Category: Music

Tonight it's The Simon and Garfunkel Story, at the Music Hall in Aberdeen. These are the two demi-Gods of my own teenage years, I thought then as now they have a sound and a voice that ranges from playful to poignant, from mischief to wistfulness, from passionate political protest to love fulfilled or requited. And as a young man I sensed there was a seriousness in their take on life, a humanity and compassion in many of their lyrics, anger and resistance to those forces and social realities that dehumanise, from civil rights to Vietnam, from urban poverty to human exploitation. That may all sound idealistic, and much of it is, but listening to them nearly 50 years after Sound of Silence was released, their own peculiar sound still re-awakens memories of my own emerging view of a world where JFK, MLK, Vietnam, CND and other issues and causes were worked out in my own developing sense of who I was and who I wanted to be, and what I thought of the world. 

Years later, hearing an actor reading Robert Frost's poem, Acquainted with the Night, I sensed the emotional and imaginative connections with the lyrics of The Sound of Silence. So tonight is a tribute show – but for me it has longer roots in my memory. It's an interesting question how formative repeated listening to resonant lyrics borne on music that is emotionally potent can be on moral taste, pers0nal values, life choices and our ability to think for ourselves. Of course we grow away from music of such powerful immediacy, but not before it has touched us into a different awareness of who we are and what matters to us. 

There were plenty other groups and artists pouring out music in that decade of my growing up that was the 1960's, when nearly all the classic Simon and Garfunkel songs were produced. They have made a life habit of falling out, re-uniting then splitting again. Paul Simon particularly has pursued a solo career of considerable substance. But the songs in the musical tonight are the iconic ones, given context in narrative and dialogue between the songs. I'm expecting to be a wee bit nostalgic – and grateful for the giftedness of such music into our lives. The Sound of Silence, I am a Rock, Bookends, Homeward Bound, Cecilia, The Boxer, Bridge Over Troubled Water – take your pick, they are masterpieces in my canon of classic folk rock!

For those who want poetry here are two brilliant evocations of urban life, its anxieties, loneliness and understated menace to the humanity of those who live in cities where the drivers are not self-evidently beneficial to those who live there.

Acquainted With the Night (Robert Frost)

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain — and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
A luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

The Sound of Silence (Paul Simon)

At just the right time, when we were powerless, Christ died for us….. (Romans 5.6) If you believe God is livingly active in the creation and sustaining of the world, then, it seems to me that now and again we are also likely to catch Him out at His providential being there before us. I've always felt the personal force of that first clause, "At just the right time….." Just now and again in my life, things have fallen into place in ways I didn't plan, couldn't see coming, and even as they happened didn't tumble to their  significance then, or the part they would play in this unfolding story that is my life.

The providence of God is both a comfort and a worry. So, I believe God is actively present in His Creation, and therefore in the details of an ordinary life of this one human being amongst billions, on this planet for a human lifetime, in one of any number you can think of galaxies and keep adding zeros? Really? This is one of those thoughts that theologians have never grasped, not for want of trying with big words and bigger and bigger concepts – omniscience, omnipresence, aseity, omnipotence, eternity. But am I really saying everything that happens is God's doing? No I'm not, but I can't get away from those times when the coincidence of time and circumstance in my own life at that time and place, has happened too often to ignore the thought that God was at it again.

I think providence is a tough doctrine to get my head round; but those occasional life coincidences, when "Just at the right time…" a grace unspeakable rescued me, are far too significant to be dissolved in the technical discourse of philosophical theology, cosmology, psychology or epistemology. Which brings me to music, and one evening when music washed across the aridity of a heart that was losing its rhythms, with affections disabled and suffering a diminishing grasp of purpose. Eliot described such pain with searing precision. 

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.   (Waste Land, II, 19-24)

I've been in places like that. Some years ago, sitting in the home of a special friend, talking out of my own aridity and emptiness, in the background a piece of music was playing I had never heard before. "At just the right time", the kind unjudging words of a supportive friend who understood, were accompanied by background music which flowed like streams into the emptiness, slowly filling the long dry fissures turning them into new rivulets. The music didn't solve all the problems, how could it? But the insistent beauty, the patient harmonies, the composure and assurance, were like the gentle drizzle which slowly softens the surface, making it receptive to the coming deluge. And that's all hope needed. Drizzle!

