Music and Devotion

December 6, 2011 Leave a comment

Score by Tomás Luis de Victoria

Please excuse the pun, but, increasingly, I’m finding the devotional music of the late Renaissance a serene counterpoint to the, at times, overly insistently dynamic and goal-oriented music of my guru, Beethoven. There are times when you just want music to wash over you; to carry you away; to allow yourself to be lost in the sweet and earnest beauty of its ceaselessly interweaving counterpoint.

I am vaguely familiar with only very little of this music. I am aware of just a few works of the more famous composers of this period: the Missa Pape Marcelli by Palestrina, the marvellous forty-part motet, Spem in Alium by the Tudor master of polyphony, Thomas Tallis, which at times creates a ‘wall of sound’ far move overwhelming that anything created by Phil Spector in the 1960s. One candidate for the current pop classic of this period is Allegri’s Miserere from around 1630. I love the televised version of this piece by Harry Christophers and the Sixteen, where the boy soprano is replaced by a female soprano in singing the soaring high notes, culminating in the famous top Cs. This music is hauntingly beautiful.

For anyone who is not a devout Catholic the words of much of this music can be very hard to connect with. A common theme seems to be self-abasement, verging on self-loathing, before God: “And my sin is ever before me… Against You only have I sinned and done evil in Your sight… Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity and in sin did my mother conceived me.” I find some of these sentiments obnoxious; all the more so since I believe that the most insidious effect of Roman Catholicism is to exercise its hold on the faithful by instilling in them an overpowering sense of sin from which only the Church can offer salvation from eternal torment. To me, this abuse of power is nothing short of an evil in itself (Darwin thought this to be a “damnable doctrine”).

So, how are we to respond to this music? For the most part, I like most others I suspect, have hitherto just ignore the words as I allow myself to be lost in its ethereal beauty.

However, I found a recent BBC4 programme on the Spanish 16th Century composer, Tomás Luis de Victoria (sometimes called da Vittoria), has had quite a profound impact on me; not only by providing me with an approach I might take when listening to the music of this period, but also by giving me a glimpse of what is missing from my own spiritual life, devoid as it is of any notion of a personal god.

Victoria was an ordained priest and seems to be a genuine mystic, someone who devoted himself as a man, as well as a musician, to a heart-felt contemplation of the divine. Such was his personal commitment to his spiritual calling that his music, which is less cerebrally contrapuntal than that some of his predecessors, such as Palestrina, has a direct impact on the listeners’ emotions, directly communicating his own very personal feelings of devotion, especially, to the Virgin Mary and to the story of Christ’s Passion. Much of Victoria’s music also has an ecstatic quality; in this he probably took as his example his early spiritual mentor, Teresa (later Saint Theresa) of Ávila, who was the subject of Bernini’s famous sculpture the Ecstasy of St Teresa.

I’ve concluded that the best way for me to listen to this music of this period is neither to ponder the literal meaning of the words, nor to just to let the music wash over me, inducing a mindless sense of calm. I feel there is far more to gained by engaging imaginatively in the experience that it seeks to communicate: a devotion to the highest and most beautiful ideal that can be conceived, and in so doing, to try to empty myself of all sense of self and will – a fundamental spiritual practice in its own right.

I am therefore left to ponder how we might incorporate into a non-theistic spirituality of the Global Age practices that engender contemplations of equivalent beauty and spiritual power. The Buddhist tradition is very rich in meditative practices that have developed over many centuries since the Buddha’s time, such as the Brahmaviharas – the sublime abodes, as taught by the Buddha himself, and the much later Tonglen practice. Wonderful and essential as some of the traditional practices are, my feeling is that they are not complete. Essential elements of a new spirituality would be a sense of awe and wonder at being an integral part of creation and a love for the World and a devotion to its further blossoming. For me, these explicit sentiments are completely missing from Buddhism.  I therefore hope that new meditative practices will emerge that tap into the capacity that virtually everyone has (sadly, perhaps not most psychopaths) to experience what might be called the divine (our Buddha Nature as its called in Mahayana Buddhism) and in so doing, to find a devotion to a calling to bring love, beauty, joy, understanding and compassion into the World.

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J.S. Bach’s Chaconne

November 7, 2011 Leave a comment

The last movement of Bach‘s Partita for Solo Violin in D Minor is the famous Chaconne, surely the work of a musical superman.

I will complete this post soon.

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Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony

November 7, 2011 1 Comment

Beethoven in 1818 by August Klöber

Image via Wikipedia

I have always thought that the Pastoral Symphony in F Major (No6) is a very special piece of music, even for Beethoven.

One could dismiss this symphony as music from a bygone age, ostensibly depicting a rural idyll from a time when Beethoven’s Vienna of the first decade of the 19th Century was hardly aware of the industrial age that was being born in Britain at that time.

