition in history, going so far as to briefly cross over into the pop charts and surpass records by Madonna and Prince. The story is even told that during the applause after its Parisian premiere, one Pierre Boulez stood up his small stature, shouted “merde!” and left the hall in a huff. Gorecki, like Penderecki before him, had “betrayed” the modernist establishment, and he would never be forgiven for it.
(As a side note, it’s become an understandable quip amongst composition professors that many a student will claim to “discover Gorecki”, when all they mean is that they heard the Third Symphony. Most music students in the west remain sadly unfamiliar with his biting and energetic chamber music, or the unmatched Slavic luminosity of his choral output. They also generally don’t know the great little piece which follows:)
In Maria Wilczek-Krupa’s excellent Polish language tome – Gorecki – there is quote of the man responding to his modernist critics. While I can’t find it at the moment, he essentially denied betraying anyone or anything, and insisted that he just kept moving forward. Having pushed sonoristic textures and large ensemble capabilities to their very limits, he returns the question: “what else was I supposed to do?” Modernism, despite its promise, turned out to be internally limiting in its every iteration: Penderecki realized this when writing sacred music, Arvo Part realized this similary, and music history was never the same. Furthermore the composers profiled in Reilly’s book turned out to be right all along: musical tonality, or the idea of writing coherent music with a tonal center of some kind, was far from exhausted. Indeed, even if most of the resulting work was sub-par and shallow, pop musicians had continued to write arresting tonal music the entire time modernists were building barricades around their ever-shrinking fortresses. Why couldn’t classical composers reclaim their own language and start to do the same at a much higher level?
My own musical conversion was accidentally completed by one Dr. Marie Labonville, with whom I took a modern music history course. At one point she played two works for our appraisal. We knew that one was a piece of the highest serialism, slaved over for years by Pierre Boulez. The other work was written by throwing dice to randomly create musical patterns by John Cage. Nobody in the class could tell which was which, and yet it was certain that neither piece could ever capture the soul of millions as Gorecki’s work had done. It also begged an important philosophical question: if music was a heard art, then what did the method of generation matter once the music was performed? In the end, it was the listener’s perception which was the receptacle and judge, and how could we take an entire school of music which disregarded this as anything but a historical curiosity along the Eivel Knieval Principle-strewn path? I was convinced at that moment that it was good to break free from the narrow strictures of musical modernism. I began to read aesthetics and to philosophically explore (and secretly write down) my critiques of the modernist establishment, and soon I began to explore the links between the intellectual elitism and passive aggressive resentment of modernist music, and the vapidly condensed and canned product of pop music. Both struck me as false expressions, and I’ve continued to explore this strange relationship until this day.
Ultimately nobody can fault the modernists for what they did. They were the jaded and broken children of the post-war era, and they responded to what they feared was the end of their European culture by seeking new ways to organize sound. Their works bear all the hallmarks of supreme intellectual rigor and ultimately sincerity, and it is probably a stage mankind had to pass through via the joking principle I previously outlined. However one cannot deny that the music which resulted was incomprehensible, and it took a field where new music was once the norm – the classical world – and made it a place largely devoid of contemporary expressions, accelerating it into a moth-ball tinged museum mentality. The modernists successfully alienated performer and audience alike, and half the battle of composers today (no matter how accessible their music is) is simply begging existing performing organizations to take a chance on their work. Dedicated classical audiences are now so allergic to the idea of the modern composer and whatever aural offence he may offer next, that new works are seldomly performed in the classical mainstream. To give just one example: I had a particularly excellent violinist try to get my violin concerto – Fragments – programmed for a number of years. We even created a demo of the work to demonstrate that it was beautiful and accessible. Potential presenters agreed that the music was lovely and accessible, but declined to program it anyhow. For them, “modern and risky” ended around Shostakovich, and they couldn’t risk putting a new work on the program and predictably losing ticket sales. I can’t blame them: they are not the ones who burned the bridges, and they have bills to pay as well. Yet itt also doesn’t help that when new works are performed they are often the quasi-modernist musings of the friends of conductors, and simply reinforce the deeply ingrained negative social narratives around new music.
