Music as Muse
(12/17/22)
O Lover,
In mid-Advent my wife and I attended a concert in the Basilica of Your Sacred Heart on the campus of the University of Notre Dame featuring faculty and graduate students in the Sacred Music Program in addition to a children’s choir. The program consisted of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany music from across varied geographies and genres over a millennium of time. While many of the composers were known to me—Buxtehude, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Vaughan Williams, Dupré, Messiaen, Whitacre, some were not. But their aggregate impact, peaking with Eric Whitacre’s Lux Aurúmque, drove me back to the haunting question throughout my decade hosting on the Notre Dame classical music station: what is it about music which is so astonishing, particularly in a liturgical season as pregnant with mystery as is the sequence we have now entered? What all is this gift with which You have enriched and dazzled us?
My favorite musical meal is choral (a cappella or no), sacred (religious or no), with dissonance the spice flavoring the yet essentially tonal entrée. While in the ageless tension between score and text it is the former which often impacts me more, nevertheless the artful wedding of the two can be astonishing, taking me to loci beyond names or words, coordinates or chónos, “places” invariably haunted by You. Music of the sort predominant in the above concert repeatedly has me skating ever closer to the diaphanous membrane separating the aesthetic from the spiritual; such music inexorably bleeds into mystery. While working in the radio studio cockpit across that decade I would repeatedly tear up as I was again confronted with questions like the following: Are not the endless textures, combinations, and tempos of musical notes a more supple mode of expression than the words of theology when it comes to You and Your Oneing Project? Stated otherwise, is not music, often in collaboration with its verbal sidekick poetry, more at home in apophática, the land out there beyond all of the capabilities in our toolkits, than is the discursive and/or the descriptive? Does not music occupy one of the inside lanes when it comes to Your Mystérium both immanent and beyond my every reach? What am I to make of the fact that an increasingly rich tsunami of music, from Gregorian to Grechaninoff and counting, has struggled mightily, albeit never definitively, to laud the Christ, Your very “splendor” (Heb 1:3)?
During last week’s concert I found myself praying this: O Lover, would I not still assent to Your embrace of me had I but a single one of Your gifts: music? Had I but music, would I not somehow both experience and intuit You as One, as Beauty, as Good, as Lover? Am I even capable of failing to yearn for You while being episodically skewered on a dissonant chord only lingeringly and achingly revolved?
Well You know, O Lover on whom time has no claim, that even while letting go of virtually all particulars, my experiencing of You seemingly makes me incapable of failing to presume the “more” of Your drama after physical death in the new heavens and new earth. I have an inkling that music will have a place in that “more.” The Apocalypse makes frequent reference to music in that Greater Life: a “new song” (5:9, 14:3, 15:3) and “the song of Moses . . . and . . . of the lamb” (15:3), to say nothing of the harps of popular religiosity. If Gregory of Nyssa’s epektásis (“straining toward”) points in the right direction, then our exploration of You, O Lover, in Your “more” will be both central and unending, a task for which music together with its corollary silence might well be less inadequate than any of our other capabilities, however transformed “then.”
