I
want in this lecture to explore the interface between music and religion. I
don’t simply mean religious music – the part music plays in liturgy and
spirituality. What interests me both as a musical amateur and as a theologian
is the more difficult and fundamental question of what music is in itself, and its place in the
divine scheme of things. This topic takes us into elusive borderlands where
theology, psychology, philosophy, aesthetics, semiotics, social anthropology
and cultural history meet. I can do no more than suggest a few threads we might
fruitfully follow.
To
do theology is to reflect on our human experience in the light of faith. All aspects
of life provide the raw material for theological reflection that draws on the
insights of the Bible, the Christian tradition, and the experience of people of
faith down the ages. One of the most creative developments in applied theology in
the past century has been to bring theological perspectives to bear on a whole
variety of disciplines. Or as I would prefer to say, bring any or all academic
disciplines into a conversation with theology in which each asks, what can I do
for the other? So my questions today are
these (and I am framing them in the words of Jeremy Begbie who has written
extensively on these themes, and has recently co-edited a stimulating
collection of essays Resonant Witness:
conversations between music and theology (2011): what does religion do for
music? And what does music do for
religion?
I
hope you will forgive a somewhat off-beat approach to this topic. I want to begin with some autobiography and
reflect on seven pieces of music that influenced me early on in life. (Not
eight – I wanted to avoid implying that this lecture is a version of Desert Island Discs.) These were – still
are – profoundly important in shaping my thinking and indeed my life, and each
suggests an insight about this conversation between music and faith. After that, I want to offer a couple of
metaphors suggested by poetry and film that may indicate paths worth exploring.
First
up is Mozart’s 39th symphony. I cannot have been more than five when
I first became aware of this marvellous work. I loved that slow, portentous
dissonant introduction and how its clouds seem to be dispersed with the
luminous first subject of the movement proper. It would be years before I
understood Sonata Form, or any other musical form; yet as I look back, I
believe I was drawn by the perfection of musical form the great classical
symphonists exhibit; it happened that I learned it from this symphony of
Mozart, but it could have been any of the other late symphonies of his, or the
many more of Haydn. It is a kind of Pythagorean view that says that music
reflects mathematical or cosmic perfection, the music of the spheres, but I
can’t help feeling that there is a truth worth pondering in this. So for a theologian, perfection of form is
linked with a creation whose Great Original brings order out of chaos.
At
about the same age, I discovered Schubert’s Lieder.
Specifically, it was Winterreise, the
winter’s journey made by a forlorn lover who has been abandoned by the woman on
whom he has set his heart. These poems by Wilhelm Müller chart a young man’s
solitary journey away from the home and community of his beloved into the
darkness of a winter night where the frozen landscape acts as a metaphor of his
desolate experience. It is in fact the
journey of a soul. How could such a work touch a youngster who had yet to
discover the heart’s times and seasons and the capacity of love to bring both
joy and pain? I don’t think it was this that I intuited; rather, the romantic’s
ability to create new worlds, weave imaginative spells, transport the listener
into different dimensions of human experience. Religion, I think, is also about
imagining other worlds and inhabiting them, both the transfigured realm of
heaven itself, but also the pain-ridden worlds of so many who suffer. Indeed, if religion has nothing to say about
suffering and pain, then in my judgment it has nothing to say about anything
that is worth hearing. So Schubert began to teach me the life-lesson that, in
Blake’s words, ‘Man was made for joy and woe; and when this we rightly know,
through the world we safely go’.
A
few years later, I took part in one of the earliest performances of Benjamin
Britten’s Noye’s Fludde. I was
assigned the part of a goat. I loved that work for what I now see as its
freshness and inventiveness, and above all for the way it brought so many
people together in a community of music-making and enjoyment. Earlier this
year, I took part in a performance in the Cathedral to mark Britten’s
centenary. This time, I was give the Voice of God to speak. Needless to say,
the press loved the ‘goat to God’ theme, especially when I waved at them the
letter I received from Britten in response to mine telling him about the
performance and how much I had enjoyed it. The Pears-Britten archive even
produced my original to publish in the concert programme, the first time I had
seen it for more than 50 years. To me, Noye represented something essential
about music, that it creates a community of performance. But there is more to
it than that. The community actually embraces composer and listener as well.
