On Thinking with Music

Some things can only be sung

My last post about confronting the unthinkable kept me…well, thinking. Confronting unthinkable horrors through music is certainly one way of thinking the unthinkable. But I don’t think that’s the reason we have music, in the same way that we don’t have cinema just to make Salò. Art helps us to confront things that are impossible to speak about precisely because it is a distillation of experience, not just of reason: it externalizes and concentrates the stuff of human life so that we can work over it slowly and examine it. Life at life’s own pace is always moving; life at the pace of art affords us time to stop.

For me, music affords the most occasion for thought. I cannot remember a time when I didn’t sing or hum to myself, and I nearly always have a fragment of a song in the back of my mind. One of the major downsides to this is that I can’t do serious work while listening to music: the music will take all of my attention. It’s a constant and even constituent substrate of thought, but it can easily overwhelm my focus and direction if it takes center stage.

But sometimes it needs to take center stage, because there are things we can learn through music that we can’t learn in other ways, or perhaps that we might learn in those other ways but only with great difficulty. The best sacred music, I think, aspires to do this, because it is necessarily speaking to us about things that are always in excess of our understanding; this is very different from being incomprehensible. We owe it to ourselves and one another to try to understand these deep and sacred things as best we can, even as we know that this will be a lifelong task, and the combination of words that speak of sacred things and music that points beyond the words is a powerful aid. Take this prayer for a safe evening, taken from the Vespers service in the Byzantine liturgy and set to music by Benedict Sheehan:

There’s a lot here, but for me what always sticks out, probably because it’s something I’ve always had a hard time processing, is the litany that goes:

Blessed art Thou, O Lord: teach me Thy statutes.
Blessed art Thou, O Master: make me to understand Thy commandments.
Blessed art Thou, O Holy One: enlighten me with Thy precepts.

The exquisite dissonance on the last syllable of “understand” highlights, at least for me, the essential tension here: we want to understand the law, and we should want to understand it, because what God has appointed for us is holy, and if we could fully understand the law this would be equivalent to salvation. The sanctity of the law is not something I’m used to thinking about, nor is it something that historically has given me much comfort. But of course the law is holy. Marilynne Robinson, in an essay I can no longer find online, observed that if we were to actually implement the laws of the Hebrew scriptures in which, among other things, all debts were cancelled and all land sales reverted every seventh year, it would be an economic revolution beyond the present ambitions of the most ardent communists. It is law that places limits on our behavior, that divides loving action—that is, action that befits a human being—from unloving and therefore less than human action. I am led and pointed, by text set to music, beyond my own limited understanding of the law, circumscribed by my own experiences, toward a consideration of the law as mystery.

I don’t think that the liturgical music of the apostolic churches has a monopoly on this sort of thing; indeed, I think that American contributions to sacred music are, if anything, desperately underappreciated in a church music world given over to a certain amount of “old world” idolatry. Take, for example, this set of three pieces by the late Alice Parker, perhaps the greatest modern interpreter of the American Puritan musical tradition:

The first, “ComeYe that Love the Lord,” is straight out of the early American hymnic tradition that often gets referred to as “Sacred Harp,” after the book The Sacred Harp that remains in use today. It is characterized, as is all early American sacred music, by a strong beat that almost renders the choral sound percussive and by open fourths in the chords that cause a certain kind of “ring” in the harmonics. It’s a song about the joy of worship, the joy of coming together and being in the presence of God and one another, and it sounds like it! It communicates this joy in its text and in its infectious beat and in the play of the upper voices around that beat.

The second, “God is Seen,” sets a text about the ubiquitous glory of God to a ballad tune in minor. The result is almost chant=like, an interior-directed meditation on the glory of creation. That tension between the outward direction of the lyrics and the inward direction of the melodic and harmonic structure is unbelievably generative, the sort of thing you can enter into and think on for hours at a time. The meter of the text and the ballad structure can’t help but recall another American masterpiece, “Wonderous Love,” and some of the bare and solemn beauty of that better-known text shines through in this one.

The third, “Hark, I Hear the Harps Eternal,” is my personal favorite; I think it’s Parker’s masterpiece. The strong early American beat is there, but Parker’s masterful syncopation in the refrain turns variation into celebration, a calliphony of praise in the American mode, each vocal line with its own “Hallelujah” joined into a whole far greater than the sum of its parts. The verse text is anticipatory, looking forward to the afterlife, and by the time the third refrain comes around, the act of praise itself, the constitutive act of created things, has itself become attractive, drawing us through the anticipatory verse toward itself, into the praise that constitutes and consummates us as creatures. And the play and syncopation around the strong beat makes visible the order in all this, the right relation of the vision of God to our longing.

But there are other American sacred traditions than the Puritan one. This last song, Shawn Kirchner’s arrangement of “Unclouded Day,” has the same subject matter as the one just discussed, but approaches it entirely differently:

This is white gospel music in the Baptist tradition, and its relationship to Baptist theology and spirituality is obvious from the start: it is free and spontaneous, with the call-and-response of the vocal lines echoing the spread of the Good News, building up to an apocalyptic crescendo: the high B of the first soprano line is the sunrise of the new creation or the first glimpse of the face of God. Theres is no drawing-on, no journey through the vale of tears, because the work of salvation is done; the gift is given, and all that’s left for us to do is celebrate it. The joy is almost confrontational: the Good News, it says, is so simple and wonderful; why aren’t you celebrating too? Indeed, as a Christian myself, and not one given to spontaneous celebration, that confrontational quality is precisely what I think on. It lays bare the truth that the Good News should fill a Christian with overwhelming joy; if we understood it better, it surely would.

I’m not sure there’s a greater point to this except to demonstrate how some of my favorite pieces of music have acted as aids to my thinking on things that are worth taking the time to think seriously about. Maybe some of them will help you as well, or prompt you to take a closer look at why you run some of your own favorite pieces on repeat, and what they express that can’t be said in words alone.