The music was Spem in Alium – English Translation:

I have never put my hope in any other

but in You, O God of Israel

who can show both anger and graciousness,

and who absolves all the sins

of suffering man

Lord God,

Creator of Heaven and Earth

be mindful of our lowliness

Latin Original

 Spem in alium nunquam habui

Praeter in te, Deus Israel

Qui irasceris et propitius eris

et omnia peccata hominum

in tribulatione dimittis

Domine Deus

Creator caeli et terrae

respice humilitatem nostram

Here's Harry Christopher and The Sixteen performing in concert: You need ten minutes to listen to this.The last four minutes are applause!

The tapestry is called Shalom (I) and is a colour exegesis of Iasiah 35 verses 1 and 6. This was worked out of that remembered experience of grace drenched music.

Music, poetry, art. I can't imagine life without regular exposure to these life-giving rays of sunlight, sure sources of Vitamin D for the soul. I love books but refuse to have my study walls lined with bookcases. There must be space for pictures, visual nourishment. There must be time for at least one poem, one chunk of something that comes as a gift to the mind and a word to the heart. And there must be music, sounds that compose us even as they have been composed and played by others.

I've tried to think of the piece of music or song I've listened to most and am surprised at how hard it is to answer that self imposed question. At different times in my life I've listened to some songs or pieces of music repeatedly, then they have fallen off my top 20 for a while, maybe for good. There are songs that are now part of who I am because I've played them off and on for decades. There are songs and musical compositions I've only discovered relatively recently and wondered how I never came across them before, and thanked God that they found me. 

I've a lot of friends who are more knowledgeable about music than I, and whose tastes are very different, who play music as well as listen to it, and from them I've received an informal if patchy and often unintended education. To take only classical music, Brahms' Violin Concerto, Gabriel's Oboe, Spem in Alium, Bernstein's Chichester Psalms (Psalm 23, and 2 Adonai ro i),  are musical gifts others urged on me. Listening to them has become as easy as a conversation with someone who knows me deeply, but stops short of stripping away the mystery of the self I am. Hearing the recurrent newness in the familiar, listening to music that has taken root in us restores and renews our 'muchness'; as the Mad Hatter said to Alice,“You used to be much more…"muchier." You've lost your muchness.” Music therapy is when those few pieces of music that know us better than we know them, do their restoration work on our 'muchness'.

Gabriel's Oboe is a masterpiece of sound that heals, restores, lifts up. In the context of the film, The Mission, it carries a powerful critique of the savagery of civilisation as Christianization. It is this gentle music, played on an early baroque instrument in the South American jungle, that first arouses the curiosity and ultimately the conversion of the native people. The film exposes with unsparing criticism of power-seeking religion the consequences of such surrender and vulnerability. This solo piece expresses the contradiction between the spiritual devotion of those remarkable priests to God and to the community of native peoples, and the ugly violence of real-politik, empire and greed of Church and State. This is music at its most poignant, potent with possibility, vulnerable in its beauty, therapy for cynicism.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCOBWxUZbmA

Well I preached my sermon on music therapy, and like many a sermon, once it's preached, the preacher was less impressed than some of the other hearers. One of the legacies of being a theological educator which includes the formation of preachers, is the difficulty in switching off the critically evaluative programme, and the "areas for further development and improvement" programmes that run in the background of the mind. So I could take the same texts now and preach them better – and maybe I will.

But that story in Acts 16.1-16 on Paul and Silas curing the local Mystic Meg at Philippi and falling foul of the local religious mafia is worth some second thoughts. So they cure the girl, then get arrested, badly beaten up and whipped; in a piece of security overkill they're locked up in the high security cell with manacles and chains and a personal jailer, and at  midnight they start singing. Then there's an earthquake and the doors come off their hinges and the padlocks and chains fall off from their own weight and we think it's a miracle. Well I guess the self exploding hinges and padlocks are just that, the things that happen when God's around.

But sometimes it's the miracle we don't see that triggers the miracle we do see. "At midnight they started singing"… This isn't Johnny Depp the Pirate, high on whatever and easily outwitting some dumb Hollywood stooge. These are flesh and blood preachers who have just had the ultimate feedback and they are beaten up, locked up and washed up, pain, prison and persecution. "At midnight they started praising God and singing…", now that in itself is miracle enough. Music-making becomes an act of both defiance and trust. One of the oldest forms of revolution as music reconfigures the inner world. Not the external circumstances we see, but what we don't see; not the vision of chains, welts on the back and locked doors, but a vision of hope, freedom and new beginnings, formed and affirmed by singing about God to God, just for the heaven if it!

