10 Reasons Why to Use an iPod (and Earphones)

Not the iPod as it is used, but the iPod as it can be used. The iPod (with earphones)...

1. Destroys the concept of background music. Making music sound good is dangerous. Once our ears hear something pleasant, we can start to think that we understand the music. Music is meant to be pleasant, and the best music, the most pleasant—but when pleasure is extracted from the High music the same way pleasure is extracted from popular music, two things happen. (1) Popular music will always win (as it should, if that is the competition), and (2) High music becomes disappointing.

The iPod and similar technologies change all that. With the iPod's earphones pushed firmly in your ears, the music demands your attention. As C. S. Lewis says about art, "We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way." Not that I would suggest that a picture is better appreciated by looking at it with your nose touching the canvas. The iPod with earphones is preferable to CD players and computer speakers because it is far closer to the experience of live performance.

2. Is less individualistic and more corporate than music on a CD player. The iPod makes you aware of the performer. Your left speaker plays certain sounds into your left ear, and your right speaker plays certain sounds into your right ear. With this, you get a sense of distance between the players. This is fantastic. It's a constant, conscious or subconscious reminder that music is a communal thing.

3. Replaces music as a science. That teenager, doing the closest thing to lying down that you can in a chair, eyes on vacation and slobber collecting on his lip. Yeah, him. He has earphones in and he understands about popular music what Classical musicians don't understand about their music. We think he's rude when it takes yelling at him to pull him out of his musical seance. He probably is. But what if, instead of our caricatured teenager, we have someone whose profession in life is the study of J. S. Bach. Suddenly, the fact that it takes yelling to get him out of his iPod infatuation is a good sign. Like the college student engrossed in his calculus. Or biology. Or history. Or Latin.

Or music.

4. Teaches you about poetry. I was listening to a 12th century Christmas song on my iPod when I realized the guy was singing in Latin and I recognized the words. The iPod managed to remind me that it was just as sensible to say that I was hearing poetry as to say that I was listening to music. That sound of the saliva from the singers' dentals and labials can be heard much more deliciously when they're spat right onto your eardrums. Again, it's more like live performance.

5. Teaches you about ambience. Just like HD TVs can show you the pores on your favorite news anchor's face, the iPod lets you hear all the gory details of the music without everyone yelling at you to turn down the volume. Why is that an advantage? Yes, you guessed it. It's more like live performance. The iPod teaches you that music isn't on paper.

6. Teaches you about liturgy. Liturgy assaults the senses. It comes from all sides. That's what makes a football game so fun. When you listen to a Bach oratorio on an iPod, it's like a football game. Like I said in #2, you feel distances. You hear the details. You sense the contour. Texture is a thing only the best Bose speakers can emulate for a CD player. For an iPod with earphones, it's the name of the game. Antiphony, cyclicality, and juxtaposition are all heightened with your earphones.

7. Teaches you about polyphony. This was, to me, the most shocking and delightful thing about my iPod. At last I could hear mimesis. Out of my left ear came the soprano doing a motif, and then from my right ear a bass doing the same motif an octave lower. The iPod cheerfully murders the idea that counterpoint is beautiful only on paper. Ahh, I thought. It's almost like I'm there. Now, tell me you can hear the counterpoint on your CD player like that.

8. Teaches you about conversation. Mortimer Adler said Western civilization was engaged in a Great Conversation. Well, he was right, about music, anyway. The iPod imposes canonicity. You can move your thumb a centimeter and flip over centuries. Think of how that can change perception of music. It's the difference between having a Bible made up of separate scrolls for each book and having a Bible in one leather-bound volume. What's that do you to your understanding of theology? A lot.

9. Teaches you criticism. On my iPod, I have six (6) different recordings of Ravel's La Valse. I can put them all on a playlist and listen to them one after the other. Why would I want to? Well, they all just do that climax wrong. Simon Rattle goes slow enough that you lose the waltz. Pierre Boulez just drags. Charles Munich goes too fast. Bernstein is almost right—the trumpet crescendo is brilliant—but, there's just something. Hm.

10. Teaches you humility. My iPod Nano is smaller than a baby's foot and can hold 8 GBs of music. Yahoo answers says that's 2000 songs, which means that it can probably hold about 800 of mine. The "Cover Flow" feature is enough to remind me that there are galaxies of music I haven't visited, and I can flip through them with my thumb. It's a humbling thought. And fun.

(11. There's this cool game on my iPod called Vortex...just kidding. This is all thanks to my cousin Madeleine, who decided I was just awesome enough of a relative to deserve an iPod for Christmas. You can blame my corrupted self on her.)

Natural Talent and the Real Me

Behind both [Roman Catholic and Protestant] views of baptism is the notion that the "real me," what makes me uniquely me, is some internal ghostly me that remains unaffected by what happens outside and is unchanged by what happens to my body. Neither the Protestant nor Catholic considers a third option, the possibility that baptism, precisely as an external and physical ritual, might actually affect who I am. Both the Protestant and Catholic, in short, seek to locate some eternal, unchangeable, autonomous "me" deep within. Ultimately, this is idolatrous. It is an effort to find some divine me inside the human race. Christians aren't supposed to believe any such thing. (The Baptized Body, Peter J. Leithart, "Starting Before the Beginning".)

When Christians say to a talented person, "You've been given a gift," oftentimes (not always, granted) there is an implicit presupposition there. We're talking about some raw propensity or ability that God simply infused in this person's soul. If Jay Greenberg had been born in the 8th century, he still would have been Jay Greenberg, the Gifted Musician. The more realistic crowd (ostensibly) chalks it all up to genetics, but it's often expected in the religious world to really attribute this to some sort of supernatural activity. God gave me a real gift, and that's a part of Who I Am, no matter what context I'm in. I was born with it.

