In the Looking Glass of Its Art

"Artists and writers are the most important conduit of worldviews. As philosopher William Barrett wrote, an age sees itself 'in the looking glass of its art.' Anyone who wants to "understand the times and know what to do" (1 Chron. 12:32) must learn to interpret the images in that looking glass." Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo

Attention Span in Music

If you listen to a symphony or a polyphonic mass, there are two levels at which you can understand the music:

(1) euphonically, that is, understanding it based on its good-sounding-ness

(2) formally, that is, according to its set-up.

A good symphony and a good mass can be understood on both levels. In fact, it's really not understood until it's understood on both levels. And with especially good symphonies and masses, it will be difficult to understand it as (1) without understanding it as (2). A really good composer is not obscure about the formal beauty of his piece. He draws you into its formal beauty, luring you in with its pleasant sound.

Take Beethoven. His music is engaging at any given moment, but it's difficult not to understand the overall drama of the sonata form present in the work. Beethoven is a Herodotus or a J. K. Rowling. The moment you're listening to is exciting, but he draws you into the bigger picture, the garden, wilderness, and garden-city of a symphonic first movement. Beethoven, good story teller that he is, lengthens your attention span.

Think of it this way—for a three-year-old, as he listens to Lord of the Rings being read to him, chances are he doesn't understand the big picture: the quest to destroy the Ring, Sauron trying to thwart Gondor, Sauraman, Rohan. But that doesn't mean that he can't feel the excitement during Helm's Deep. It doesn't stop him from looking like a stone when Frodo's finger's getting ripped off with teeth.

A twelve-year-old, on the other hand, is likely to understand the big picture. It isn't simply an instantaneous enjoyment of the moment that keeps him going. It's the unresolved tension way back in Book One that holds an inexorable grasp on his attention while he's reading Book Five. If you reflect for a moment, you'll realize it's really quite amazing that something he might have read three months ago is informing how and why he reads right now.

But why does the knowledge that The Ring Must Be Destroyed really matter that much? Couldn't it be that three-fourths of the way through the book, Frodo slips and falls, gashes his head, drowns in a river, and the ring gets forgotten for another thousand years? No. This couldn't happen any more than Sauron dying at the end from food poisoning. It's because the twelve-year-old recognizes form that he knows that none of these things would ever happen. That's why we feel gypped when an author pulls a deus ex machina. That's why everyone hated the last episode of Lost.

People recognize the form of stories. They know certain things are in the realm of possibility, and certain things aren't. Within that realm, what the author does is exciting. The bad guys might just win - that's in the realm - but the piece might also end on a picardy third, so to speak.

Which brings me back to my original point. In most cases (and, I grant, not all), the reason someone gets bored with a symphony is not because the symphony is boring, but because he is a boring person. He does not recognize a form. He's like someone who doesn't appreciate an exciting story when he hears one. But we must have pity on this sort of person and try to educate him to enjoy the tension of a story.

That's why Beethoven lengthens your attention span. If you recognize the form, if you understand what's in the realm of possibility and what isn't, you'll know that the symphony has its natural crescendo, climax, and resolution, just like a story. And if you realize that, you're the twelve-year-old of music, now, no longer the two-year-old. You don't simply have an instantaneous enjoyment of the music. What happened in the first few bars is informing how you see the end of the movement.

Why is that so hard? What I read a month ago at the beginning of War and Peace sticks in my head word for word as I read about characters at the end of the novel. But I have a hard time identifying a simple tune that shows up at the beginning of a piece six minutes later. Why is that?

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.)

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.

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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?

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.

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

The Musically Gifted, Part II: How About Classical Education

The whole mission of Magister Perotinus could be summed up in those two words—classical education. What brings together the hodgepodge of posts on this blog is the idea that music is an essential ingredient of paideia and must be treated as such.

As I've mentioned before, this is the reverse of our usual categories. We think of music as an art derived and governed by certain scientific principles. It's all about overtones and neurology, but with the "passion" and "human ingenuity" that only our artistic sides can add to the music. The classical model is the reverse of this. Music is a part of the quadrivium, or four-way intersection, in Latin, of, mathematics, geometry, astronomy, and music. These are the four liberal sciences. The three liberal arts are grammar, logic, and rhetoric, forming the trivium (yep, three-way intersection). The arts (or, perhaps we could, as I mentioned earlier, think of them as "skills" as well as "arts") are like a template. Grammar isn't necessarily a study in itself (unless you're talking about syntax and construction, which is a different thing). You study the grammar of several different subjects, like geometry—theorems, common notions, axioms, that sort of thing—or like what we might call general science—Na is sodium, the Fall of Constantinople was in 1453, and combustion has something to do with oxygen.

