The prisoners crowd out into the sunlit yard for recreation. They lounge, and argue and whisper in small groups, discussing the latest example of the prison governor’s oppressive regime. In the prison library, the prisoner who acts as librarian opens a new batch of charity books and discovers some long playing records. One of them catches his attention. He takes it together with a portable record player and heads for an office which for the moment is unattended. He locks the door and begins to connect the player up to machinery in the office. Suddenly in the prison yard below the inmates hear the sound of strings and clarinets and the voice of a countess dictating a letter to her maid. ‘Che soave zeffiretto, – how sweet the breeze will be this evening.’ The sounds spread over the whole prison and everyone stands silently listening, everyone except the guards who are trying to break down the doors of the office to stop this flagrant act of resistance to the prison regime.
On May 1st 1935 a winter assistance charity concert was given in Berlin. At the last moment Hitler announced that he would be present. The conductor entered the hall grasping his baton firmly in his right hand. Instead of giving the now customary salute he bowed quickly, turned and before the audience had stopped applauding the ominous opening chords of Beethoven’s Egmont Overture began to sound. It was the orchestra’s handyman who had suggested to Wilhelm Furtwangler that if challenged he might justify his staunch refusal to give the Nazi salute by saying that to do it with the baton in his hand might look as though he was trying to strike the Fuhrer who was seated right in front of him.
For the first performance of the Messiah in the New Music Hall in Fishamble Street in Dublin on April 13, 1742 ladies were asked to wear dresses without hoops and gentlemen to abandon their swords so that as many people as possible could be admitted. This was also a charity performance in aid of prisoners and hospital patients and for this reason the Dean of St Patrick’s, Jonathan Swift, gave his reluctant permission for the cathedral choir to collaborate in the performance of an oratorio, which was at the time seen as essentially a theatre piece. The reception was enthusiastic, though Handel’s response was to say rather wistfully, ‘I should be sorry if I only entertained them; I wished to make them better.’
Does music only entertain us, or does it do something more? Does it have the capacity to make people better? It is a question we might ask as we approach the Hampstead and Highgate Festival this month and book our seats for the concerts to be held in this church. Clearly the prisoners in my first example above, from the film, ‘The Shawshank Redemption’, were given some kind of hope by the sounds of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. And yet Hitler could sit through concerts of Beethoven’s music without perceiving the irony of his situation, while guards in the death camps held back Jewish musicians from the gas chambers so that they could play Schubert for them after dinner.
In the Bible it is a descendent of Cain, the first muderer, who invents the first musical instruments; but it is David the harpist who exorcises the evil spirit in Saul. It is clear from the book of Revelation that there is music in heaven, though one of the greatest Protestant theologians of the last century, Karl Barth, couldn’t decide whether God could listen to Mozart as well as Bach. Paul clearly thinks that music has its place in setting the mind of the community on higher things. The answer to temptation is to sing and make melody to the Lord with all your heart.
But if in spite of the Puritan rejection of organs and choirs we do continue at some cost to make music in our churches, does that music brings us closer to God? And is our appreciation of music necessarily a spiritual exercise? As we sit in Church and feel moved by performances of Purcell or Mozart, Vaughan Williams or Britten – is that really a spiritual experience? Did the officers at Auschwitz not feel the same?
The experience of great music, like the experience of all that is beautiful, is always an indicator of something in us that can be without us, nor can we tell how it entered into us.’ To be a person is to be the focus of a sounding through’ by something beyond us. Per-sonare’ from which we get our word person’ means literally to sound through’. To be a person is to be sounded through’. Listening to music is a means of self transcendence, an opening up to the other. It can put us in the place of God, as Mozart puts it in Shaffer’s Amadeus; ‘Millions of sounds ascending at once and mixing in his ear to become an unending music, unimaginable to us! That’s our job we composers; to combine the inner minds of him and him and him, and her and her – the thoughts of chamber maids and court composers – and turn the audience into God.’ But is it God or Demon – the power of music does not guarantee that those who receive it will be made better by it. In Schoenberg’s opera Moses and Aaron, Moses has nothing to sing, his is a speaking part. It is Aaron, who sings and who leads the people astray to worship the golden calf.
So perhaps there has to be also a form of ethical self transcendence in our listening. Perhaps we are to be like the wise young women at the door of the bridegroom’s house who are not just waiting there but are also alert for the host’s arrival. Our listening to music is not a passive activity, waiting for our sensibilities to be stirred, provided we don’t fall asleep. Cheap music can be potent too. Nor is our listening is to be a listening for information or the representation of a mood or image. Music conveys nothing other than itself and listening to it is a form of contemplative alertness. We allow ourselves to be taken up into the order and pattern of the sounds. We listen contemplatively not to be entertained or pacified or cheered up, but for the sake of the sounds themselves. We discount our ordinary interests in order to be taken up into the organising force of music. That force gives a sense of meaning and significance to the sounds, thought these sounds are an untranslatable language. And so through music we are given a different way of experiencing the world. Music, properly listened to, cleans the windows of our perception, and leads us into a way of living in sound which can be entirely un-self regarding.
And this is not an isolated or isolating experience. There would be something unchristian about it if it were. I have always felt deeply uncomfortable with the pianist Glen Gould’s idea that the recording would replace the concert hall because it was a means to a more pure mode of listening. Take for a moment as a parallel example the experience of dancing or team sports. Part of our pleasure in these things has to do with the satisfaction of co-ordinated movement. Such movement in agreement is a symbol of what our social life should be like. Music is perhaps an even purer form of such co-ordination – the co-ordination of singers, players, conductor, soloist and audience to form a kind of harmonious society in which we are drawn together into the music. And as we listen contemplatively so those disparate processes which make up our lives are drawn into the pattern of sound. And so the possibility emerges that when the music comes to an end we may indeed return to our world as better people, more in harmony with ourselves and one another.
With my love and prayers for good listening,
Fr Stephen
The Vicar Writes
Stephen Tucker