I think the implicit assumption here is the same as the one Leithart identified in modern Protestant and Roman Catholic views of the sacraments. There's some sort of Inner Me, the part of my soul that's unchangeable and the way it is, regardless of my environment or whether or not I can help. In the end, the notion of "giftings" as we see it today is based on a flawed anthropology. It's-Just-The-Way-I-Am can be the justification for pedophilia or congressmen who have affairs, if you buy the notion, but it shouldn't be the way Christians account for people who are darn good at playing the violin. It certainly wasn't always the way Christians accounted for it. (Nor is it particularly flattering to the violinist, whose gift from God was, more likely, the discipline to practice incessantly.)

Messiaen, the Not-Mystic

"When asked if he has ever felt the 'joy of mysticism' (a moment of epiphany, of certainty) during the act of composing, the response is a resolute, 'No, not at all. When I am working, there are so many things that require immediacy, so many details to manage, that all I can do is be attentive to what I am doing. I do not experience what you mean. I do not contemplate but act.'" (Olivier Messiaen, from The Reinvention of Religious Music: Olivier Messiaen's Breakthrough Toward the Beyond, Sander van Maas, "It Is a Glistening Music We Seek".)

Simple, Hilarious, Popular, and Modern

Percy Dearmer prefaces The Oxford Book of Carols with the opening sentence,

"Carols are songs with a religious impulse that are simple, hilarious, popular, and modern."

How about that?

More Monody Argument

"The 'new music' immediately found imitators all over Italy and soon spread to other countries. The older contrapuntal art of the seventeenth century did not, of course, disappear; but the first half of the seventeenth century witnessed a gradual modification of the language of music owing to the interaction of the new monodic idea with the older contrapuntal principles, and the efforts of composers to find a means of reconciling the two. ...The integration of monody with the traditional practices of music and the earliest adaptation of the resultant new style to opera were achieved during the first half of the seventeenth century." A Short History of Opera, "The Immediate Forerunners of Opera", pg. 38-39.

The Monody Argument.

What Else Is New?

One of the most well-known moments in Western music is the stark tension of measures 12-16 in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde Prelude (1:17-1:50). The theme gets increasingly fragmented, increasingly higher, and always resolves on an unresolved dominant seven. At last, only two notes of the theme are left with no harmony underneath, until suddenly an unexpected chord bursts out of nowhere:









Wagner is taking advantage of the harmonic ambiguity in the third and fourth measures of the excerpt above. The passage can be put into simple chords as follows:









The question mark represents the lack of any harmony. What's this doing compositionally? It's creating a huge amount of tension. The listener is looking for resolution, and instead of giving it, Wagner simply takes away all harmony and leaves a two-note strand of music without any sort of context. While we're waiting for any sort of resolution, he suddenly gives us what we're not expecting—yet another unresolved dominant seven, this time an E-major minor-7 chord.

What's particularly interesting is that this isn't a new tactic. Harold C. Schonberg in his book The Great Conductors points out that "even the most important chords of the nineteenth century—the ones that open Tristan und Isolde—had previously occurred, almost note for note, in Liszt's song, Ich möchte hingehn, composed in 1845, more than ten years before Wagner 'composed' the Tristan opening." But the harmonic ambiguity Wagner uses a few measures later is actually a tactic used much, much earlier by none other than Johann Sebastian Bach in his Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248, Flösst, mein Heiland, flösst dein Namen.














Bach, too, is fragmenting his theme, taking away its unresolved harmony, and then surprising us with yet another dominant seventh chord. This can be analyzed similarly:











So, don't bother to do anything new harmonically. Chances are, Bach has already done. As Arnold Schoenberg points out in Style and Idea, Bach was really the first composer to use a tone row. Right there, in BWV 869, the final Fugue in the Well-Tempered Clavier! (Erm. Well, you get the idea.)

A Matter of Taste

"This is in sharp contrast to the relatively minor status of individual 'taste' in Western musical practice and aesthetics from the ancient Greeks until the late eighteenth century. To an earlier age, our contemporary idea of a complete relativism in musical judgment would have seemed nonsensical. One could no more make valid individual judgments about musical values than about science. Music was no more 'a matter of taste' than was the orbit of the planets or the physiology of the human body. From Plato to Helmholtz, music was understood to be based on natural laws, and its value was derived from its capacity to frame and elaborate these laws in musical form. Its success was no more a matter of subjective judgment than the laws themselves." (Who Needs Classical Music?, Julian Johnson, "Musical Values".)

Messiaen, the Theologian, not Mystic

"Pure music, profane music, and above all theological music (and not mystical, as the majority of my audience think) alternate in my production." (Olivier Messiaen, from The Reinvention of Religious Music: Olivier Messiaen's Breakthrough Toward the Beyond, Sander van Maas, "It Is a Glistening Music We Seek".)

Atonality Out of Necessity

"The method of composing with twelve tones grew out of a necessity. In the last hundred years, the concept of harmony has changed tremendously through the development of chromaticism. The idea that one basic tone, the root, dominated the construction of chords and regulated their succession—the concept of tonality—had to develop first into a concept of extended tonality. ...[I]t became doubtful whether a tonic appearing at the beginning, at the end, or at any other point really had a constructive meaning. ...In this way, tonality was already dethroned in practise, if not in theory." (Style and Idea, Arnold Schoenberg, "Composition with Twelve Tones".)

Compare with this.

Music Is Community

"Music is communal property, made and played as a shared activity whether it is carried on by a solitary individual or a large group. The difference between the band performing at a huge open-air concert and the person who plays a guitar in the privacy of his or her bedroom is much less significant than it appears. The activity of making and listening to music involves us in something that is never merely personal. In this sense, music is like a language; when we "speak" or "listen" in musical language, we participate in a signifying system that is communally shared and defined, something that is larger than our own use of it and that we enter whenever we involve ourselves in music." (Who Needs Classical Music?, Julian Johnson, "Musical Values".)