What's the equivalent for music? Studying the grammar of music would be gaining a basic knowledge of musical nomenclature. Reading music, learning your dominants and submedians, plagals and deceptives, and fun stuff like that. The logic would begin to delve into the reasons behind these things, like harmonic and structural analysis, polyphony in general, counterpoint analysis, substitutions, etc. And the rhetoric is the application and outgrowth of that—now write me a fugue.

What we're seeing is a radically different picture than what we're used to. Many parents might assume that giving their kids a classical education in music necessitated them throwing their kids into piano lessons or clarinet lessons where they'd learn how to play piano or clarinet. Somewhere in there, they'd learn some "ear training" and "music theory". Just so they know how to play. Obviously, we don't necessarily want our kids to become music majors.

But this isn't what the classical model is talking about when they speak of musical education. If you're musically educated, you're educated to write music, not just perform it. Or, to put it more bluntly—you think you're an educated person? Then, you should be writing music. Crank out a fugue!

They will probably say I set my sites too high. But this is the goal of Magister Perotinus. A restoration of composition as a part of education. Take an example like the New Saint Andrews College undergraduate degree. My suggestion is this—if they really take their higher education seriously, they should be aiming towards giving every graduate the ability to write a good Bach-style chorale. Why? Because this is a part of what they're trying to do. This is classical education.

And, as always is the proviso, this is also generational. My hope is not to see kids five years from now at some higher education college writing fugues as an undergraduate requirement. But I think my great, great grand-children should be doing that.

Why this is, I think, necessary both from a theological and aesthetic perspective, I'll have to take up some other time. This is long enough.

Secularism Says Achievement, Not Genius

"Genius is nothing you can be born with. No one is born with it. Not Mozart, not Picasso, not Tolstoy. In any field, world-class achievement demands at least 10,000 hours of practice. According to Daniel J. Levitin in This Is Your Brain on Music, dozens of cognition studeies have produced the same result: geniuses practice more. Neural pathways require repeated stimulation to attain a 'genius' level of mastery. The neurons must be stimulated and restimulated, over and again." ("My Brain on My Mind" from "The American Scholar", by Priscilla Long, Vol. 79, No. I)

High Music and Folk Music, Part I

Johannes Tinctoris, in his treatise Concerning the Skill of Counterpoint, begins with a quote from Horace's Ars Poetica:

"Scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons." That is, to understand or to have knowledge (sapere) is the first principle and the fountain (principium et fons) of writing well (scribendi recte).

It's worth noting that Tinctoris is drawing a pretty clear corollary between the skill of poetry (ars poetica) and the skill of counterpoint (ars contrapuncti). He's importing a principle from the one for the other so he can explain to his reader the difference between just scribendum (writing) and scribendum recte (writing well). The difference is sapere.

Understanding this in cultural context is important. In the 15th century, counterpoint is the not-uncertain capital of the Church. The French chansons, the obvious exception to the vast majority of contrapuntal pieces serving a liturgical function, was stylistically not all that different from the many of the liturgical pieces (take, for example, the similarity between Josquin's Absolon fili mi and his Je ne me puis tenir d'aimer). Obviously, because of the lack of commercialization and the printing press, the audiences to this sort of secular music was extremely limited, probably to nobility and their clergy.

So, when Tinctoris starts off saying that knowledge is key to writing well, he's not talking about writing a nice tune that a troubadour might sing or the latest local hit song in the tavern. Tinctoris is talking about High music. And the first thing he points out about this music that distinguishes it from just any music (hence the recte, "well" qualifying scribendi, "writing") is the possession of a body of facts concerning counterpoint.

Folk music is music centered around the village square or the domestic hearth. In the 20th century, with the rise of commercial music, it may center around the LP or the iPod, but I think it's still the same principle. There's a fundamental difference between this and High music. High music can be described as requiring ars or τεχνη or skill. That skill comes only through a knowledge of the theoretical techniques and musical precedent.

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.

The Abolition of Man

"Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. ...Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting, and hateful. In the Republic, the well-nurtured youth is one 'who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart. All this before he is of an age to reason; so that when Reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her.'" (The Abolition of Man, by C. S. Lewis, from "Men Without Chests", Collier Books, pp. 26-27.)

The Musically Gifted

Evgeny Kissin, 38-year-old concert pianist, debuted with the Ulyanovsk Symphony Orchestra at the age of 10. At 13, he gained international recognition for playing and recording both Chopin’s piano concertos with the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra. He was, reputedly, able to hum a Bach tune along with his sister, who was then playing it on the piano, at the age of 11 months. So much for Wikipedia.

