After the first performance of his Eighth Symphony, one of the violinists complimented Shostakovich on the bright but peaceful finale which at last emerges from hitherto grim and alarming music. “My friend” the composer replied “if only you knew the how much blood that C Major cost me.”
I am aware that this congregation includes musicologists and music critics and, of course, I’m also talking to professional musicians, behind me. So you may wonder at my temerity in trying to talk about music. What I know about musical theory could be written on a small postcard; but what I feel has been important to me since the age of ten or so when my mother and I were asked not to sing in church as it was thought we were trying to wreck the hymns. Music means a lot to me and often in a religious way as of all the arts music seems to me best at expressing the human condition and our relation with our creator. Architecture comes close, but there again I have very little idea why some buildings, especially churches and mosques, should be so moving, so obviously spaces which tell us something about God and man. But music is not mostly written for musicians nor are buildings built for architects; they are for all to appreciate and so I shouldn’t really need to make this excuse. I’m just conscious of James’ rather stern admonition for preachers in the reading we heard, and covering my back for when it comes to the hand shake on leaving.
The first ideas for what I want to say came to me listening to the Prom performance of Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony a week or so ago; it, and the quotation with which I started, seemed to fit well with our rather serious readings from Isaiah and Mark. In a nutshell, joy and hope emerging from pain and suffering.
I was also thinking of what Francis Spufford says in his book Unapologetic, when talking about those ridiculous posters that Professor Dawkins put on London buses: “There is probably no God; now stop worrying and enjoy your life”. It is hard to know where to start in response to that, but Spufford lists all the feelings which we have which are not enjoyable, but without which our lives would be empty, and in fact lifeless. Enjoyment is not the only thing that life should be about, and sadly, those who think it is the only thing, or that it is a simple thing, are rather unlikely to find it. This is I think why the generally up-beat Isaiah, speaks, as in our reading, of the Servant, perhaps Isaiah’s own painful experience, an experience which foreshadows that of Jesus, and the experience that the Disciples find so hard to understand. We find it hard too, but I want to suggest that music might make it easier, or clearer.
Beautiful as church music often is, little of it gives me at least, the same religious buzz as one can get from, say a symphony or a string quartet. I know it’s different for others, but hope you will allow me to try to explore in a very amateurish and self-centred, way, why some of this sort of mostly secular and non-choral music has this effect on me.
In part it is a matter of time; music has an ability to both engage with terrestrial time while also, at the same time, taking us out of our normal experience of time passing and into its own time; and connected with this the fact that it is usually abstract, not directly connected with, or at least not telling, any story nor representing the visible or tangible world. It shares this abstraction with architecture and some abstract art (and much of what I say about music might apply, for example, to the work of, say, Mark Rothko).
Music sets its own boundaries of time; you must have noticed the way in which when you are held waiting to speak to someone on the telephone, a box office clerk, say, and music is played, you assume that as a piece of music comes to an end, a clerk must become free. I’m often surprised, and irritated, when that does not happen. The music with its time has taken over reality. Less trivially music can create its own reality, seemingly cut loose from the time of this world and operating to its own rules.
I see in this a useful parallel with Christianity’s concept of time; on the one hand playing out great schemes- completing the story that God starts off in Genesis, but starting again a story that will end in the second coming. And yet insisting as Jesus often does, that the time has come, the Kingdom is at hand and that we now enjoy eternal life. We have it, so to speak, both ways, we are part of a story, a chain of events but also set loose and free of past and future, and that is just how music can work creating a sense of time that is both boundless and yet regimented by rhythm and the unmistakable shape achieved by harmony (at least, I think it’s harmony and resolution that creates that feeling of knowing a piece of music is ending).
The sort of music I am talking about – symphonies, concertos, quartets and so on, does not normally represent anything nor tell a story. There are of course exceptions; and some of Shostakovich’s symphonies are among them; he described the 8th as an attempt “to reflect the terrible tragedy of war” and he also meant the suffering under Stalin’s tyranny as well. But while narrative in a literary sense is rare, there is often a feeling that the music is telling its own story in its own time; a struggle between two elements or an intimate perhaps complicated love affair. Music is particularly good at expressing resolution; peace or at least equilibrium emerging from strife or calm after a storm. The crashing and groaning, the shrieking and wailing of the earlier movements of Shostakovich’s Eighth turn themselves in the end to quiet peaceful hum, a hum which we recognise as being based in the menacing hum with which the symphony starts. We realise that the seeds of joy are held within the pain; that peace grows out of discord and that there can be no resurrection without a crucifixion.
Music is equally good at evoking an atmosphere; it cannot paint the sea but can make you feel you are on it; it is not itself frightening but can evoke fear and any number of other emotions, and-and here is perhaps unique- it can do so with all the ambiguity that we usually do feel in highly emotional states. It was its power to arouse emotion that made Plato and Tolstoy think it dangerous; for me it is ethereal, remote and wonderful, while at the same time capable of grasping you almost physically; that is how the gospel is too.
All this is you will say rather obvious and facile and indeed it is. My purpose is only to suggest that these qualities in music supplement our religious experience. We puzzle at Isaiah’s expression of his suffering set among a prophecy generally full of hope; we sympathise, I think, with the disciples in Mark who believe the kingdom has come and yet are told the king, their leader and friend will die. And even stranger that having died he will come back.
Is it fanciful to think that these are just the sorts of paradox that music can express? They are in a way irrational, but music is not bound by the reason that words require. Of course, we need words too; we believe in a God who involves himself intimately with his creation, even becoming one of us; naturally his story is told, and we attempt to describe him, in human words. But equally obviously his nature is beyond verbal descriptions and beyond terrestrial time. It’s also beyond musical description, and beyond the numinous space of a really great church or mosque, but music especially can I think bring us a little bit nearer to understanding and reconciling some of the deep paradoxes for which words struggle to make sense. Amen