Why Sing Goudimel?

This is something I wrote a while back, attempting to explain why Goudimel uses so many root and so few inverted chords. It's not as clear as I'd like it to be, but it's a start.

--

Our goal is congregations with ever-increasing, corporate activity in worship. One of the oldest tools for enhancing this activity, especially in early Protestant traditions, is the singing of hymns in parts. The problem with this is that congregations don't know how to sing in parts. They don't know how to begin to learn. This goes back to a deeper problem, an attitude that musicianship is a mater of talent, of divine gift, of genetics. It's not. It's a combination of two things - discipline and conditioning.

Claude Goudimel gives you both. Goudimel's approach to part writing is, at best, unusual. But it's a conscious attempt to compel a congregant into becoming a musician. His method is simple - give each person a sense of identity with one of the four voices of a hymn. Your identity as a soprano, alto, tenor, or bass is something that has a tangible application in the sound. Your section has a distinctive way it jumps around or honks a note. The best of it all is that this means you don't have to read music to learn, but learning how to sing naturally ends up teaching you how to read.

It starts with the melody, which is usually pretty catchy. This doesn't really pose a problem. The next part that we naturally want to hear is the bass, since it gives us a sense of the harmony of the piece. Theoretically speaking, if you're a bass, there are three possible notes you can sing with each melody note without creating dissonance, since Goudimel's policy is almost always to have the bass note sing the root position of any given chord. But, of course, nobody really thinks in those terms when they're singing. Simply due to the fact that most other possibilities than the one Goudimel writes are awkward and unsingable, it's intuitive for a bass to sing it the way Goudimel wrote it. From the point of view of someone learning, there's simply a distinctive sound that accompanies his identity as a bass. From the composer's perspective, Goudimel simply never (well, hardly ever) writes an inverted chord.

From hereon out, it's pretty simple. You have a soprano and a bass line in place. The rest essentially fills in the blanks. The alto and tenor parts, which would seem to be more difficult since they're close to each other, again, have that intuitive sense of what not to sing because the other parts are already singing it. To dip again into the theory behind it, at any point, either the alto or the tenor is going to be singing a note that neither the bass nor the soprano are yet singing. For the person who's learning, it sounds funny otherwise. To help distinguish between the two parts, either of the two middle parts at any point is going to be doing something melodic, while the other is honking on one or two notes. Simply by virtue of the fact that there are only two possibilities for each voice at any given time, and neither can do both at once, possibilities are limited and parts become intuitive.

What's important to realize is not how it happens but that it happens. Goudimel is forcing people who aren't comfortable with music to listen to themselves, listen to those around them, distinguish notes from notes in thick textures, and identify themselves with a particular sound. This is, perhaps, why the people who usually end up looking down on Goudimel are those who know the most about music. Not all Goudimel hymns are created equal, and most of them are milk. As long as we keep in mind that the meat is, say, Bach, we're on the right track. But Goudimel is good for where we are now - introducing the idea of sanctifying corporate worship. It's a matter of creating better musicians through a delicate mix of discipline and conditioning.

Suzuki and Talent

If the Suzuki method has proven that a toddler can acquire excellence in musical performance the way he learns a language, why can't we extend the logic to musical composition? A daughter seeing her father having fun working calculus problems on a page will, without a doubt, turn out to be great at math. So, maybe it's that, and not his genes, that allowed Mozart to be writing those symphonies at 3. Or whatever. (In the words of Michael Flanders, "I very much wanted to play the music of Mozart, in particular his wonderful horn concerto in E flat, which he wrote at about the age of 18 months. Marvelous man.")

Suzuki's brilliance lay in one core idea—mimesis. Children can pick up a language when they're one year and two years old, becoming fluent in a tongue high school students in a different country spend years and undesirable toil to accomplish the same thing. What allows toddlers to do that?

Suzuki said it was seeing their parents do it. When a child sees his mother and father using language, he wants in on it. He can see the pleasure and the utility that results from language, so he imitates, with no textbook knowledge of grammar, of phonetics, idioms, or anything. Only his ear. Suzuki, therefore, insisted that parents take lessons with their children. You can see the result—the 4-year-old who would never practice before would be jumping up and down, throwing a tantrum because his mother got to practice and he didn't.

So, can we try the same thing with composition?

Plato and Schoenberg

"Moreover, so much of music as is adapted to the sound of the voice and to the sense of hearing is granted to us for the sake of harmony; and harmony, which has motions akin to the revolutions of our souls, is not regarded by the intelligent votary of the Muses as given by them with a view to irrational pleasure, which is deemed to be the purpose of it in our day, but as meant to correct any discord which may have arisen in the courses of the soul, and to be our ally in bringing her into harmony and agreement with herself...." (Plato, Timaeus, [47d and ff.].)

Most modern readers would dismiss this as the typical Platonic idea that any sort of art needs to have a message. Music should "correct any discord" inside us and bring harmony into our souls. Composers of the last 500 years have certainly used music more as a means of portraying reality rather than delivering a sermon or giving us inner peace. That way, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring can be a "beautiful" piece insofar as it represents well the reality that he's trying to portray, much like a painting of a battle can be beautiful, though its subject is grotesque.

Harmonic Emancipation and Its Dissenters

"The forces that ultimately to lead to the breakdown of the tonal system, or at least the end of its dominance of Western music traditions, may be viewed as the logical extension of the direction in which music had been developing since the beginning of the nineteenth century.... We might also note that melody was gradually released from its traditional harmonic associations, with the result that melodic and harmonic successions began to exist in their own coloristic right." (Tonal Harmony with an Introduction to Twentieth-Century Music, Kostka and Payne, "Tonal Harmony in the Late Nineteenth Century.")