On YouTube, you can look up an interview with Kissin, who relates the instance of receiving a good review from a critic when he was 17, but with this barb at the end of the article - “In general, one gets an impression that, up till now, everything has been easy for Kissin in piano playing - sometimes even too easy. Both pluses and minuses of his art come from that fact. Now we only hear in his playing what comes from his great natural gift. This is, of course, wonderful, but in future, something definitely has to change. What? When? In which way? Everything will depend on that.”

Has everything been easy for Kissin in piano playing? When he was 17, he performed Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with Herbert von Karajan. And this critic expects us to believe it was easy?

As a pianist (one, I might add, who is stunned by Kissin’s playing), I can confidently say that that is rot. My reader may say I’m being arrogant - supposing that my limited piano experience is vaguely the same as this child prodigy. But I still say it’s nonsense - Evgeny Kissin’s “great natural gift” consists of an environment saturated in great music, hours upon hours of disciplined practice at a young age, and memorization skills that were whittled when children eat memorization out of the can with a spoon. To suppose that it has been easy for Kissin, who ostensibly bears an inherent talent, is lazy of the critic and insulting to Kissin. He had to work to get where he was - to credit it to a “great natural gift”, like something he can’t control, represents a pathetic understanding the great pianists of our age.

Again, my reader may think I have turned into a soft-and-squishy liberal politician who can’t stand to see people not on an equal footing. I just can’t stand to be inherently unequal to Evgeny Kissin, so I’m stripping him of his natural talent. The same with Mozart. The same with Bach. Well, no, not exactly.

I’m taking my cues from Bach himself. According to Christoph Wolff, his most recent and well-respected biographer, Bach reputedly said, at the end of his life, that he had worked hard and achieved great things, and that anybody who worked as hard as he had could do the same things. This is coming from the man who is rumored to have improvised, upon request, a 6-part fugue for the prince of Germany. Can you do that? Could you do that if you worked hard?

Well, no, I don’t think you could in all likelihood. But Bach is speaking from a specific culture, and we can’t just throw his words out as the modest and humble words of a “gifted” man. Bach is speaking from a culture that, as Glenn Gould once related, considered family entertainment sitting around the fire and composing a “quodlibet” - a contrapuntal combination of two or more folk tunes into one coherent song. Imagine living in a culture where the standard for a 10-year-old’s entertainment was competing with his Dad at writing counterpoint. Now, would a Bach (or a Mozart) coming out of that culture be such an anomaly? And, yet, we wonder why there aren’t any Bachs or Mozarts today.

Gone is the notion of music as paideia. Music teaches. It educates. It trains. It disciplines. It cultivates. This was the opinion of Plato and Boethius, who both commented on what a sly weapon music was for propagandists. Music is a matter of education - if our children grow up in a culture of Lutheran hymns, quodlibets, Bach chorale preludes, and village performances of coffee cantatas, then what we could call “talented” musicians should pop up everywhere. And they do in Bach’s Europe. A few years after Bach died, Mozart was playing, blindfolded, for the Pope.

People think of “natural talents” in two ways - a gift from God to the child, as if his musical talent were some facet of his soul, sort of like a charismatic’s gift of tongues or prophecy, or perhaps a genetic disposition resulting from a sort of natural selection. The idea here is that many people start with piano lessons, but only the ones who have the right DNA and the parents with the most developed ear and limber fingers really have the chops. And they’re the ones that end up being on stage wowing us with their “talents”.

But, briefly, I’d like to remind those Christians out there who think I’m giving the glory to Kissin’s works rather than God’s grace, that the word the Old Testament uses for “artistic talent” is the same word it uses for “wisdom”. It’s something that God gives but that simultaneously a man acquires. That modern Christians see a tension between God’s grace and man’s works is not an excuse to rush after this idea of “natural gifts” but a clear indication that they need to read Thomas Aquinas, or, even better, John Calvin.

What about Jay Greenberg, the child with no musical parents, who attended Juilliard at 10 years old, composed an internationally broadcasted, fully orchestrated overture for the 9-11 terrorist attacks when he was the same age, and reputedly hears the music in his head - sometimes even several different pieces simultaneously - and writes it down just as he hears it? Surely this is a person with natural gifts and talents from God.

A very simple test can be done that reduces such claims either to absurdity or to a better grasp of reality. Imagine Jay Greenberg, if you would, born into a family of medieval aristocrats in the 14th century. Would he compose music that sounded like Rachmaninoff or Schoenberg or Beethoven or Bach, as he composes today? Or would it sound like Perotinus, Machaut, Dufay, and Josquin? His music bears the distinctive mark of environmentally induced music - the music he hears in his head does not come from some distant, detached spiritual psyche, granted to him by God upon birth. Yet this is seemingly the attitude that we take towards Greenberg.