There is something analogous here to the way in which religious faith also
creates a community around a sacred text. You could say, too, that theology,
like music, is something that is essentially performed, that is lived. This nexus between text, performance and lived
reality is a fruitful issue worth exploring.
Next
I want to speak about Bach’s St John
Passion. I got to know it in early teenage years and it changed my life. We
sang it one year in the school choral society. Its importance for me was
twofold: first, it was my discovery of Bach, and second, it led to my discovery
of faith. I had played a lot of Bach on the piano, and was starting out on the 48 Preludes and Fugues. But it was the St John that taught me something about
Bach’s genius, specifically as an interpreter of religious texts. And it was
his interpretation of St John’s great passion narrative that struck me with
extraordinary force. I was not brought up in a religious environment: my father
was a lapsed Anglican and my mother a non-observant Jewess who was fortunate to
escape the Nazi holocaust in her native Germany where relatives and friends of
hers ended their days in Auschwitz. Here was another text of pain, the
suffering of Christ, whose Jewishness connected with my own. It led to what I
can only call an epiphany. In time, I embraced Christianity and have tried to
live by it ever since. It is certain that but for Bach, with his extraordinary
gift for interpreting biblical and other texts and making them vividly alive, I
would not be here speaking to you now. But more than that, I experienced his
music as possessing a quality of disclosure, revelation: the capacity to get
you to see things in a new way that is life-changing.
In
my teenage years, I became a church chorister: not, to my lasting regret, a
cathedral chorister though this choir sang the cathedral repertory and sang to
cathedral standards. This was my introduction to a musical language I had never
known about before. In particular, it opened up the world of Renaissance music
of which my mother, my chief musical influence up to this point, knew nothing
about: music for her started in 1685 with the birth of Bach. I particularly
loved singing the music of William Byrd: his mass settings, Ave Verum and so on. But the motet that
touched me profoundly was Civitas Sancti
Tui, a Lenten piece that laments the ruin of Jerusalem and in penitence
cries out to God for forgiveness and restoration. Its plangent cries ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
desolata est’ haunted me then and still do. This, like the Bach Passion, spoke
to me about music’s ability to interpret texts (and yes, yet another text of
suffering: I had not realised there were so many in my early life until I sat
down to write this lecture). But not just that. It was music’s ability to speak
in its own distinctive language that I was touching here: a form of speech
different from the verbal and conceptual. So I need to put this on the table
too, for religion has many different voices in which to ‘speak’, and one of
theology’s mistakes has often been to restrict it merely to the spoken or
written logos of human speech. And
insofar as church music has as its end the praise of God, I want to suggest
that all of music is essentially ‘doxological’, in that it points beyond
itself, transcends its own boundaries, enables the created order to become
sacramental as a symbol of deeper realities than we can see or hear or touch.
There
are two more defining moments, this time from my student years. I read maths as
my first degree, and this severely left-brained discipline pulled against the right-brained
love of music and its different voices. For some reason that I can’t now
recall, I fell under the spell of Richard Wagner. It began with Götterdämmerung, spread backwards to
embrace the whole Ring cycle, then
rapidly embraced the other music-dramas. Like Bach, it would take a lifetime
and more to explore the significance of Wagner for human society and for me
personally. I have still not yet seen all his works performed and am promising
to take myself off to Bayreuth in retirement to put that right. It will be, I
imagine, a kind of pilgrimage. And this is precisely, I think, what drew me to
Wagner. It was not simply the extraordinary sound-world his music-dramas summon
up, and certainly not any admiration for the man with his notorious political
views. It seemed to me that there was something of a ritual, quasi-religious
quality to Wagner, psychodrama in which the creation of imagined worlds of gods
and humans, of myths and legends seem to embrace the whole of the human journey
in its compromised ambiguity and its yearning for redemption. This was the
drama of transfiguration which spoke directly to a young man discovering
transcendence in the Christian message.
There are worlds so much bigger than we are: it is the job of religion
to help us discover them, and music, whether it is sacred or secular (and how
do we characterise Wagner?) opens up just such journeys of discovery.