Think of it this way - if you set your goal as beating the fastest record for the 100-meter dash, the logical conclusion is that you want to run the race as close to zero seconds as possible. The "breakdown of the tonal system" is the "logical extension" of the trajectory of music in the 19th century, whose goal had been taking harmony to the most emancipated place possible. Schoenberg himself talks about this and certainly views the atonal system in these very terms.

But there is always a reaction away from any dominant movement. (No puns intended.) Practically all the music that is not in the German tradition of increasing chromaticism can be categorized as a vague return to modality. Kostka and Payne even note this. Think for a moment.

The French school was dominated by Debussy and Ravel in the turn of the century and the first half of it. They worked, primarily, in the whole tone scale and the Dorian mode. (Check out Jeau D'eau, for instance.) Olivier Messiaen was also a central figure and not entirely atonal. He worked in "modes of limited transposition". Even in a piece like La Transfiguration, he wanders far, but never entirely away, from E major throughout the entire work.

The English school was dominated by figures like Vaughn Williams, Holst, Walton, and Britten. Look how much of their music employs the Church modes. (The Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis comes to mind immediately, but so does Jupiter, Somerset Rhapsody, any of the choral music of Walton and Britten and showing up prominently elsewhere.)

The Russian school is enormous and odd. But look at Petrushka by Stravinsky, Scheharazade by Rimsky-Korsakov. When not gushing with Wagnerian chromaticism (like Rachminanov) or verging on atonal (like everyone else), even the Russians resort to static harmonies and "tonal" centers without dominant chords.

Modality permeates music that is not along this central trajectory (as at least Schoenberg thought it) of Classical music. It seems that Classical music is obsessed with looking back at two things - primarily, the Classical age of drama (like the Monodists and Wagner) and, secondarily, the folk and Church music that provides a strangely removed flavor.

A gorgeous, concrete example of all this is the Somerset Rhapsody by Gustav Holst (previously mentioned). Check it out - he stays almost entirely in modes (Dorian, Aeolian, Lydian) with a few splashes of harmonic color. It's peaceful and almost fairy-tale-esque in tone. Then, for whatever reason, Holst decides to go Wagnerian (listen to the chromatic scales in the violas and woodwinds) at 6:15 in the recording until it fades away about halfway through the seventh minute. A wonderful example of the conflict present in most 19th and 20th century composers between a look back at modality and a look forward toward harmonic emancipation.

Bach and Newton

"In August 1750, just days after Bach's death, Agricola wrote:

He [Finazzi] denies his [Bach's] music the effect of pleasure for the listener who would not savor such difficult harmony. Yet, assuming the harmonies [that is, musical structure] of this great man were so complex that they would not always achieve the intended result, they nevertheless serve for the connoisseur's genuine delight. Not all learned people are able to understand a Newton, but those who have progressed far enough in the profound science so they can understand him will find the greatest gratification and real benefit in reading his work."

("Prologue: Bach and the Notion of 'Musical Science'". Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician. Christoph Wolff.)

Several interesting things here - the fact that Wolff feels that "harmonies" and "musical structure" are somewhat synonymous in the 18th century German tongue (drawing any tempting conclusions would be unsubstantiated conjecture on my part) and also the fact that, were it a reference to what we'd actually call Bach's harmonies, we wouldn't think of them as complex at all. We've been acclimatized in that respect. If it's a broader "musical structure" that's so complex (such as setting a poetic German text to 9 part choral harmony and two separate orchestras), I see what they mean. Finazzi's still wrong, though. Bach's congregations didn't seem to mind his "difficult harmony" so much, after all.

Running a Race in Zero Seconds

"Wagner's art recognises only superlatives, and a superlative has no future. It is an end, and not a beginning."

Edward Hanslick (1825-1904), in: Pleasants, ed., Hanslick's Music Criticism (1950).

True, but slightly misplaced. Hanslick may have thought Wagner was a superlative, but he was only the necessary comparative to Schoenberg, who was the true superlative. Taking a tonal center away from a piece as a whole was Wagner's subversion in the Tristan prelude. But taking it away at any and every given moment was the next, logical step. Perhaps another quote is appropriate about Wagner, then.

"Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches -- he has made music sick. I postulate this viewpoint: Wagner's art is diseased." Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Fall Wagner (1866).

Classical Drama, Classical Opera

An interesting quote from Music With Ease:

"It is a far cry from the date of the first extant opera to the music-dramas of Richard Wagner. The opera, as regards its essential form, is old enough. [T]he Greeks knew it, and it was probably well established before their time. In the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, there was musical recitation, and the choruses were sung in unison. But only a measure or two of this ancient music remains to show what it was like. It is to the age of the Renaissance, with its attempts to revive old-time Greek art, that we owe the first specimens of what we mow understand as opera."

Something Is Rotten

A brief thought experiment.

If you were a lover of Classical music in the 1850s, what kind of music were you most excited to hear? What composers dominated the scene? Strauss' waltzes were so popular the Queen of England requested he come and play them live for her himself. Dvorak's 60th birthday was celebrated as a national holiday and there were banquets in his honor. While he was still alive. We're even told people were amazed to find out, thanks to Mendelssohn, that J. S. Bach, from 120 years back, was a serious composer.

If you are a lover of Classical music now, what kind of music are you most excited to hear? What composers dominate the scene?

Dead composers. Dead music.

Exulting in the Three-Fold God

One of the most beloved descriptions of the Trinity by all of its students is Gregory Nazianzus':

"No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the Splendour of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Them than I am carried back to the One. When I think of any One of the Three I think of Him as the Whole.... When I contemplate the Three together, I see but one torch, and cannot divide or measure out the Undivided Light."