To paraphrase Glenn Gould again, he also lamented the loss of equality between audience and performer. The performer is now lifted up as a talented genius, but Gould insists that this is the downfall of Classical music. He says,

“I think that what happened in the 18th century, when performers stopped being composers, was the great disaster for music. And I think that to look at it today as an irrevocable move and to say that this is not any longer correctable, that we cannot in fact get back to that glorious time when performers had a composer’s insight into music and when an audience consisted largely of people who performed and composed themselves - that we cannot get back to that is simply to say that music is finished. There are people around who would tell you that music in our purely occidental sense is indeed finished. I don’t share that gloom, I must say, but there’s good cause for it.”

Pärt's Science

Thomas More's quote spoke of music becoming increasingly able to stir the emotions it was trying to produce in the listener. It's fascinating that Paul Hillier can sight in Pärt's tintinnabuli style three subdivisions of increasing response "to the words in ever greater detail, with a subtlety and variation unimaginable in the earlier works".

His divisions are, characteristic of a musical analyst, unhelpful and impossibly abstruse. "...the earliest, like drawing with just pencil and paper (the works of the later 1970s to early 1980s); the second, transferring this knowledge to the medium of fresco (mid-1980s to early 1990s); the third (mid-1990s to the present), now painting in oils...". But I suppose I can't blame him - there's only so much that sleeve notes can handle.

I might question the primacy of More's original goal - that the utopia for music is its increasing ability to stir specific emotions - but I think we can begin to see that general trend in a scientific approach to music. Pärt, in the 1970s, "began to study Gregorian chant (not to copy it, but to imitate the timeless quality of its ebb and flow); he also studied medieval and renaissance polyphony, and became fascinated, too, by the sound of church bells." This is music that is not so much concentrated on the Romantic ideal of "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" in Wordsworth's words, but music understood as a science - a part of the Quadrivium that included arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. Perhaps this is why, as Pärt's music develops as an "aesthetic" (according to Hillier), it becomes like More's utopia, "responding to the words in ever greater details".

Qualitative and Quantitative

I cringe whenever "traditional" and "contemporary" are pitted against each other, since they really go together like a horse and carriage. You can't have one without the other. This misguided notion of their mutual exclusivity is because we think of "traditional" as a quantitative term and "contemporary" as a qualitative one. In reality, it's just the opposite.

"Traditional" usually means something like, how many years of dust have piled up on the manuscript. But it's not a question at all of how many but of what kind. Something is traditional because of the tradition it plugs itself into. On the other hand, contemporary usually means (especially to the traditionalist) new and, hence, cheap. But this is misguided as well. This can all be illustrated by the simple fact that J. S. Bach was contemporary when he was writing his music. Who says it isn't traditional?

Once we release ourselves from this false conception of the traditional and the contemporary, the whole situation becomes much simpler. The Scriptural mandate for "new songs" and contemporary music is inescapable. It now depends upon what kind of contemporary music. This necessitates a method, a theory, an education, an analysis, a science, and a tradition of its own that Church composers can plug themselves into. This will make them simultaneously traditional and contemporary composers.

So, you ask, that's all very nice, but what's the concrete side of this? What musical science and analysis and theory and education and tradition should we be composing new music in? The answer is obvious - a culture, with its worldviews, doctrines, and presuppositions, that can produce music like Josquin, Dufay, and Perotinus is one that must have a coherent, methodological approach to it. Why else would he be called Magister Perotinus? He teaches something. All we have to do is teach it once again.

One more comment on tradition and the qualitative definition. As much as it is a qualitative sort of thing, tradition is inescapable. No matter how revolutionary your music is, it is always in some sort of tradition. As much as many people would like to think ex nihilo Schoenberg fit, even he can be traced through Wagner through Beethoven through Bach, all the way back to Magister Perotinus. You may digress from tradition and you may even revolt from it, but in so doing, not only are you still being affected by it, but all that you'll do is revolt into a different tradition. It's still always tradition, though. This holds true for Schoenberg and for Zep.

So, it becomes even more important when we approach what usually passes for worship music in, say, PCA, OPC, PCUSA, and all those other Reformed denominations. What tradition is your music plugging itself into? What culture does it sound like it's coming out of? Does it sound like, if you took away the words, it would be a bad imitation of a mild (or not so mild) pop song? It should be terrifying to us that our music is always traditional when we analyze what tradition it came out of.