Finally,
I want to mention music of an entirely different genre which leaped out at me
as a student and made me begin to reassess what I believed about music and wean
me off an over-elitist assumption that only ‘serious’ music could touch the
human spirit. This was the musical Cabaret,
or at least the film version with Liza Minelli as its unforgettable star.
When I saw it, I was both moved and shocked. Moved because of its narrative,
set in Berlin at the end of the Weimar era and the rise of Nazism. There were obvious echoes of my mother’s
past. But I was shocked for the
profanity I then ascribed to it, the sexiness and depravity that characterised
the low-life, and not so low-life, of Berlin in those times. But to my
perplexity, I found myself humming those marvellous songs, bewitched against my
own will by a film which at the time with all my purist presumptions, I wished
I had not gone to see. Well, things come full circle. My daughter took part in a 6th
form performance of the musical, and I applauded the loudest. It is surely one
of the great musicals of all time.
What
I began to learn from Cabaret has two
aspects. The first is the improvised quality of so much music that appeals to
the popular imagination. Theology as a performance also needs to learn to
improvise: listen to all the other voices and join in appropriately sometimes
as a solo voice, but mostly in concert. The other is that our discourse about
music must not be confined to the serious, high-art end of the arts spectrum.
On the contrary, the vast majority of the music that is played and enjoyed in
this world is and always has been populist, of the people for the people. It exists to entertain. Much of the conversation between theology and
music tends to ignore this, but it does not need to. If we equate
‘entertainment’ with ‘recreation’, we see at once that there is a deeply theological
nuance in the idea that entertainment brings happiness and enjoyment. This
dimension too needs to be brought into the conversation about what music can
bring to religion, and what religion can bring to music.
Much
of what I have said so far comes down to how music and religion ‘speak’. This array of different ‘languages’ is to
recognise something very important: that ‘theology’ is not only done through
the explicit use of human speech. It also happens through many other forms of
‘speech’ and behaviour, often unconsciously. Among these, music surely has a
prominent place, not least because of its appeal to the affect, our human
emotional life. So to ask, ‘how does music speak to us of God?’ is not a
frivolous question. It may well be absolutely central to how we understand what
we are about as theologians and believers. When liturgists say (correctly) that
people learn theology, not from Bible reading, creeds, pulpit utterances or
liturgical formulae, but from the hymns they sing, they usually mean that the
lyrics of hymns and songs tend to lodge far more securely in the memory than
texts that are merely spoken. That may be for better or for worse. The logic of
that insight points attention to how rhythm, melody and harmony all play a part
as ‘carriers’ of a message, as transmitters of meaning. A ‘good’ or a ‘bad’
tune has as much to do with the formation of people’s theological minds and
hearts as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ texts do. In other words, the ‘text’ lies not only in
the words but in the music and its performance. There are considerable
hermeneutical ramifications to that.
So
perhaps we can begin to gather up some possible answers to the two questions I
began with. The first was: what does religion do for music? I believe we can
say that it places it within a larger context of human, and a theologian would
say divine, activity. Theology suggests not only that music is not an end in
itself (I doubt if anyone would dispute that) but how it has meaning and value
because it belongs to the sphere of human creativity that in the end reflects
and even embodies God’s creativity. One of the meanings we could give to the
statement in Genesis that God created humanity in his own image is that human
beings are given a share in God’s dominion over the world, which is an aspect
of his own creativity. And just as talented creativity in any aspect of life is
commonly called a ‘gift’, we can speak of music as in its very nature a ‘gift’
offered to humanity for its benefit and enjoyment by an infinitely gifted and
talented deity.
I
spoke of music as community-building. We could also say that in public social
terms, music builds the kind of communities that resist the reduction of human
life to what is merely measurable or functional. The current pressure on local
authority arts budgets illustrates the tendency, when times are hard, to judge
the arts by the criterion of utility; and indeed only last week, a government
minister called on those promoting the arts to show the extent to which they
benefit the economy. Arts communities,
like faith communities, resist this way of commoditising that in which
different kinds of value reside. Music, therefore, bears ‘witness’ to what
makes a human community with wholesome values, wholesome in that they respect
the imaginative, spiritual dimension of life and not simply the economic. This
can be part of what religion brings to music.