Many things have been compared to this dizzying concept of triunity—a family, mosaics, an irreducibly complex biological system—but what better picture of it in corporate worship is there than polyphony? One often hears that, in polyphony, each voice remains independent throughout. Quite the contrary, no voice could be removed from polyphonic music without the rest of the voices losing their aesthetic appeal. The same is not true in homophonic music, where there is simply a melody and chords whose presence or exact manifestation is optional. Polyphony exults in the distinguishability but inseparability of its voices. That same desire to bask in the simultaneous unity and diversity of the Trinity in Nazianzus is present in John Dunstable. Anyone, be he Protestant, Roman Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox, wishing to see an exuberant understanding of the Trinity spill into aesthetics need look no farther than the Burgundian music of the Middle Ages. This is music "exulting in the three-fold God".

Good Advice from the Episcopalians (of 1940)

For being the product of a church characterized now by both of these errors, the Handbook for Clergymen, Organist, and Choir Directors accompanying the Hymnal (1940) offers some great advice.

"Those in charge of the music in the small church need to beware of the sin of carelessness. Those with richer resources need to beware lest they become concerned with a 'good show' and forget that the music of the Church is an offering to God, and that its primary purpose is to convey the Word of God and to contribute to the corporate worship of the congregation."

Those are two of the best criteria for judging both music and its performance in church: (1) conveying (I'd get picky and say "representing", but okay) the Word of God and (2) contributing to the corporate worship of the congregation. Especially (2) is an excellent wording - it doesn't mean that all music has to be congregational, but all music has to contribute to the corporate worship of the congregation. This includes a trained choir and the organ playing prelude music. That's appropriate, only insofar as it enhances the congregation's worship.

So, then, what culture does the Church belong to?

"Culture is not a shadowy something existing in secret 'behind' its 'manifestations' in language, rites, and disciplines. Culture is a people organized and united by its language, rites, rules, and mechanisms of enforcement.

So also is the covenant.

So also is the Church."

(Against Christianity, Peter Leithart, pg. 51.)

Penderecki on a Return to Tradition

"The avant-garde gave one an illusion of universalism. The musical world of Stockhausen, Nono, Boulez and Cage was for us, the young hemmed in by the aesthetics of socialist realism, then the official canon in our country, a liberation. It opened a new reality, a new vision of art and of the world. I was quick to realize, however, that this novelty, this experimentation and formal speculation, is more destructive than constructive; I realized the Utopian quality of its Promethean tone. I was saved from the avant-garde snare of formalism by a return to tradition." - Krzysztof Penderecki

Here is a link to probably Penderecki's most famous composition, which, I assume, is one of his more avant-garde. Thanks to Justin Jaramillo for the quote. (Who doesn't, for the record, necessarily condone anything on this blog.)

Martin Luther on Josquin

"In 1538, Martin Luther proclaimed that 'Josquin is the master of the notes. They must do as he will;s as for other composers, they have to do as the notes will.'" (A History of Western Music, B., G., P., pg. 203-204)

How Not to Argue about Church Music

There are a lot of common avenues of arguing about Church music that I think are seriously flawed and particularly destructive because they may be arguing for the right music for the wrong reasons. Here I'm simply outlining the ways I think are particularly unwise—perhaps in another place I can begin to outline the ways I think one ought to do it. (The bold affirms what I do not.)

1. Church music must be old. I've addressed this a bit already, but let me restate here. All music is, in a fundamental sense, traditional. It simply depends on what tradition you're plugging yourself into. Any contemporary Christian artists or praise choruses are doing just that—plugging themselves into musical traditions. Similarly, it did not take a thick layer of dust on Bach's manuscripts for his music to become traditional. His music was traditional from the moment he wrote it. It was in the tradition of Praetorius, Schütz, Pachelbel et al.

This is also a theological point. Most famously, but certainly not the only instance of it, Psalm 98 enjoins us to sing a new song to the Lord. More than simply citing chapter and verse is involved here, though. The Biblical principle is that of the Davidic liturgical revolution, where David took the dust-gathering Levitical traditions and started improvising. Peter Leithart in From Silence to Song points out that David seemed to herald in a special liturgical period, where he and the musicians could worship with the Ark of the Covenant face to face. If the Davidic liturgical revolution took place under these circumstances, how much more should music be jubilant, noisy, and, above all, new now that the veil has been torn?

2. Church music must be complex. The voice of the Church past speaks out strongly against this one. That's not an infallible argument, but nonetheless one difficult to reckon with. There is nothing complex about Gregorian chant or a Lutheran or Calvinist hymn or Anglican chant. If you're calling yourself a traditionalist, this is probably not the argument you want to employ. It's also important to remember that contemporary music is difficult for many people to sing along with for a reason—the rhythm tends to be devilishly hard. None of this is to say that Church music can't be complex. The really complex thing here is the issue, not the music.

3. Church music must be Classical. Sed contra. This is one I particularly take issue with. I would say the opposite—Church music needs to be not Classical. Remember what Classical means. Classical doesn't just connote "older", like classic rock connotes Led Zepplin (old, ha, ha, ha), but it also connotes the real Classical era, the era of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. It's no coincidence that these men are one of the first recorded instances of art for art's sake and the use of the stage rather than the altar or the hearth as the background for music. Nor is it a coincidence that the movement that molded the direction Classical music would go was a group of Renaissance men who thought music needed to be less sacred and more like, of all things, the era of Classical drama. More about that here.

Think about it this way. If you have a problem with taking the devil-worship words out of a metal song and putting in great theology, then you should also consider there's a similar (maybe not so drastic) problem with Mozart's Requiem. Think about it—the same compositional techniques Mozart used for his definitively secular symphony he is now using for his ostensibly sacred requiem. If you think that simply slipping in good theology (well, even that's debatable) on top of secular music is in general a bad principle, then Classical music is precisely what you don't want your Church music to be.

