Monday Morning Music Ministry

5-16-16

I don’t know if this is proper horticultural protocol, but I have long defined weeds as flowers and plants that are ugly or inconvenient. After one springtime battle with pretty purple crownvetch that misbehaved – seeming to grow four feet along the garden every night as I slept, choking delicate and expensive plantings – I decided on this definition.

In the same way, there are things in life that have elusive dictionary definitions, but are commonly accepted by humankind. “Beauty” is one of these things. Classic episodes of “The Twilight Zone” aside, we humans all pretty much agree with what is beautiful. In appearance, music, art, sunsets, and buffet tables. (A Supreme Court justice made the same point in a very different way when he stated he could not define pornography “but I know it when I see it.”)

There is a popular saying that did not originate (as 90 per cent of popular sayings seem to) in the Bible or Shakespeare. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is from the novel “Molly Bawn” (1878) by Margaret Wolfe Hungerford. There’s a trivia question, or answer, for you. We hear it all the time. It is not true; but it rings true.

I say this because there are certain innate perceptions and instincts, and an elemental sort of consensus about what constitutes beauty. Not without exception, but largely. Once upon a time, but… less and less it is the case.

People Magazine has an annual issue announcing its “Sexiest Man Alive” (Esquire claims the distaff honors) and it is revealing of our sorry age. First, we see that “Sexy” has replaced “Beautiful” in our estimation. And it is dismissive of almost anyone other than Hollywood stars. Where are the Africans, Asians, Semitics, Martians? Beauty has been debased. I usually disagree, actually, with their coronations… but who am I to argue with supermarket checkout-line pronouncements?

One of the first philosophers, Plato, had beauty, and other things, figured out when he celebrated harmony in music. Why chords and harmony please our ears he did not ascertain, and neither have we; but he theorized that harmony on earth – in music, poetry, debates, colors, fashion, relationships – is a reflection of heavenly harmony. Heaven? The pagan Plato? Yes, he believed that there is such a thing as abstract truth.

Abstract Truth might be unknowable, Plato thought, but humankind ennobles itself by striving for it; to try to know it; to manage to practice it. Unlike his rival Aristotle, he was on to something. In fact it is why the early Christian fathers considered themselves Neo-Platonists. The Bible, and the Person of Jesus Christ, embody Absolute Truth.

Harmony: the goal of artists, composers, musicians, poets for millennia. Today, a lot of music employs dissonance. Literature dwells on chaos. Art depicts the sordid and degenerate. Drama and movies are obsessed with conflict and disaster. These tendencies do not vitiate our conception of Beauty and Harmony, or Plato’s postulation, no. They confirm the fact that people who love beauty and seek harmony are seeking, consciously or subconsciously, Absolute Truths in their lives. And a world turned ugly is reflected in the arts.

Where is Beauty? We have replaced the concept with many perverted versions. Where is Harmony? It has been drowned out by the cacophony of self-indulgence and hate in contemporary life. God planted these instincts in us! He programmed His children to love and seek Absolute Truth and the beautiful, harmonious things of God.

A lost generation cannot cherish beauty, harmony, and truth, when it believes those qualities do not beckon them in wonderful ways, abstract but attainable. They think, if there is no such thing as Absolute Truth in a Heaven that does not exist, how can it have relevance on earth? Hence, everything is polluted, from art to treatment of our fellow man.

If beauty and harmony are good things, there is a universe that is home to them.

If Abstract Truth exists, giving us all a conscience and a sense of justice, then something… some One… has placed them within us.

With history’s exceptions (let us call them people yielding to sin) like war and persecution, we all seek lives and hope for a world of beauty and harmony. We sense, and we know, that Creation, uncorrupted, is what once we collectively shared, and what innately we seek.

Beauty, harmony, and Truth must have authors. And so, if there is a Creation, there must be a Creator. Why people fight against this self-evidence is a mystery, but no more so than people who temporarily go mad and choose today’s things we listed above: dissonance, chaos, the sordid and degenerate, conflict and disaster. Hate. Sin.

The God of the Universe – the God of the Bible, author of Salvation – exists. And He grieves at our current course. Jesus was and is our substitutionary payment, suffering death that we deserve before a Holy God, so that we might be free to commune with the Author of Beauty, Harmony, and Truth, forever.

Like the man with the muck-rake in “Pilgrim’s Progress,” let us take our eyes from the slop we live in every day, somehow getting muddier and muddier. And look upward. “Abstract” does NOT mean “non-existent.” It means of a different substance. Manifested in different ways, through other ways. Like Truth, and in beauty and harmony.

Jesus, recorded in Mark 21, said that “our hearts incline toward evil.” A desperate condition. But our souls seek beauty, harmony, and Truth, and on that path with Him lies our redemption.

+ + +

Real Clear Religion, on whose site many readers have followed Monday Music Ministry, has been to many people an indispensible part of their daily fare. It is going through changes right now after almost seven years.

For those who have followed us on RCR, please be sure to continue receiving our weekly essays by Subscribing to Monday Morning Music Ministry. (See link under “Pages” at right.)

+ + +

Click: Beauty and Harmony: Grimaud plays Beethoven
The second movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto. Helene Grimaud; The Hessicher Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester, Frankfurt; Paavo Jarvi, conducter.

10-6-14

Some years ago I was a guest on a local program somewhere in New England on a National Public Radio station, “The Man and His Music.” Under today’s politically correct strictures, especially on NPR, I suppose the series would be called, “The Person and His/Her Predilections,” or some such nonsense. (Maybe even “His/Her/Its”) Anyway, the premise of the series was to explore a guest’s personality through discussions of musical taste and favorite pieces, in addition to the standard celebrity-interview fare.

