The Insidious Mastery of Song

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

—from "Piano", D.H. Lawrence

The most frightening thing about music is that, unasked and unanticipated, it can provoke entirely illogical reactions in us. I shall give you a personal example. Today in choir we rehearsed, for the first time, This Is the Feast, a hymn I associate closely with the Lutheran services of my childhood. (We'll soon be performing it at the Paschal Vigil.) Though the Papists didn't know it very well, and—lacking proper Lutheran zeal—sang it too slowly, it was still enough to bring tears to my eyes. And this in the middle of choir, even though I knew beforehand that we'd be singing it. How is it that the very act of singing can incite such Sehnsucht? What is it about a melody that draws forth such powerful emotion?

More importantly, why is it that sacred music so rarely elicits such a response? I suspect it is a problem, like so many other problems we have, of community and continuity. How many Christians are fortunate enough, nowadays, to have grown up with a consistent corpus of well-written, well-performed hymns? And how many of those lucky few have developed a real connection to these songs, one nourished by ties to a real church community? Our mobility has cost us, among other things, a sense of our heritage. The deeper meaning with which music can be invested only comes with the genuine experience of something greater than ourselves, be it communal or even divine.

(Mind you, I don't mean to suggest that older is necessarily better. Why, This Is the Feast was written less than a decade before I was born; I'd understand if it simply doesn't have the same effect on my elders, since they didn't grow up with it. But they grew up with their own standard hymns, the best of which I know as well. As a church musician it is my duty to ensure that only the best new music is added to our unofficial, yet widely agreed-upon, canon. Lutherans, as long as they retain any sense whatsoëver, will always have Bach; it's just a matter of finding other things to fill out the hymnal.)

---

In other news: What makes art "Christian"? (Or Krustian, for that matter?) And, for Holy Week: famous last words.

Flannery; Sebastian

The more of Miss Flannery O'Connor I read, the more I realize how rich her works are. Presently I'm making my way through Everything That Rises Must Converge, and enjoying it thoroughly. Her stories are at times hilarious, and at times horrific. Sometimes it's hard to tell which. If there's a unifying characteristic of her main characters, it's that they're terribly unaware; the arc of each story is generally one in which this complacent ignorance is shaken apart. Grace is a fundamentally discomfiting, if not violent, undertaking.

"Well, I've never read O'Connor, but I'd like to start", you might say. "Should I then presume? And how should I begin?", you might continue, if you have a penchant for quoting Prufrock. The novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, are excellent, but the short stories may be better to start with. I'll recommend my favorites (so far): "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", "The Artificial Nigger", "Good Country People" and "Greenleaf" are particularly good.

In other news, another thing I've been making my figurative way through is George Ritchie's complete Bach organ works. (They're not quite complete, though; I noticed that he's missing the chorale partita on Christ, der du bist der helle Tag.) The nice thing about these discs, other than the fine musicianship and recording quality, is that Ritchie has used a variety of American instruments, two of which are by Paul Fritts, who built our organ here at Notre Dame. (This reminds me: come, if you like, to my recital on April 18th—at 5:00pm, Eastern.) One could listen to Bach every day and still only understand a tiny bit of his genius, I think. Heck, one can play Bach every day and still only understand a tiny bit of his genius.

The Promise of Living

The promise of living with hope and thanksgiving

Is born of our loving our friends and our labor.

The promise of growing with faith and with knowing

Is born of our sharing our love with our neighbor.

The promise of living, the promise of growing

Is born of our singing in joy and thanksgiving.

No, that there's no verse by Mr Berry, though the sentiment is certainly akin. (He doesn't care to rhyme that much, anyway.) It's from The Tender Land, Aaron Copland's unfortunately neglected opera. It's sung to an original countermelody against the revivalist tune Zion's Walls, which he also arranged. (It so happened that I conducted that arrangement today in class; it's solid.) I wonder if the lyricist who wrote those words happened to believe them; can it be that intellectuals once had that sort of optimism, that sort of trust in the goodness of the human spirit? If so, what has changed?