Here's the question? Those times when we are beat up, chained by circumstances we can't break out of, closed in by the limitations of the life that's given us, sore with pains no one else can understand, wishing for freedom from the way it is; what would happen if in the midnight of our disconsolation we sought consolation in the God whose gift is the life we are now living? And what if that consolation was sought in music, either our own or someone else's, those sounds so beautiful, or rebellious, melodies so evocative or provocative, tunes which tune and retune the heart. No wonder totalitarian regimes censor composers and performers, poets and lyricists, artists and musicians. The therapy music delivers may well be instilling the determination to be transformative, persistent and defiant of all that diminishes, constrains and hurts human life. That transformative determination is captured in one of the jolliest renditions of Puritan theology I know! go listen This is John Bunyan set to the kind of music he would have enjoyed!

"And around midnight they started singing and praising God…."

Too many long and heavy posts here just now. Not surprising, it's a heavy world just now.  But time for a change on note, tone, pace and sound. As I just told my Facebook friends, I'm preaching this morning on Music Therapy! I Samuel 18.1-11 where David clearly displeases one of the X factor judges, and Acts 16.16-34.

When the discordant circumstances of life, the cacophony of voices pulling and pushing us, or the remorseless electronic beeps of a life too full of connectivity are ignored, and we choose to praise, look for reasons to be grateful and to wonder. Like Paul and Silas in ACts 16, "jammin' and singin'" in chains, on a cold stone floor at midnight…….

The photo was taken in Vienna, Mozart is one of my favourite musical therapists – I have a one hour journey each way – time for the clarinet concerto – then on the way home the very best of Emmy Lou Harris.

This week the posts will pick up on Charles Wesley's rock concert approach to life when he gets carried away by the music and throws his crown at the feet of Jesus, "lost in wonder, love and praise." Let's start there! I know Christian life was never meant to be a lifelong rock concert for rockers, or a lifelong symphony for classical buffs, or a lifelong (Lord help us) country western ballad for us country music fans. But to think of worshipping God as being present at a live concert of our favourite music, played or sung by those artists who can stir our soul, who can make us laugh or cry and either way shed tears, and just occasionally take our understanding of ourselves and our lives and of the love of God, to a new level or a new depth – that would be music therapy.

Here's one that does it for me – every time. For my fortieth birthday Sheila bought me a pre-digital Technics sound system. The first CD I played on it contains this track. It reverberated throughout our granite built house and I could feel it vibrate in my bones – it still lifts me into those secret places of emotional inner expression where prayer, worship, loss and longing, sadness and joy, weariness and vitality, merge into a sense of something vaster than me, which enlarges, heals and summons us towards that which finally and fully allows us to be who we are. 

Jessye Norman, singing the Sanctus from Gounod

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYmaznpLMz8

I once read a book that I enjoyed so much I immediately read it again. On second reading I was no longer seeing trees walking, but realised I was learning to see into some of the depths of human experience, the glory and the anguish, the cosmic and the tragic. Except it wasn't so much seeing, as listening, and allowing remembered sound to ignite my imagination as I read words of explanation, suggestive and serious and transforming. With mind aflame, the ideas and visions took hold in the mind as I listened to this piece of music yet once again, but doing so having read an exposition of the piece by someone who had heard, and seen, and written, and whose words had opened windows, which opened vistas, and so I began to begin to understand.

All of that reads as pretentious and contrived waffle, perhaps. It will sound even more so when I say that I don't remember the title of the book, nor the author, nor do I still have it. I don't know where it went, and it is one of the few lasting regrets I have in my life with books that I have been unable to recall the details that would let me revisit it. And 35 years later I do an Amazon search with no success.

It was about Beethoven's nine symphonies. I had begun to listen seriously to Beethoven in my 20's, and I can even remember reading the book in my study, in Partick in Glasgow, on a sunny day, probably around 1978. The chapter that jolted me awake expounded the Fifth Symphony. That piece of music can cause problems with the other folk in our house because it has to be played with the volume appropriate to a work expressing in symphonic form controlled rage, looming tragedy, dignified lament, blazing triumph and fate defied rather than deified.

The book was like an essay on psychological archaeology, a careful sifting through layers of social, cultural and personal experience, to discover clues to the complex potency and spiritual impetus which was released by Beethoven into the composition process that gave birth to his Fifth Symphony. That I lost the book, I regret, and still as I write this, I feel its absence, and puzzle at my carelessnes. But. All is not lost.