What
about the other question, what does music do for religion? I have already spoken about the ‘language’ of
music, and how this helps theology to be less ambitious about what can be
expressed in words. If religion is engagement with mystery, then we would not
expect verbal formulations to be more than provisional in their penetration of
what is essentially ineffable, that is, capable of being expressed in words.
Music can teach theology to be more respectful of other ways of engaging with
reality, to be ready for disclosures that come other than through the cognitive
route. ‘From the heart: may it go to the
heart’ wrote Beethoven on the score of his Missa
Solemnis. The language of the heart can encourage theologians to think
metaphorically, understand that much theological reflection is more in the
nature of poetic analogy than description and propositional statement. Importantly,
it can teach theologians to be silent altogether in the face of mystery: ‘that
of which we cannot speak, of that we must be silent’ as the philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein famously said.
In
these ways, music and the arts help theology to be both imaginative and
playful. It is important to connect the idea of ‘playing’ music in performance
with ‘playing’ in the recreational sense. If as I have suggested, music is a
genuinely ‘recreational’ activity in the sense of imitating divine creativity,
then play is an important aspect of being creative. In the Book of Proverbs,
God’s act of creating the world is likened to divine play. God creates us not just because a cosmos that
has purposeful activity is better than one without, and not just because it is
an act of hospitality in which he, so to speak, steps back in order to create
space for the created world and human beings to come into being. It is presented as an act of pure enjoyment,
an end in itself that gives God satisfaction in just the same way that an artist
derives pleasure from his or her own artistry. So music, as a vehicle of
pleasure and fulfilment can enable theology to be more joyful, less solemn,
more relaxed. It is a bit like Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game whose players strike me as rather like
instrumentalists tackling a late Beethoven string quartet for the sheer
intellectual and emotional pleasure of understanding the game from within and
mastering it.
*******
The
risk in all this is that we try too hard to ‘explain’ what the artist is up to
and what happens when we encounter his or her work. What Isadora Duncan said
about dance is true of all the arts: ‘if I could tell you what it meant, there
would be no point in dancing it’. St Francis told his brothers: ‘Preach the
gospel. Use words if necessary.’ There is tempting to collapse the experience
of music down to mere prose. In fact, Art
is art’s own best interpreter. So let me conclude by doing some playful
metaphorical thinking based on a novel, a poem and a film. I hope they may help
us recognise what is happening in this conversation between music and religion.
Here I am drawing on a piece I wrote for a symposium on the relationship
between music and theology a decade or so ago.
My
novel is Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity.
Here is a cameo of a very ordinary encounter in a record shop:
‘Have you got any soul?’ a woman asks... That depends, I
feel like saying; some days yes, some days no. A few days ago I was right out;
now I’ve got loads, too much, more than I can handle. I wish I could spread it
a bit more evenly, I want to tell her, get a better balance, but I can’t seem
to get it sorted. I can see she wouldn’t be interested in my internal stock
control problems though, so I simply point to where I keep the soul I have,
right by the exit, just next to the blues.
Nick
Hornby charts (forgive the word) the fortunes of an obsessive. His public world
is the record shop; his private one his record collection, his relationships,
and the inner complexities of the male psyche. The book is funny, wise and in
its off-beat way, disconcertingly accurate on life and art and sexuality: what
it means to be a man and know from the inside what lust, longing and love are.
Records are both a metaphor of another world and a gateway to it:
Is it so wrong, wanting to be at home with your record
collection? It’s not like .... collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique
thimbles. There’s a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more
peaceful, more colourful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the
world I live in....
The
question that runs through the novel is the woman’s question in the shop: ‘have
you any soul?’ To which the answer is, it depends what you mean by soul, what
it means to be a human being. That is art’s great question down the centuries.
That is religion’s great question too.
Hornby
stands in a long tradition that grapples with the function of art at an oblique
or metaphorical level. Perhaps that is the only level at which it makes sense.
The world of his record collection, both lovelier and more depraved than the
world of his own experience, is not a fantasy world but the real one. Far from
dulling his senses, music awakens in him a deeper awareness of reality just as
fairy tales ‘enchant’ children into discovering at a mythical, symbolic level
archetypal truths about the way things are. In Bruce Chatwin’s novel Songlines, aboriginals ‘sing’ the world
into being. In their cosmology, the world would not exist without music, or it
would not be recognised. Whatever else is going on when we listen to music and
feel ourselves stirred in some way, there is surely an act of recognition taking place, a response, a
welcome, an embracing of truth that is too deep for words. We are back to the
parallel languages we need in order to do theology.