---

More devout readers, or at least the more liturgically inclined, will note that today is the Feast of the Annunciation. Over at the Episcopal lectionary I frequent, a Mr James Kiefer has written a fine meditation for this day.

Endurance (and Lemons)

One of the most interesting things I learned about mostly from PBS is polar exploration. I'm not entirely certain why the story of men (and their sled-dogs) trying to get to an arbitrary spot on the top or bottom of the map should be so compelling, but it is. (And yet I find the stories of Everest-climbers to be quite dull in comparison. Perhaps it is a matter of latitude. Or perhaps it is because the poles are the closest thing to a real conspiracy of cartographers.) Scott, Amundsen, Peary, Franklin, Shackleton... they're all fascinating. The failures are often more interesting than the successes; the 'successful' failures moreso. Shackleton's expedition, for example, failed utterly in its objective, but the way they managed to survive is far too good a story to make a decent movie: it beggars belief.

But I digress, as I am wont to do. What I really meant to do was provide a link I think you might find neat: Scott and Scurvy. How is it that a disease that was cured in Napoleonic times ended up perplexing doctors well into the twentieth century? It's a case of science gone awry—with deadly consequences.

A Threnody for Naperville

Is it possible to feel nostalgia for a time one has never directly known? For that, I suspect, may be what I feel every time I commute past the suburbs of Chicago. (I drove home yesterday for my Spring break, you see.) In my mind I can see the farmsteads and villages and acres and acres of woods and fields that once occupied that region. The strip malls and McMansions there now represent the death of all that went before: anything that was unique, or particular, or even praiseworthy is now overwhelmed in this monotonous sameness, this standardization.

Even the farmsteads, it must be admitted, represented a sort of death, for before them was nothing but prairie and virgin forest, mile upon mile, century upon century. But that first death was reversible; field passes swiftly enough into prairie. This second death is far more permanent. What hope is there for Naperville now that it is committed to a world defined by Wal-marts and highway off-ramps? It is a blessing, at least, that this world cannot long endure. I am an optimist in the sense that I know there is a sort of justice in the long term. Even if the world continues to run on oil after I am gone, I know that it cannot do so forever.

"These times we know much evil, little good / to steady us in faith." Indeed.

Oh, those magical Christians

I've been thinking, lately, about the "magical" elements of Christianity. And lo, in an article in the Jewish Review of Books ("It's not just for Jews anymore!"), I read this:

To put it crudely, if Christianity is a fantasy religion, then Judaism is a science fiction religion. If the former is individualistic, magical, and salvationist, the latter is collective, technical, and this-worldly.

The article, incidentally, was quite interesting; it asks, and attempts to answer, why there have been no great Jewish fantasy writers. But I digress: I'm wondering about the characterization of Christianity as "magical", which, I think, is not inaccurate. There are certainly elements of the religion that defy any sort of conventional logic (viz., transubstantiation, parthenogenesis, trinitarianism, &c.). In recent centuries, various sects have attempted to excise those elements that have proven increasingly baffling to modern man. The end result of this process is, I suppose, Unitarianism. My favorite Unitarian joke, if you must know, is this:

Q: How do you get a Unitarian family to leave town?
A: Burn a question mark in their front yard.

Last night while I was trying to fall asleep it occurred to me that, should one remove all the "magical" elements of Christianity, one is left without any sort of physical manifestation of the Divine whatsoëver. The Real Presence in the Eucharist? Out. The Incarnation? Nope. Miracles? Well, of course not. A de-magicized Christianity is, in fact, a good deal more "spiritual" and a lot less material.

Here I shall make an argumentum ad verecundiam: Wendell Berry says we need to be a good deal more cognizant that we are creatures of matter, so it must be true. (The implications of this are fodder for a great many other posts, but I shan't delve into that here.) I wonder, however, how a Unitarian, or a Jeffersonian agnostic, or certain Episcopalians, can back up this sentiment without recourse to that absurd idea that matter itself has been made divine.