Every time I play the Firth Symphony I listen for some of the clues which gave birth to ideas, emotions and inner visions those years ago. So I have just ordered a new book, The First Four Notes. Beethoven's Fifthy Symphony and the Human Imagination. No it won't be the same book, but maybe it will further enrich what for me is epiphanic music, eye-opening, life enhancing and mind expanding. It's a celebration of one of the most famous musical openings in Western Music, and a recpetion history of the influence of the Fifth across Europe and beyond. I'm not qualified as a musician, I don't play an instrument, but if these significant deficits can be overcome I'll write a review of this book when I've read it.

We're soon going to know the list of those nominated for the Queen's New Year Honours list. The process of identifying, recommending and nominating those to be honoured I'd hope has criteria beyond the person's fame, capacity to influence or celebrity profile. I'd like there to be two specific criteria. :

Is the person a great human being?

Have they contributed  to human compassion and inspired us to be more humane?

The answer to the second would help answer the first. Now I admit this post didn't begin with a thought about the New Years Honours List. It started with me listening to a piece of music and thinking for the umpteenth time that the violinist is one of the greatest human beings I've admired in my lifetime. That sparked the question, what makes someone a great human being?

Generous outward looking compassion.

Discontent with injustice.

Love for a broken world. 

Bringer of joy into the lives of others.

Cherishing of human worth.

Communication across cultures.

Hopeful poise towards the future.

Moral integrity and courage. 

That isn't an exhaustive list. It certainly won't be universally agreed. But for me it describes Yehudi Menuhin. I first encountered Menuhin on an EMI recording of Brahms' Violin Concerto, the first classical record I ever listened to at the age of 20! A mind and soul that was soaked exclusively in the ferment of the music of the late 60's and early 70's, had no idiom or discourse to interpret what I was hearing. I remember the joyful bewilderment, the humbling realisation that there are other languages than my own, deeper chords in my being than I knew, longings from who knows where. These were awakened by the creative power, remorseless beauty, corrective harmony and proffered vision of an artist at the height of his powers commanding attention with the overwhelming argument of that wordless language of the human heart and spirit which we call music. I still can't hear the first bars of the second movement without remembering with grateful embarrassment that epiphany in sound which conferred such a generous invitation to come, to hear, and to relinquish that culpable arrogance that thinks it knows, and discovers such arrogance is ignorance.

There are different ways God invades our lives and subverts our certainties. Ever since that afternoon, music has had the power to do this to me. Not long after I read Menuhin's autobiography, Unfinished Journey. That's when I became interested in what moves and inspires, what gives moral content and human value, what is that inexplicable quality that is expressed through the creative kenosis that enables music to express human integrity, transcendent beauty and those deep truths of existence out of which our joys and tragedies are fashioned. Amongst other things it is the list of attributes of what I consider makes a great human being. On my own unfinished journey, Yehudi Menuhin has been a recurring humanising presence whose gift was the opening up of a new inner universe.

Ever since I read a review in Sojourners years ago, I've listened to the music of Carrie Newcomer.  She is one of my favourite singer songwriters,(Mary Chapin Carpenter being another) strongly connected with the Quakers, outspoken on issues of justice and peace, a poet of human relationships of love, loss, forgiveness and joy, and a singer whose voice ranges from conversational confidence to a clarion call to community and convictions essential to human flourishing.

She writes and sings out of a life committed to Christian principles and practices, but the spiritual is an undercurrent, a powerful but gentle pulling of the listener to consider and ponder, wonder and care for what goes on around us.

I've just ordered her Geography of Light album, another collection of songs that gently and at times peruasively, and occasionally assertively, invite or demand that the listener pays attention. Attentiveness to people, to our inner world, to the situations of others, to those ordinary experiences that hint at the extraordinary, and to the mundane which can contain mystery – Newcomer balances the poetry and the music, and the result is a style that is somewhere between folk and progressive country, but always the sense that wisdom, insight and compassionate observance of human longings and behaviour inform her thought and suffuse her music.

Her membership of the Quakers is for her a natural commitment, a spiritual context within which she is at peace and an ethos of gentle enquiry that resonates with her own reflective appreciation of human living, longing and loving – the emphases on peace, silence, pondering deeply, community building, and shared wisdom are not so much themes in her songs as presuppositions and assumptions of her poetry and her worldview.

There is some irony in her being voted one of the ten most influential musicians working in the States just now, and her not being as widely known as that would suggest. So this is an unabashed plug for her music, and her voice as a call to pay attention to the life we are living, and to be attentive to those who share that life.