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.)

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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?

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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.