This also gets into how you define Classical music, of course, but I think it's vital to understand it as a secular project, not a sacred one. So, this ends up going both ways—music that is truly sacred can't be considered Classical music. This isn't just an arbitrarily subversive category. Church music does need to be culture defining, not culture defined. It necessitates careful distinctions, and the clearest one is between High music that is sacred and High music that is secular. If this involves declaring that BWV 244 is not Classical music in the normal sense, oh well. It's a distinction that still needs to be made.

I'd also like to address, at some point, the concept of music as a mood enhancer. This should be enough for now.

What a Classical Education Does To Your Musical Appreciation

"Peter, she felt sure, could hear the whole intricate pattern, every part separately and simultaneously, each independent and equal, separate but inseparable, moving over and under and through, ravishing heart and mind together." (Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers.)

A convicting quote. He's apparently, by the way, listening to Bach.

"Whole Meaning Lies in the Words"

"'Uncle' sang as peasants sing, with the full and naive conviction that the whole meaning of a song lies in the words, that the tune comes of itself and exists only to give measure to the verse, apart from which it is nothing. Consequently this unconsidered tune, like the song of a bird, had an extraordinary charm." (Tolstoy, War and Peace.)

Live Performance and Praetorius' Polychorality

"Praetorius' music stems from a tradition of congregational involvement which is at the core of Lutheranism. Although his output includes some of the most elaborate sacred repertoire of the time, most of it is skilfully written to allow for the inclusion of the various musical groups that took part in music within the church: town waits, school children, the Collegium Musicum of amateur musicians, and the professional Kantorei. ...In addtion, Praetorius offers advice regarding the displacement of the musicians, who were frequently positioned around the church, especially in galleries. This basic polychorality allows the music to envelop the congregation in the act of worship." - Paul McCreesh and Robin A. Leaver

Schoenberg on Emancipation and History

"The procedure [of the "atonal" school] is based upon my theory of 'the emancipation of the dissonance.' Dissonances, according to this theory, are merely more remote consonances in the series of overtones. Though the resemblance of the more remote overtones to the fundamental tone gradually diminishes, their comprehensibility is equal to the comprehensibility of the consonances. Thus to the ear of today their sense-interrupting effect has disappeared. Their emancipation is as justified as the emancipation of the minor third was in former times."

(Arnold Schoenberg, Structural Functions of Harmony, from "Apollonian Evaluation of a Dionysian Epoch".)

Michael Praetorius

Schoenberg on Pre-Bach

"To base the teaching of counterpoint on Palestrina is as stupid as to base the teaching of medicine on Aesculapius. Nothing could be more remote from contemporary ideas, structurally and ideologically, than the style of this composer. Besides, his contrapuntal technique...does not demonstrate the more difficult problems and their solutions discovered only shortly after him." (Some Aspect of Counterpoint in Selected Works of Arnold Schoenberg, Boris William Pillin.)

It may be chronological snobbery, but it's an excellent example of a common, understated attitude amongst academia of (at least) the early 20th century toward Renaissance polyphony.

Live Performance, Part I

Counterpoint comes from two Latin words—contra, meaning "against" or "opposite", and punctus, meaning "point". A punctus was the early ancestor of what we'd call a "note". Placing notes against or in opposition to each other was, in some ways, a visual expression of the idea of melodies that play off each other. Probably the earliest known example we have of counterpoint in this sense was a style that originated around the 11th and 12th century known as organum, where a chant melody formed a static baseline for several more florid melodies that were placed "opposite" each other.

A good example of this is Viderunt Omnes by Perotin. When listening to this, the human ear naturally tends to want to hear the top notes being sung. The rest is secondary. What doesn't come through in recorded performances is the fact that these melodies are constantly switching places, intertwining, popping on top of and dipping below each other. You can see a copy of the score of Viderunt Omnes here. If you follow along with the music, you can see this happening. But you still can't hear it happening. In a recording, like the YouTube link above, it simply sounds like one guy is singing the entire melody, when it's really it's a motley affair, the contribution of several different singers.

In a live performance, things are different. Due to the physical presence of the singers and their distance from each other, you can hear different melodies coming from different places in the room. The result is that you hear X melody coming first from your left, and then, suddenly, the same melody X from your right, while the guy singing on your left is now singing Y melody. And then it switches again. The texture is an enormous—perhaps a fundamental—part of understanding the music. It's something you won't ever get in recorded performance.

This isn't just true of Perotin. It's true of many pre- and post-Reformation composers, including Dufay, Josquin, Palestrina and Byrd, perhaps to a lesser extent, and the Lutherans through Bach. The physical placement of the musicians is totally essential to understanding counterpoint. In many ways, without live performance, we understand the punctus part of counterpoint, but not the contra part.

Contra gives us words in English like "contrarian", "counterclockwise", and "counteract". But contra has some more delicate connotations than simply "against" or "opposite". In Vergil's Aeneid, for instance, he constantly uses the word in his conversations. Sic Venus et Veneris contra sic filius orsus is literally, "Thus spoke Venus, and the son of Venus began opposite." Another denotation is "in turn". The word contra adds a back-and-forth dimension to the conversation. They're speaking contra in the same way you might throw the baseball contra somebody. You're throwing the ball back and forth, opposite each other.

Applying that back to music, the contra of counterpoint is the playful, conversational element of it that can't be expressed through Bose speakers. Your boom box can only give a slight impression of distances between singers and the delineation of lines. A CD can't really express how the singers are interacting and jumping on top of each other and creating notes that are in response to other notes. That's why counterpoint really necessitates live performance. Being present while different melodies come from different parts of the room and hit your ear at different places will only really give you the idea of a conversation between parts.

Atonality, the Logical Conclusion

"Thus Schoenberg, as well as many of his disciples, regarded atonality and the dominance of chromaticism as a logical, if not inevitable, historical phenomenon." (Some Aspect of Counterpoint in Selected Works of Arnold Schoenberg, Boris William Pillin.)