From "Christian Discourses", Søren Kierkegaard

Father in Heaven, well we know that it is Thou
that givest both to will and to do, that also longing,
when it leads us to renew the fellowship with our Savior and Redeemer,
is from Thee. Father in Heaven, longing is Thy gift.

But when longing lays hold of us, oh, that we might lay hold of the longing;
when it would carry us away, that we might give ourselves up.
When Thou art near to summon us,
that we also might keep near to Thee in supplication.
When Thou in the longing dost offer us the highest good,
oh, that we might hold it fast!

Dies Cinerum

One of the small pleasures of attending such an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic university as Notre Dame is that people don't look at you funny for walking around with a smudge on your forehead today. (Of course, Lutherans and other saner Protestants also distribute ashes, but an ostensibly Lutheran school like Augustana is basically secular.)

It is a remarkable thing, this wearing of ashes. No other day of the year do we so boldly proclaim our identity as followers of that Jesus fellow. And how could we? Indeed, how can we, even for one day, presume to represent the moral teachings of Christ? We fail miserably, and are (rightly) judged as hypocrites. And yet God suffers this (or, at least, is content to let it continue). I suppose it is right that we are permitted to persist in our striving towards sanctity.

O-lim-picks

Christopher ("Christ-bearer"! Ha!) Hitchens may be an intolerable blowhard, but he happens to have some interesting thoughts on the Olympics (which, I understand, are going on now).

Have you ever had a discussion about higher education that wasn't polluted with babble about the college team and the amazingly lavish on-campus facilities for the cult of athletic warfare? Noticed how the sign of a bad high school getting toward its Columbine moment is that the jocks are in the saddle? Worried when retired generals appear on the screen and talk stupidly about "touchdowns" in Afghanistan? By a sort of Gresham's law, the emphasis on sports has a steadily reducing effect on the lowest common denominator, in its own field and in every other one that allows itself to be infected by it.

As usual, Hitchens has overstated his case in his rush to be "controversial", but there's something to be said about the sports-mania that afflicts our society. It is certainly obvious that international sports have very little, if anything, to do with promoting goodwill among nations. Bread and circuses, I say. Bread and circuses.

"Moral Luck"?

I'm not a regular reader of The New Yorker, but if I happen upon it (i.e., if I find it unused in the common kitchen area of the house), I'll give it a look-see. In an article on Van Gogh, there's a digression on Gauguin—who, like Wagner, happened to be a generally terrible man who made extraordinary art.

[Bernard] Williams points out that Gauguin's is a prime real-life case where doing the wrong thing—abandoning your wife and children and betraying your friends—appears to be morally justifiable, since the art made was, as it happened, great. Moral assessment, Williams suggests, has a strong component of sheer contingency and chance. You run a red light and no one notices; I run a red light and hit an old lady and I'm the worst guy in the world.
...
Gauguin is the original of the type, of whom Picasso is the most famous realization, of the artist as gambler—the solitary risk-taker, indifferent to anyone's welfare but his own and therefore capable of acts of independence and originality unknown to timid, orderly, nice people, acts that thrill and inspire new acts a century later. It is the goal of that kind of modern artist to run the red light and hit the old ladies—the old ladies of custom and convention. Where art since the Renaissance had attempted to limit luck in a system of inherited purpose and patterns, modern art demands that you press the pedal as hard as you can, and pray.

So that's what's wrong with modern art: the urge to upset people enough to be remembered for it by future generations, and the rejection of "inherited purpose". The great myth of modern art (of modern man, come to think of it) is that the artist is an autonomous individual whose actions, however abhorrent, may be justified by the acclaim of people unknown, or unborn.

It is far to easy for me to sit back in my armchair and complain, though. Let me talk of something I may be a bit more qualified to discuss: music. We see the same type among composers, as well: Wagner, Schoenberg, perhaps even Mahler(?!). But the world would be a far worse place without the music of these men. (For those uncertain about Schoenberg, I suggest you try his Gurrelieder, or Verklärte Nacht. Gorgeous pieces.) Would their great art have been possible if these men had not been egotistical bastards? I don't know.