David was a King who made music. He was ‘the man whom the High God raised up, the anointed Prince of the God of Jacob, and the singer of Israel’s psalms.’ Knowing as we do the complexity and ambiguity of David’s character his problems with women, his deviousness and scheming it seems odd that he should also have been Israel’s greatest religious poet and musician. (We now know of course that David did not write all of the psalms but no matter his name is forever associated with them). The rabbis thought it was odd too and produced a salutary story just to keep David’s reputation in perspective. As he completes the last psalm David proudly boasts to God, ‘Have you a creature that proclaims your praises more than I?’ At which point a frog pipes up that he chants the praises of the creator far more often than David. And what is more when it’s time for him to die he goes down to the sea and allows himself to be swallowed up by one of its creatures so even his death is an act of kindness. It is not recorded what David’s response was or whether the frog’s example inspired him to donate his body after death to medical research.
With all that in mind we might even so be inspired to wonder whether it would be good if our political leaders should be creative musicians or failing that at least spend time listening to great music. The history of the 20th century, however, does not suggest that we would necessarily benefit from such musical taste in our national leaders. Perhaps we might resort to a distinction made by that one time Hampstead resident Sir Thomas Beecham: ‘The English may not like music but they absolutely love the noise it makes.’ How might our leaders be influenced if they liked or even loved music rather than just the noise it makes? To love music is to love the ineffable. Though we expend a lot of words on music the purpose of music is to express what cannot be explained. We may talk about the language of music but it is not a language that communicates anything other than itself. Music may give us a variety of subjective experiences but we can never claim such experience as anything like ‘ the meaning of the music.’ Music may accompany words but when different composers set the same words they always come up with something different. The number of completely different settings of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis at this service is evidence of that. Even numerous settings by the same composer are very different as Herbert Howells demonstrates this evening. That setting is much less affected by the words than by the acoustical demands of St Paul’s Cathedral. Music means nothing other than the sounds we hear, and though composers may try to convey rivers or galloping horses or ox carts in their music we don’t in the end judge the music by the accuracy of its representational powers. To love music we leave words behind.
But does that mean we enter a world of emotion? In part perhaps, but again we do not judge music by its emotional content, nor can we be sure that the emotions we feel are identical with what someone else feels or with the emotion of the composer as he wrote the music. If we love music because of the emotion it makes us feel we are in danger of loving it simply for the noise it makes. So a true love of music passes beyond words and emotion.
All of which goes to show that it is pointless to ask the question, ‘what is music for?’ Of course music can serve the purpose of entertainment, worship, state occasions, the pacification of nervous passengers in an aeroplane, but no-one would say that is actually what music is for. Music is nothing other than itself; it is therefore a complete waste of time. Though we might also say that music is made, by making the best use of time. Music takes our time and rearranges it; it does things to us by taking us into a different experience of time to which we must open ourselves up. Unless we can so give away our time, music has nothing to give us, it cannot work its enchantment on us.
And the power of music is a particular kind of enchantment. Something enchanted is something changed. Bewitchment immobilises and makes its victims passive. Enchantment transforms so that Cinderella or the Beast are turned into their proper selves.
So to love music and to listen to it means giving ourselves to something ineffable beyond words or emotions something which demands our time and our attention for no purpose other than to give us of itself. Music changes us in time but only through an experience of time which is beyond our normal experience of time. And it gives itself to us only gradually and through repeated listening where what is heard is never the same. And afterwards we can never say if we have learned anything only that over time perhaps we find ourselves changed. We hear differently but what we hear is still the same music. All of which goes to show that listening to music is not unlike listening to God not the same as… but perhaps a preparation for prayer. And if our leaders could find time to listen, then perhaps they would be better at leading- they might find that ‘the fundamental things apply as time goes by’. Amen.
Stephen Tucker