Music Yet Again
[Duruflé, Maurice (1902-86), Requiem (Op. 9, 1947); performance (with organ) by the Choir of Trinity College Cambridge, Stephen Layton (cond.), Saint-Eustache, Paris.]
O Lover,
In the face of the darkness encroaching on Advent and this new liturgical year I again found myself opting hard for music. Last weekend my spouse and I heard Handel’s Messiah performed by the Notre Dame Chorale and Baroque Orchestra followed Sunday evening by the rich Lessons and Carols in the Basilica. Advent through Epiphany is arguably music’s prime time.
However, it was via a musical performance improbably experienced via DVD on YouTube rather than live that the Advent season, O Lover, unfolded further. That work, which I have known across forty years, is the 1947 choral Requiem by Maurice Duruflé (1902-86), a career Parisian church organist. I was a member of a choral group which sang this piece (with organ) in the Chapel of the Sermon on the Mount in Elkhart in 1981. In the early 1990s my wife and I experienced the orchestrated version in the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany near the White House in response to the raging AIDS crisis. Later I would play Robert Shaw’s rendition at least annually during my decade hosting at Notre Dame’s WSND-FM (88.9) classical station. My YouTube apotheosis last Sunday involved the Choir of Trinity College Cambridge.
But wait! What has Duruflé’s work, drafted as Gregorian chants for the dead and in its final form consisting of nine segments (Introit, Kyrie, Domine Jesu Christe, Sanctus, Pie Jesu, Agnus Dei, Lux aeterna, Libera me & In Paradisum), to do with Advent? While I cannot fully answer that question, I have repeatedly experienced the power of music to transcend sense, cognition, language, and dogma. In Durufle’s counterintuitive melding of Gregorian plainsong with music as modern as Ravel and Debussy, the wedding of medieval tonality with delicious dissonances released into resolution, glimpses of You happen.
While I know the Requiem’s Latin text reasonably well, it seems that I am being drawn beyond beauties into You, Beauty Yourself, most powerfully via choral music, whether set for organ or orchestra. Neither Your creatures nor our creativities finds me as lavishly lost in You, wondrously albeit briefly released from doubt or striving, belief or self-consciousness, as does music. In those immeasurable moments—knowing nothing, fearing nothing, clutching nothing, believing nothing—it is as if I am unítas indistinctiónis, a spark indistinguishable from Your Light Uncreated to which Your Christ bore definitive witness (Jn 1:7-9). In the aftermath of Sunday’s experience I found myself identifying with Catherine of Siena’s image of You as Mare Pacífica (“Oceanic Peace”), with Eckhart’s “something uncreated” at the Center, the Depth, of creation. Nudged by Stephen Layton and his collegiate choral cohort Sunday last, I glimpsed yet again Beauty Itself who is You.
Granted, summoning You up to such a “place” beyond places, as if You were a being, object, or thing, is simply not allowed.Your otherness beyond all such categories includes Your agency as Source. Nevertheless, it is my experience that intuitions as to where to look (“hear”) are repeatedly preparational and mediatory, and thus part of the attentive waiting intrinsic to the season of Advent.
Finally, O Lover, while I am indescribably indebted to You for Your gifts including sense/sacramentality, intellect/theology, imagination/arts, and religion/cultus, I want even more to be borne away far beyond them all into the ineffability and undemarcatedness of Your “all in All” (I Cor 15:28). Some of the mystics write of these intimations of You as theósis (“engoddedness”). Most of the time I am not offended by such naked and immodest desire, nor am I unaware of the Great Gregory’s teaching that to long for You is already to possess You. Music thus continues to be both acolyte of that longing and harbinger of that possession.