We authors or actors or athletes were, naturally, asked to send our choices in advance of the studio interview, and to provide (ancient history, kiddies) cassette tapes of our favorite songs or snippets of music. The hostess was well-versed in music, and could discuss or at least intelligently explore any style of music from any period of history, from Renaissance to jazz.

True to my catholic tastes, as old friends of this column will know, my choices ranged from Baroque to Bluegrass. And at least half the choices, for the two-hour program, were church pieces. Movements from cantatas and masses; traditional hymns; contemporary gospel. The man and his music, right?

It developed that eclecticism was fine for the show, but only so much. Between discussions of my books and travels and hobbies were the musical cut-aways, followed by chats about them. The hostess was glad to discuss the fact I knew several jazzmen who had played with Bix Beiderbecke; and had heard Mozart performed in Salzburg; and that I had been backstage at the Grand Ole Opry. But when my choices were Christian pieces, the conversation turned cold. Invariably we rushed to a new topic.

Not only did those musical clips carry a gospel message, but my discussion – why these pieces were special to me, the putative theme of the series – perforce touched upon what made them special, too, to the composers, performers, and the intended audiences. The stories behind the songs; the messages in the music.

I don’t think it was a particular prejudice of the hostess. Clearly, it reflected the culture at (taxpayer-supported, we constantly are reminded) National Public Radio. But, more, it reflects the culture of contemporary America. The post-modern, post-Christian world.

There is a reason I tie my weekly messages to music. I believe music is the most imaginative language devised by mankind, and always a pulse-reading of the broader culture. My ideas about music are based on those of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. They believed that harmony is a somewhat elusive quality that is yet irreducible when achieved: we know it when we hear it. Harmony is to be sought in life as well as in music. Harmony represented the Absolute Truth that Plato knew existed, and whose perfect possession might be impossible for mortals, but whose pursuit is essential for our worthwhile selves. (This philosophical summary three centuries before the birth of Jesus explains why early Christian theologians were called Neo-Platonists.)

Renaissance artists found a “new birth,” artistically, in the arts of the ancients, specifically the Greeks. Sculpture and architecture, principally. Literature followed, though awkwardly; and eventually dance and music, in ideals rather than forms (which were historically obscure until very recently). All through the church age, and finding its apogee in the Renaissance despite an interest in outward Athenian expression, art’s main function was to embody the meanings and purposes of God. Gradually, aided and abetted by political freedoms, the empowerment of the printing press, and a philosophical zeitgeist in the West that morphed from Humanism to Individualism to Selfishness, the rationale for all artistic expression, in all manifestations, changed.

Now, instead of artists striving to please God, they strive to please themselves.

Beginning in music (and speaking very generally) around Beethoven’s time, the artist became more important than his music; the music more important than the One it once served. Beethoven, however, was truly a transitional figure in this discussion; although something of a “tortured soul,” he was a fervent Christian, as were his immediate contemporaries among composers. Hummel, Field, Czerny, and especially Mendelssohn (ironically, a Jew, converted to Lutheran Christianity) were intensely personal in their compositions without rejecting traditional forms, or faith. But the next generation of composers felt it necessary to be rebels in morality as well as in their music. Composers were expected to have troubled personal lives, to bare their souls in their music, and to offer cathartic or excruciating exposures of their selves. Portraits of the artists. Listeners came to assume that artists were tormented. Artistic heroes are encouraged to wallow in personal revelations, the uglier the better.

True in music and painting, it became the norm in all of the arts, and in fact throughout all of society: that the world, our lives, our very civilization, is so rotten and contemptible that we must honor the artists who struggle to express their disdain and their doomed efforts to resist. Honored the most are those who can describe the best what stinks the worst. Of course, then, society honors leaders and politicians who base their programs on similar perceptions of a loathsome society. They can only address the evils (as they see them) of the Old Order with solutions and systems that reject any trace of traditional wisdom.

This explains where we are as a culture, and why we are doomed, I believe. (Really doomed; not the trendy ennui of parlor dyspeptics.) Beyond music, every expression from poetry to politics reflects the fact that we are a people who have cut ourselves off from God. We no longer make decisions – personal or civic, artistic or political – based on God’s Word, on praying for divine guidance, on trusting the faith of our fathers, on seeking to please Him. And – I hope this is obvious – this analysis pertains to all societies and their religions, not only the Christian West. But as a legatee of Western Civilization that crumbles around me, that is what I address today. So should we all.

And I am quite happy to debate which package of factors is the cart and which is the horse. “Art imitates life” is an ancient maxim. Its apposite response (called anti-mimesis) was provided by Oscar Wilde, who maintained that “life imitates art.” But most recently the real challenge – I should say a lucid perception of our world’s post-Christian dilemma – was voiced by the brilliant Russian émigré, the critic Alexander Boot: that among the ruins of Western Civilization that we have come to call home, Art imitates death.

Having ignored, banned, ridiculed, insulted, and rejected God for so long in the post-Christian West, how can we expect otherwise?

+ + +

I could choose a hundred thousand musical pieces, few from the past 150 years, to accompany this essay. I have chosen a video that is in itself a work of art, the DeutscheGrammophon production of the supernal Helene Grimaud playing the second movement of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Concert Nr 23 in A, K. 488. Close-ups of her technique, her sensitive expressions, and nature scenes. God is glorified.

Click: Mozart Adagio