This much one can accept—the question is, the logical conclusion of what?

Bach's Classical Education

The subject matter [of Bach's schooling] included Latin exercises based on Reyher's Dialogi seu Colloquia puerilia and beginning Greek reading exercises...Leonhard Hutter's Compendium locorum theologicorum, a systematic summary of Christian doctrine derived from the Bible and early Lutheran theological writings, as well as the biographies of Roman leaders by Roman historian Cornelius Nepos and letters by Cicero...historical writings of Roman author Curtius Rufus; Idea historiae universalis, an influential book on world history and geography by the seventeenth-century scholar Johannes Buno; and the latin comedies of Terence. Arithmetic was taught in all classes. (Christoph Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician.)

Bach's Raw Material

"It's often said that because Bach requested 16 singers for his choral establishment, he must have wanted at least that number for the St Matthew Passion. But that's a selective reading of the appropriate document because he goes on to say quite specifically that the reason he needs this number is because he has to provide music for services in four churches, each with very different musical requirements. Bach is very frank when he talks about his singers. He says he's usually got four good singers who can sing his more elaborate music, for who are a bit rough but who he can work with most of the time, and several who can just about manage a chorale if he's lucky. The idea that he had 16 virtuoso singers who could sing all his most demanding music goes against all the evidence.... We have to get ourselves out of the mentality of a genius working for posterity and realise that at the end of the day Bach was also working as the head of a school's music department!"

"Bach was above all a pragmatist. He had a small team of more or less talented individuals, but they were trained by one composer in one style over a long period of time. Of course there were moments of frustration, but the image of Bach writing music way beyond the abilities of his players and singers is patronising and far from the truth. Leipzig was no provincial backwater, but the very epicentre of a progressive Lutheranism which proved the most fertile ground for Bach's musical genius."

- Paul McCreesh

Music and the Public Square

While I am the last person to have an unnatural desire to apply Marxist historicism to everything I can get my hands on, it's worth noting that Classical music is, in much of its history, a matter of social distinction. You go to Classical music concerts if you're rich and you can pay for it. These boundaries are largely destroyed in the advent of commercial recording, but even now they still exist. If you want the real taste of Classical music, the live performance, the aspect of the connoisseur, you must go rub shoulders with the city councilmen and the local music theory faculty at a live performance. Maybe your dentist, your family doctor, your French teacher. Chances of seeing the plumber there? Adjuster? Not really that high. It's a bit like golf, but worse.

Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily. But it is worth noting that it can be fallacious when people formulate bombastic apologiai for Classical music, trying to win "back" the younger generation and the majority of people to the aesthetically superior form of music. The problem is, Classical music has never had a wide audience and, quite possibly due to commercial availability, never wider than today. It isn't a matter of getting Classical music back to a position of wide-spread appeal, since it may not have had it in the first place.

On the other hand, not all Classical music is like this. It doesn't seem likely that you're going to hear Brahms' 2nd piano concerto if you're a 19th century Dickensesque inn keeper. It does seem considerably more likely that you hear a Bach cantata if you're an 18th century inn keeper. Bach's music was music that was heard in church and, while, at its more corrupt moments, the Church's liturgy has been a matter of class, music of the church is music that is heard by all the congregation. And, in early Lutheran Protestantism more than anywhere else, perhaps, the music is informed (but not dictated) by the congregants' needs and their level of musical education. These early Protestant churches love congregation-lead music.

I've talked before about the tune that most of us sing O Sacred Head Now Wounded to—it was apparently a German love song. Both his predecessors and Bach himself took this tune and set it many different ways. (And, so did a few composers who came after him, most famously Brahms.) This is an example of the composers of High music lifting folk and popular tunes out of the culture and implementing them in a religious context. I think it would be a little unrealistic simply to attribute that to some already-existing quality in the folk song that merited its use in worship. Bach et al were, to some degree, trying to teach and edify by using something that would be, to most of the congregation, familiar.

Bach is an excellent example, but he's not the only example. As I've mentioned before, Josquin and Dufay do this with the famous tune L'homme arme, just barely leaving the tune recognizable but ubiquitous in their Missae L'homme arme. There's even a rumor that the tune Pange Lingua, to which is set St. Thomas' famous poem, was in fact a Roman marching song.

But does that mean that modern Church music composers should take a "melody" (coughcoughcough) from Coldplay or Regina Spektor and use it as the basis of a Kyrie? Yyyeah, no. That's dubious, to say the least. Not that I have anything against Coldplay or Regina Spektor (that would be appropriate in this post), but the issue is one of apples and oranges. Bach and Josquin were working on generations upon generations of people who had built up a Christo-centric culture. The music that came out of that culture was certainly not sinless and certainly not totally consistent with a Christian worldview. But the music didn't clash with Christian doctrine. Today, we have a totally different field to play on. Inevitably, a song (regardless of the ethos of its authors) that hits the top of the commercial music list is going to clash with the catechesis of Christian worship. That doesn't mean it's not going to work 100% of the time, but it does mean that there are many more issues to weigh in the balance and many more insidious cultural connotations to deal with. Bach and Josquin had a level playing field—they weren't in a battle with the majority of the culture. We are.

When the music of a culture is defined by the music of its Church (I don't think it ever isn't), when, in short, at the center of the public square is the music of worship, the effects on folk and pop music will be drastic. When this happens in Christian Churches, and we all come to hear, worship with, love, and understand the High music of the church, the gap between the aesthetically richest 10% and the aesthetically poorest 10% will be narrowed. But, as usual, it doesn't work to regulate that. It has to happen organically, over the course of generations and academic years and, uh, counterpoint classes. But then we won't be far from the sort of culture that writes quodlibets for a pastime. Everyone will be edified, musically, by being immersed in music they have, over time, come to understand. The give-and-take between the music of the Church and the music of the culture will be such as was not really possible for the majority of the history of Classical music.