Composers and performers have reacted by creating small but energetic circles of new music connoisseurs. The settings are often vibrant and ambitious, yet much of the work done therein is self-referential and going in aesthetic circles, often attempting to travel increasingly narrow paths within the various modernist techniques developed from serialism to minimalism. Predictably, their audiences are generally miniscule and their composers hardly able to scratch a living from the resulting scraps. Also predictably, this aesthetic dead-end increasingly leads these musical subcultures and their chief scions and creators to explore the one path remaining to them: political activism and radicalism. These circles are often nauseatingly progressive, and their works often religiously intense invocations of the causes de-jour of the day (lately: climate change and transgenderism.) One is reminded of the modern wing of any art gallery, loaded with works which refer to the first half the 20th century, unable to say anything new yet too afraid to look backwards far enough to rediscover beauty and begin anew. Don’t take my word for it: just look at the recent list of Pulitzer Prizes in music for a nice selection of political activism and clear ideological preference, peppered with new-music speak.
Returning full-circle to Pageau’s discussion of the re-sacralization of art, the Eastern European composers have provided us with paths forward precisely by creating a sonic art which matched the apparent simplicity – but plumbed the spiritual depths – of eastern iconography. While their resulting personal styles were so individual as to make imitation of them far too obvious, they have allowed modern composers to take honest stock of what came before them and to pursue beauty. They have allowed religious music back into the concert hall, and dismantled the notion that modern music must be too difficult for a common man to grasp.
Part of the realization of the new art of our time may be that nothing else truly new or groundbreaking is possible. Via our dogged pursuit of the Eivel Knieval principle, we may truly have done everything new there is to do under the sun, at least where syntax, technique, and vocabulary are concerned. It seems to me that we are in a part of history where creators are called to slow down, take stock of the dizzying endpoint of history we have just collectively inherited, and find new ways to synthesize our acquired language. I think it a blessing in disguise: gone is the pressure to be original, leaving us only the choice to be profoundly transcendent, or not. In music, this has predictably resulted in the re-sacralization of a large part of our field, even when the political forces which remain gatekeepers in our industry are increasingly ideologically hostile to such expressions. Indeed, we can take a luminous work such as Arvo Part’s De Profundis:
There is something of the modernist which permeates the works of Part and Gorecki, however, and it is that their musical language is so individualistic as to make it nearly impossible to copy or work within without seeming derivative. And yet while largely unrepeatable, their unabashed drive towards a deeper truth in musical expression has shone new light on the overgrown path whereupon artists can pursue truth, goodness, and beauty. Listen to how it opened the door to modern works such as Pawel Lukaszewski’s masterful Via Crucis:
And here in America, Frank La Rocca’s many great works, including his very recent Messe Des Malades:
And may I share a work from my dear friend, Daniel Knaggs? He treads this rediscovered path so firmly and authentically that one is forced to consider whether truth, beauty, and goodness are indeed objective realities to be discovered and pursued:
Indeed, in sharing just these few examples, I am forced to risk offending the many vital voices I have not posted. Sebastian Szymanski? Jeffrey Quick? Dawid Kusz? Kurt Sander? There’s quite the long list to consider, and quite the confident counter-movement to the official institutional line in swing.
Whether the modern ideological heirs of Boulez like it or not, the re-sacralization of music (and the fine arts in general) is in full swing: one visiting a national conference held by the Catholic Art Institute, for instance, will encounter a gathering of enough great artists to start a true and good renaissance, if only the proper patronage can be found. Despite little support from academy, Church, or state, modern sacred music has a strong and determined community of creators, and new events are being organized constantly. In the end, Beauty shows forth once again as an objective and undeniable reality, and composers cannot help but turn lovingly to its source.