Next, the poem. I doubt if anyone has ever compared Nick Hornby to Dante. Yet
in a curious way, Hornby’s record collection embracing the entire spectrum of
human life, echoes Dante’s Divine Comedy,
one of the universal works of the human spirit. There, Dante uses a literary
device to open up the worlds of hell, purgatory and heaven, the worlds, that
is, of ourselves and our human
journey. The Inferno opens with a man
lost in a dark wood, not knowing which way to turn in order to travel safely.
Dante introduces us to the figure of the Roman poet Virgil, who shows him that
he must travel through the circles of hell in order to come out the other side,
climb the slopes of the mountain of purgatory and reach paradise. The metaphor
here is of a journey into the self. Dante must travel ‘down’ into the dark
places of terror, fear and sin that lurk in the human spirit in order to travel
‘up’ into divine light and grace and glory. We can only know God, Dante is
saying, as we are prepared courageously to tackle the hard journey into knowing
ourselves as we truly are.
Why
Virgil? Why not, as in Pilgrim’s
Progress, an evangelist to point the way? Perhaps because Dante’s Virgil
does more than point the way. He is travelling companion and guide, the
map-reader who helps Dante understand the landscapes he is passing through. He
is the interpreter without whom these bewildering, often terrifying worlds
don’t make sense. And in his choice of Virgil, regarded by medieval Christendom
as not only the greatest of poets but on a par with the Old Testament prophets,
Dante reveals an entire theory of the function of art in society. It is not to
prettify, but to illuminate in the
technical sense of the word: to uncover meanings and shed light on human
experience. It does this, says Dante, not directly, full-frontally, so to speak,
but by ‘telling it slant’, to use Emily Dickinson’s memorable phrase: by means
of analogy and metaphor that awaken the imagination and lead the soul into
dimensions of truth that didactic prose by itself cannot penetrate.
The
last part of the journey, the Paradiso, introduces
us to a different guide. This is Beatrice, the love of Dante’s life, whom he
had glimpsed as a young man by the Ponte Vecchio in his native Florence, and
was only to encounter once more in his life. Beatrice is Dante’s symbol of
beauty: glimpsed, perhaps, rather than embraced - for like Beatrice, beauty
cannot be trapped and tamed by human beings, made subject to their whims and
desires. Again, the message is clear, that beauty is to lead us by the hand
into paradise and the vision of God. Only then does she bid farewell to Dante
as he looks on him whose love ‘moves the sun and the other stars’. When we gaze
on the God who embodies all beauty, art’s work is done.
Finally,
my film: Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993).
Set in 19th century New Zealand, it chronicles the fortunes of a
dumb heroine Ada who is married off to a tyrannical and abusive husband. She
has three ways of communicating: a writing tablet, her little daughter by a
previous affair, and her piano. Both Flora and the piano enable her to break
her silence and ‘speak’; but the piano is her only vehicle for communicating
her passionate emotions, what lies in the depths of this complex, agonised
woman’s heart. Ada falls in love with another
man, Baines, a neighbour. The complex interactions within this triangle of
obsession, domination, and redeeming love are resolved when Baines finally
takes Ada and Flora with him in a boat away from the island. On the boat, Ada
insists that the piano is thrown overboard. She deliberately catches her foot
in the ropes holding it, and is pulled under by the instrument. Just in time,
she extricates herself and climbs up to the surface to live again and find her
own voice and freedom.
If
the piano is the real heroine of this film, it is because it is such an
eloquent symbol of the human predicament. To be human means to be heard, known
and understood. Ada’s piano is a complex metaphor of this, a transitional
object that enables Ada to cling on to her humanity and keep her soul intact
while the forces around her threaten to tear her apart. With her piano, she can
move safely from one stage of life to the next. When it has served its purpose,
it can ‘die’, and with it, her old self. The piano works at one level as a
symbol of how music makes up for the deficiencies of other forms of speech,
whether written words (epitomised by the writing tablet) or oral (her daughter,
her mother’s surrogate mouthpiece in much the same way as the Old Testament
describes Aaron as Moses’ spokesman or ‘prophet’). The late works of Beethoven
show how his beloved piano, too,
became just such a mouthpiece in the face of his increasing deafness. Those
words perhaps encapsulate one message of the
Piano.