G. K. Chesterton on Education

“Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.”

– G. K. Chesterton

How To Worship

Oscar Peterson's Easter Suite

Plundering the Egyptians or Hanging Out in the Wrong Part of Philistia?

Olivier Messiaen

The following article I wrote is taken from Quo Vadis, a Catholic periodical written by the students and faculty of Regina Coeli Academy. Reproduced with the permission of Quo Vadis.

Many of the Catholics spearheading a full return to the Tridentine Mass in America have started to meet during the summer at a Sacred Music Colloquium. This year they're meeting at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. The Colloquium, on its website at MusicaSacra.com, points out that "[A]s Pope Benedict XVI and the Second Vatican Council have emphasized, [Gregorian chant] is integral to Catholic liturgical life and should be heard and experienced with wide participation in every parish." The weekend is spent educating congregants, choirmasters, and organists to read, become facile with, and themselves to be able to teach Gregorian chant to their respective parishes.

But, the average layman attending the conference will be in for a totally unexpected ride. After having heard the sublime and accessible (or so he might think) Gregorian chant during the Mass on Sunday morning, he may hear this piece, or one like it, for the postlude. The chords strike us as dissonant, ominous, jarring, angular, formless, arbitrary—all of which are nice for the background while Voldemort is doing damage with his magic wand, but what are they doing here, you ask, in liturgy? And what does this piece have to do with its title, "Dieu parmi nous", which is "God with us"?

Meet Olivier Messiaen. I'm 17 and he died the year I was born. He's recent. Messiaen (if you want to learn how to pronounce it, I recommend Mrs. Thompson's excellent French class) was a modern Classical composer. But I seriously doubt this is Classical music the likes of which you've heard before. In fact, I bet you haven't heard this kind of music anywhere before. Messiaen is unprecedented. There's no one like him. He's right there, teaching Pierre Boulez, hanging out with Schoenberg and Webern, and being one of the most popular modern Classical composers (which isn't saying much). Yet there's one strange thing about him that makes him totally different from everyone around him.

Messiaen claimed that his audience didn't really understand his music. And he wasn't just being your typical pouty artist complaining about how misunderstood he is. He said his audience didn't really understand his music because they didn't have even a basic grasp of Catholic theology. Yes, that's right, Olivier Messiaen was a devout Roman Catholic. "The illumination of the theological truths of the Catholic faith is the first aspect of my work, the noblest, and no doubt the most useful and valuable".

Nor was he (at least, by the end of his life) an overly-mystical, pagan-mixed, post-modern liberal Catholic who uses religion as an excuse to look more profound. (I'm thinking of someone like John Tavener, an English composer who converted to Eastern Orthodoxy...that is, before he converted to Hinduism.) Messiaen was a Thomas-Aquinas-saturated composer. His music, he claimed, dripped with Catholic theology and no secular audience could put a towel on it to dry it off. Of course, many of his (secular) friends, wet blankets that they were, liked calling his music "mystical". But he corrected them. He said his output was, "above all theological (and not mystical as the majority of my audience think)".

So, then, why does his music sound so strange? Why so surreal? And, if he thought his music really was an illumination of Catholic doctrine, how come he seems to be confusing the matter more with his really weird music? I can't claim to have a great answer to any of these questions. But I could draw a helpful analogy, perhaps. Messiaen understands something essential about theology—it's not always comfortable. In that way, he's a lot like another Catholic Thomistic writer, Flannery O'Connor. And, like with her, I'll warn you at the outset. Enter this strange world of theology-soaked art with caution. Those who have a strong, Medieval understanding of the world as a sacramental place know that you can't walk away from a visible means of invisible grace without being radically changed. The same holds true for the music of Messiaen.

This is Messiaen's Chorale of the Holy Mountain from his work "The Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ". It's for a huge choir and a huge orchestra. You'll notice right off the bat that Messiaen has a bunch of strange sounding chords that always resolve to a gorgeous E major chord at the end of every phrase (with two exceptions, when it resolves to an F sharp minor seventh chord, also stunningly beautiful.) It will sound very weird to you at first. But picture what's going on here—the Transfiguration happens on top of a mountain. Music about a mountain should feel very immense and wide. And Messiaen still retains a sharp focus and clarity throughout the entire chorale, sort of like the air at high altitudes. If you think of this as Howard Shore's soundtrack to Lord of the Rings (it does bear some similarities), it might make more sense.

Slightly edgier is this piece "Candor est lucis aeternae" from the same work. Here Messiaen is concentrating on "candor", which is a bright-sounding and bright-meaning word. If you listen closely (which you must, if you want to get anything out of this music), you'll hear the altos in the background singing the words. Everything else is an exuberant and dizzying frenzy of shininess. If you saw the old BBC Tailor of Gloucester with Ian Holmes, this may remind you of Christmas.

Now, why am I doing all this? Am I or are those crazies at the Sacred Music Colloquium suggesting that a return to Gregorian Chant and Palestrina entails the use of this kind of stuff? Messiaen may have been a Catholic, you say, but that doesn't excuse him from writing some ugly music.

Well, anyone who has read Shakespeare and certainly anyone who likes reading Shakespeare will tell you that you can't read Shakespeare and get it in the first 15 minutes. I had trouble keeping awake through the majority of MacBeth. And it's supposed to be riveting. But, of course, those who like Shakespeare, myself included, know it's an acquired taste. Like blue cheese. Like Messiaen. You have to read lots of Shakespeare and take it on faith that it's worth your time. Messiaen is obviously not as reputed as Shakespeare, but I'd still say he's worth your time. This music won't make sense to you the first time you listen to it, most likely. Okay. It didn't to me either. Keep trying. It's rewarding.