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".

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.)

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.

Musical Education and Presuppositions

Lewis' quotation should have made the thoughtful, modern reader suspicious. If we were to educate our children, as Plato suggests, to have a specific emotional reaction to a waterfall or a Beethoven symphony demanded by the intrinsic value of the waterfall or the Beethoven symphony, we would be presupposing and imposing a conception of what is good, true, or beautiful on our children rather than educating them generally and allowing them to decide according to their own aesthetic intuitions. In imposing our cultural standards on our children, one might say, we are taking away a facet of their free will, and this, according to fellows like Kant and Locke, would be holding their individuality in contempt and thwarting their freedom to make choices based off who they are, rather than choices based off what their parents want them to be.

This sort of reasoning is primarily effeminate in its refusal to adhere to absolute values. To say that there is an absolutely wicked act or an absolutely magnanimous act is to suppose that, regardless of what other opinions are, the act is either wicked or magnanimous absolutely. It is not a matter for you to decide - it simply is. Hitler was a bad person. So far, my ostensibly effeminate audience would agree. But if I were to take this absolute truth to its obvious conclusion - that anyone who says otherwise is wrong (and is either ignorant and bad himself) - my audience would squirm and backpedal and qualify. No one would suppose that aesthetic tastes (especially musical tastes) are so clear-cut as moral judgments. But just because the path to adherence to an aesthetic standard is hard to follow does not mean that the path does not exist or should be abandoned.

This sort of reasoning is also foolish in its blind hypocrisy. Fish can't walk, donkeys can't fly, and men can't stop presupposing a conception of what is good, true, and beautiful. These cultural impositions on our children are always present, and never more than today. In the pedagogical act of refusing to draw a judgment on a waterfall or a Beethoven symphony for the sake of not imposing cultural, aesthetic standards, a teacher imposes the cultural, aesthetic standard that there are no cultural aesthetic standards. This is what he teaches, unwittingly or not, to his students with his ambivalence.

Musical education, like all education, always presupposes a conception of value. A student of Derrida or Nietzsche (as most modern educators are) would probably tell you there is no intrinsic value in art or music, which is, if nothing else is, a value judgment on the art or music. But a Medieval education presupposes that mimesis of the Trinity is always intrinsically good, true, and beautiful, which is why counterpoint, symmetry, and the antiphon demand a certain emotional response.

Simson on Nietzsche and Art

Von Simson also mentions, "for Nietzsche art is a lie, the consequence of the artist's heroic will to 'flee from "truth"' and to create the 'illusion' that alone makes life livable. The Middle Ages perceived beauty as the 'splendor veritatis,' the radiance of truth; they perceived the image not as illusion but as revelation. The modern artist is free to create; we demand of him only that he be true to himself. The medieval artist was committed to a truth that transcended human existence. Those who looked at his work judged it as an image of that truth, hence the medieval tendency to praise or condemn a work of art in terms of the ultimates of religious experience."(Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture & the Medieval Concept of Order, pg. xx.)

Doubtless we are picturing that a revolution in High music toward Medieval ideology would turn us into pious composers that only wrote pious-sounding pieces, and consequently, boring-sounding pieces. But isn't Flannery O'Connor a student of Maritain? Isn't she admittedly in her writing creating a mimesis of "the ultimates of religious experience"? If dissonance is possible from a Thomistic perspective in writing, then it is possible from a Thomistic perspective in music.