But
precisely because the piano is only a transitional object, there comes a time
when there is no further use for it. And without it now (the film implies), Ada
achieves resurrection and can speak for herself. So the film can be read in
terms of music’s redemptive role in human destiny. This places it in a long
tradition of poetry and drama that does this. One example is John Milton’s poem
At a Solemn Musick, which interprets
the entire story of creation (the state of ‘perfect diapason’), fall (the
‘harsh din’ that ‘broke the fair music that all creatures made / to their great
Lord’) and salvation (which is to be brought back ‘in tune with heav’n’)
through the imagery of music. Another is Wagner’s music drama Die Meistersinger, set in 16th century
Nuremberg, where the prize-winning piece in the annual song contest is a symbol
of the new, creative art against the old and the hidebound. But in the drama’s
story of individual human lives, the prize song is also the means through which
love is declared and relationships redeemed. All these works affirm that music
is a basic human need and experience in which tragedy is expressed, catharsis
takes place and resolution is achieved. In The
Piano, music has a redemptive function. Without it, we are less than human,
and unable to reach our God-given destiny. That we experience music as gift and
recreation makes it a very apt symbol of divine grace. This is, perhaps, the
Augustinian subtext to the film.
That
is one reading of the film, perhaps the expected one. A more open-ended reading
would take the sinking of the piano to the bottom of the sea, not as a
redemptive moment but rather as a symbol that music shares in the ambivalence
of things, is a victim of our brokenness, can even have destructive
associations. The piano must ‘die’, and part of Ada with it, if another part of
her is to live. When I was a student, in love with Wagner, I was advised by
some Christian Union colleagues (who could not have been more fervently
evangelical than I was at the time) not to flirt with art associated with
Nazism. Associations can colour art: it can be meat offered to idols. Another
film, Amadeus, raises the issue of
how sublime art can derive from a mind so scatalogical and corrupted as
Mozart’s - something his greatest theological admirer, Karl Barth, had already
commented on. Is the truth that sublimity is achieved despite the character of the conduit or the associations it can
subsequently come to carry, in much the same way as Paul speaks about God’s
strength being made perfect in human weakness?
That
music belongs to a world that is not yet healed hardly needs stating (and in
the Genesis story, Jubal, ‘the ancestor of all those who play the lyre and
pipe’ belongs to the progeny of Cain, very much part of a fallen world). What
is much more difficult to put into words is the difference between music that
catharises darkness, evil and pain, Britten’s War Requiem for instance, or Bach’s Passions, and music that may
seem to reinforce it. Not long ago, a worshipper at my last Cathedral
complained to me about the liturgical mass setting that was something of a party
piece - the Messe Sollonnelle by Jean
Langlais. This magnificent piece is bold, exhilarating, and driven from
beginning to end by a furious energy. To her it was the epitome of our
century’s contradictions: violent, conflicted, disintegrating, pulling in the
opposite direction of a liturgy that is meant to put us back together again as
human beings. We agreed on the importance of not denying but offering in
worship the angry realities of the world and of our own lives in the way the
psalmists do. But we did not succeed in ‘reading’ the music in the same way. To
her it was ‘bad enchantment’ - not because the piece or the composer carried
any negative ‘associations’, and not because it was kitsch - another issue again, but because it was intrinsically
destructive, demonic even, by its very nature. To me, it was the exact
opposite. But what are the theological issues at stake here, and how do we
identify them?
This lecture can do no more than raise a few questions. Like all good theology,
it turns out to be about the whole of life, and what it means to long for and
know and love God. To go back to Nick Hornby, it is about ‘soul’ - the soul of
each of us, of humanity, of the world. It is about what the gospel warns us
against losing. I hope that this all-important conversation between music and
theology may help us to recover ‘soul’ in human life, and to re-connect with
what is so often a lost part of our world and of ourselves.
Durham
University Department of Music
7 May 2013
