Olivier Messiaen

Eighteen years ago today Olivier Messiaen died (or, if you prefer, 'went to his reward'). His example as a church musician cannot be easily overstated. There was some talk of making him our patron saint here at the Notre Dame MSM Program; I certainly would support the idea. Here's some idea of his work for organ (played by the inestimable Marie-Claire Alain):

And then, a wondrous setting of "O Sacrum Convivium":

Washington Irving, or, Irving Washington

The vicissitudes of my schedule this semester are such that I have very little to do on Fridays. (Indeed, Friday is my Sabbath, of sorts, as that whole church-music career thing precludes worklessness on Sundays.) This is the day, then, when I have time to try and remember what it's like to be a real human being, instead of a grad student: I can prepare myself actual meals, make my bed properly, indulge my peripatetic nature in walks 'round South Bend, &c. I also attempt to do some reading. Today, while my lunch was cooking, I finally began my volume of Washington Irving stories. (Lunch, incidentally, was a success: pierogies and haddock. The pierogies have a funny way of inflating in the oven, and Charity, Paul says, is not puffed-up; ergo, Charity is not a pierogi.)

There's a reason Washington Irving was so immensely popular: he's a fine writer, with an admirable sense of humor.

[Rip Van Winkle] was, moreover, a kind neighbor, and an obedient, hen-pecked husband. Indeed, to the latter circumstance might be owing that meekness of spirit which gained him such universal popularity; for those men are most apt to be obsequious and conciliating abroad, who are under the discipline of shrews at home. Their tempers, doubtless, are rendered pliant and malleable in the fiery furnace of domestic tribulation; and a curtain-lecture is worth all the sermons in the world for teaching the virtues of patience and long-suffering. A termagant wife may, therefore, in some respects, be considered a tolerable blessing; and if so, Rip Van Winkle was thrice blessed.

The modern reader, I suppose, is struck by the vocabulary level, especially considering that Irving's education was negligible. (Save for some law training, his formal education was complete by the age of sixteen.) How many college freshmen today can comprehend, let alone write, such prose? Sigh. Well, at least we have television! Take that, literate forebears!

Regarding Lawn Ornaments

Upon several months of observation, I have concluded that lawn ornaments in Michiana tend to fall into one of several categories:

• Animal: deer, rabbits, and those ubiquitous geese (often dressed up).
• Religious (primarily Catholic): angels, Francis with his birds, Mary.
• Unimaginative: rocks, sometimes with the family name or a Notre Dame logo.

While the habitats of these different groups rarely overlap, there are occasional instances where one can spy both rocks and concrete deer, or a smartly-dressed goose sharing a yard with the Virgin Mother of God. Kitsch, it seems, is inherently democratic: it is the great leveler.

Someday, when I am a home-owner (and thus, probably, more conservative, a good deal more in debt, and more likely to shout at children to get off my lawn), I think I might get one of those geese. (I have a high opinion of the Theotokos, mind you, but I have no desire to display her in my yard.)

Oyez, Oyez, Oyez!

See that, there? That is an advertisement, of sorts, for an upcoming musical event of great import. (Isn't that font great? I got it here, in case you were wondering. Typography is one of those things that people simply don't appreciate enough, if you ask me.) You may click the image to view it in fuller splendour.

I post this partly as a reminder, and partly as an excuse: if'n I won't be a-postin' as frequently as usual, it's because I have this-a-here recital to be practicin' fer.

Easter, George Herbert

Rise heart; thy Lord is risen.  Sing his praise
                                                  Without delayes,
Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise
                                                  With him mayst rise:
That, as his death calcined thee to dust,
His life may make thee gold, and much more, just.

Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part
                                                  With all thy art.
The crosse taught all wood to resound his name,
                                                  Who bore the same.
His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key
Is best to celebrate this most high day.

Consort both heart and lute, and twist a song
                                                  Pleasant and long:
Or, since all musick is but three parts vied
                                                  And multiplied,
O let thy blessed Spirit bear a part,
And make up our defects with his sweet art.

I got me flowers to strew thy way;
I got me boughs off many a tree:
But thou wast up by break of day,
And brought’st thy sweets along with thee.

The Sunne arising in the East,
Though he give light, & th’ East perfume;
If they should offer to contest
With thy arising, they presume.

Can there be any day but this,
Though many sunnes to shine endeavour?
We count three hundred, but we misse:
There is but one, and that one ever.

Quid est Veritas?

Of all the actors in the Good Friday story, I've always felt a certain kinship with Pilate. (And this is not—only—because I've been playing a lot of Caesar II, which, incidentally, is quite a solid game.) Alone among the characters in the Passion narrative, it is Pilate who most closely approximates the modern man. He is a reluctant bureaucrat, loath to involve himself in some petty squabble of the Jews he was sent by Rome to rule. It is only when the crowds question his loyalty to Caesar that he finally relents and allows Christ to be crucified. Religiously speaking, Pilate has no horse in this race; at least, he's not aware of one. He questions the Nazarene about his purported kingship, and hears his reply:

³⁷You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.

But Pilate, the Modern, will have none of it: "what is truth?", he asks. What, indeed, can this provincial Jew, some carpenter's son, have to offer a man whose vision of the world has no absolutes, save self-interest?

Pilate is a compelling character not because he is a particularly good or wicked man—though I like to think of him as a secular but virtuous type, like Marcus Aurelius—but because he is the closest thing to a dispassionate spectator in the whole saga. Christ, the "bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus", then as now, inspires great love, or great revulsion, but Pilate is unmoved.

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.