In the 20th Century modern consciousness seemed to be primarily concerned with the urban and the industrial. But, in what is sometimes called the post-industrial age, there is a much wider understanding of our dependance upon a global eco-system that comprises all living things. Our modern conciousness is now imbued with a sense of anxiety about the damage we’re inflicting upon the natural world and a renewed sense of its wonder and fragility. Until we are superseded by intelligent machines or human-machine hybrids we should be more than happy to consider ourselves to be works of nature. That being so, this symphony celebrates one great man’s response to the fundamental nature of our being – that we are a part of the greatest miracle in the known Universe: the living Earth.

The symphony is in five movements, rather than the usual four and, uniquely for a Beethoven Symphony, has as a programme, although he was at pains to stress that the  symphony is “more the expression of feeling than of painting”. Beethoven described the five movements as follows:

1. Awakening of cheerful feelings upon arrival in the country: When Beethoven’s rather fast tempo markings are followed this movement has a somewhat jaunty air. The music contains several short motifs that are continuously repeated and interwoven, conveying the sense of nature continually burgeoning and blossoming. The movement culminates in a deep sense of contentment.

2. Scene by the brook:Beethoven’s most beautiful orchestration and one of his most serene and sublimely joyful pieces.(in 2 parts on YouTube: Part1 & Part2)

3. Happy gathering of country folk: A scherzo, an energetic country dance, rather than a minuet; we are with ordinary folk rather than at court with the aristocracy.

4. Thunderstorm Storm: Depicting a storm of ferocious intensity, the music also convey’s a sense of awe, terror and exhilaration at the power of nature.

5.  Shepherds’ song; cheerful and thankful feelings after the storm: The song is a hymn of ever swelling joy and thanksgiving.

The transition from the fourth to the fifth movement, as the last rumbles of the receding storm fade away is magical. One can imagine the return from darkness and fear to the light as the sun comes out to reveal the world, refreshed by rain, glowing with renewed life. These few bars, featuring the oboes, seem to me to faintly echo the old German hymn “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” (Oh Sacred Head, Now Wounded), which Bach arranged several times, most movingly as the Passion Chorale in his St Mathhew Passion. If I am right, for a german speaking audience this would subliminally set a sacred tone, perhaps hinting at the thunderstorm during Christ’s Passion, except that here the storm has abated and the rebirth of the world is at hand. The transition culminates in the clarinet followed by the french horn announcing in embryonic form Beethoven’s hymn of joy and thanksgiving (and resurrection?). Its first full flowering is then given life by the strings.

It is pointless to try to convey in words the overwhelming joy that this movement conveys. Beethoven’s control of our yearning for joy is masterful. Towards the end of the movement the music rises to a false crescendo; we are taken to a new heights as the momentum builds again, so that when the true crescendo at last unfolds the listener is filled to overflowing with what might be called religious ecstasy.

I can think of no other piece of music before Beethoven’s time, apart from Bach’s Chaccone for solo violin, that conveys such overwhelming ecstasy of being. It has lead me to wonder if it could be seen as a precursor to the Liebestod in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.

If this symphony evokes a religious response, what, one might ask, is the religion? On one level Beethoven was a devout Christian and and it would be perfectly reasonable for Christians to view this music as a hymn of thanksgiving to the Christian God. But Beethoven’s spirituality was, I believe, highly personal and indicative of a time when the old religious certainties were breaking down. He was undoubtedly devout, but he was a Catholic who hardly, if ever, attended mass or confession – something of a contradiction in terms. He had quotations from the Hindu Upanishads on his desk. His great Missa Solemnis might be been seen as a highly personal depiction of the human meeting the divine. His conversation books (his deafness progressed to completeness from his mid-late twenties onwards) seem to imply that music stemmed from a source of divine inspiration that was a force unto itself and, I would say, therefore not ultimately dependant on any particular religious doctrine.

At times a difficult and even an impossible man, Beethoven devoted his life to using his powers as a creator to scale the heights and plum the depths of human experience in order to reveal the majesty of existence that he had glimpsed. It is for this reason that Ludwig van Beethoven will always be my guru.

Postscript

During the the BBC Radio 3 programme ‘CD Review’ of Saturday 5th November 2011 the music critic Professor John Deathridge surveyed the available recordings of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and recommended the version taken from a live performance by the Bavarian State Orchestra (Bayerisches Staatsorchester) conducted by Carlos Kleiber (ORFEO C600031B (CD, mid-price)). The movements listed above link to this recording, which has been posted on YouTube in separate parts.

Professor Deathridge said this version won his selection ‘hands down’. He commended Kleiber’s loyalty to Beethoven’s fast tempo markings and he praised Kleiber for allowing in the last movement the music to unfold as an expression of religious ecstasy with an intensity that was almost heart-breaking. In turning the theatrical into the theological the performance became an event that left the audience stunned. Professor Deathridge concluded that the symphony is a deeply human document and a superb masterpiece.

It seems that many believe that Carlos Klieber (not to be confused with his father, Erich) was the greatest conductor of modern times. His mystique is enhanced because, before he died in 2004 at the age of 74, he performed fewer concerts and recordings than most leading conductors would do in a couple years.

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