There is “religious music,” and there is “sacred music.” "Religious music" instills doctrines and requires a degree of belief on the part of the listener in order to be fully appreciated. "Sacred music" is simply a communication of the known (everyday life) with the unknown (the universe). It may also stem from a religious tradition, but moves the listener beyond the specific domain of that tradition, and is accessible for non-believers as well.
“Religious” and “sacred” are overlapping terms; it is hard to say where one type of music ends and the other begins. Some would argue that they perfectly coincide. But I would argue Bach’s B Minor Mass is an example of “sacred” music in the wider sense. Ecumenical in origin – written by a Lutheran for a Catholic prince, not long after the end of a devastating series of European religious wars – its cosmology straddles the Catholic / Protestant divide and sometimes even ventures beyond Christianity itself.
For example, coming from a traditional Chinese view, I have always heard the Kyrie of the B Minor Mass as a ritual of Heaven, Earth and ancestors. The intricate weave of voices represents the crowd of ancestral spirits who enfold us, and whose inherited habits, quirks and unfulfilled desires make up the substance of our lives. In Chinese the word used in modern times for “God”, Di, originally was a plural term meaning ancestors. The two ideas, God and ancestor, are linked by the idea of Creation - what makes us the way we are, the components that make up our bodies and minds. In modern terms we may call it "genetics."
The two Kyrie fugues, one celestial, expansive and forward-looking in technique, the other earth-bound and looking back toward Renaissance polyphony, speak to each other across space and time. The spirits of past and present, Catholic and Protestant are thus reconciled. The two choral sections of the Kyrie enclose a more intimate central section (Christe eleison), a dialogue between two female envoys (sopranos), one from Heaven and one from Earth, meeting in a middle region of the air.
The beginning of the Gloria section also explicitly refers to Heaven and Earth. Although it begins with the brassy glory of angels soaring through the sky (Gloria in excelsis), the clouds part on the more familiar scene below (Et ab terram pax), a tranquil, pastel landscape of winding rivers, green meadows, absent-minded cows grazing, and village huts with their evening plumes. The transition from Heaven to Earth, the return from the extraordinary to the ordinary, is one of the most moving moments in the work.
performed by Libor Pesek and the Czech National Symphony Orchestra
In his Fifth Symphony Mahler moves away from the folklore and Romantic nature-mysticism of his earlier work into the musical equivalent of the 19th Century Realist novel. The changing scale of the music – a single trumpet, then the whole orchestra, then only the strings, then a solo horn, two cellos, and so on... – suggest hundreds of characters within a vast background. Like the great 19th Century novels, War and Peace or Les Miserables or Vanity Fair, it depicts the fate of individuals, families, groups of friends, villages, cities and nations within the horizon of an observable, material reality.
Like the realist novel, it is full of characters who speak each from his or her own perspective, along with the author, who commiserates with, derides, and comments ambivalently on the fate of his characters, but he is not God. Unlike Bach's polyphony, Mahler's myriad voices do not add up to a coherent statement, but rather conveys a collective crisis of meaning. The Fifth Symphony can also be read as a narrative of the traumas of immigration. Mahler himself was a German Jew from an outlying province of the Austrian empire, who made it to Vienna, the center. As an outsider he was particularly in tune with the centrifugal forces within modern civilization. Near the end of his life he migrated again, this time away from Europe itself, and spent much of his last years in New York.
The curtain lifts on a village of bomb-cratered huts, smoldering metal and upturned earth, the villagers huddling motionless amid the rubble. This is the "old country," a place of both stifling rigidity and terrible uncertainty - The garish trumpet at the beginning announces, “Thus it has always been.” Above, the proud rulers represented by the brass; below, the suffering people represented by the strings. In the middle section, the threat of force is unleashed. Adorno calls it “pogrom music,” hearing the hetman's brutal commands in the trumpets and the terrified shrieks of victims in the violins.
The nightmare glimpsed in a few remote villages in the middle of the first movement fully expands as a storm that sweeps over the continent in the second. The motion of history drives us, as in Walter Benjamin's description of the “angel of history”, not forwards but backwards,:
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Within this storm human agency appears as a counter-force, pushing against the blind momentum, at certain points almost seeming to arrest it, but always it is hurled back into the chaos. Near the end of the movement, the light breaks through the clouds; another world is glimpsed, another possibility for living – but maybe it is only wishful thinking on the narrator’s part. The triumphant fanfare dies out prematurely, and is swallowed up in the maelstrom once again. All that's left at the end is ruins, a few embers burning.
Whereas the first two movements are concerned with the dark past and the uncertain future, the third parachutes us into the sensuous fullness of the present – or, the present moment circa 1900, in the city of Vienna. The movement is structured as a a series of interlocking dances and dances-within-dances. We feel the blood pulsing through the veins and arteries of a great modern city, with its car horns, its clattering street trams, its swarming thoroughfares, its quiet tree-lined alleys, a thousand lighted windows at night with waltzes swooning and swishing under the chandeliers, and, above all this, just outside the city limits, the eternal snow and silence of the Alps.
In 1900, Vienna is a city surrounded by countryside, whose fresh air still blows through it from time to time. And so, the provincial Jew from the empire’s edge of has found his way to the center. He explores the tangle of streets, rides the trams until he knows all the routes by heart, and wanders lost in the mountains. From the crowded streets, we are transported far from the human world. Ghosts of the past peek through the mist at the lone figure straying into their realm. The city becomes an unreal mirage in the distance, and along with it all human history. But returning from the mountains, one is shocked by the frenetic pace of life that one had gotten used to. How murderously the cars hurl themselves down the street! How cold and ruthless the faces of drivers and passersby! – Each person bent on his or her private ends, without a thought for anyone else! The city now no longer seems exciting, but insane, a gigantic machine bursting at the seams, spinning out of control. How is a being of flesh and blood to survive amid the gnashing gears, in the hungry maw?
This world has not been innocent for a long time; neither has love, which gives birth to all these faces washing over streets and plazas, in and out of houses where the the dead are carried out, the living replacing them on couches, chairs and beds, among all these faces, which reflect yours in their decrepitude... to find one face you cherish, and that cherishes yours – is enough to keep you human. Where does this love come from? From you? From my own heart? A dirty river formed of many streams, whose weary meandering from the beginning of time, driven by some ancient, unquenchable thirst, the love depicted in the Adagietto is not a young love, but one that has gone through the sorrows and disappointments of a lifetime, and marvels at the fact that, after all, love is still possible. The wailing of countless ghosts, unloved at the time of death, turns to song in the resonance of two living hearts that is the Adagietto.
Then morning comes: a single note on the horn. The depths experienced in the Adagietto now flow from underground into the comic Rondo-Finale: a day of friends, working lunches, coffeehouse gatherings, dentist appointments, payday... It is all a bit silly, but the fervent Adagietto music reappears again and again, now integrated into the fabric of a full life, the warp thread around which the bewildering variety of the world makes sense again. Finding love, one finds one's rightful place in the world. The finale is crowned by the triumphal fanfare from the second movement, now restored to its full glory - a pledge to work for the betterment of humanity and an affirmation of faith in its future.
But, in spite of the fullness of life conveyed by the Rondo Finale, in spite of the sincere sentiment of personal happiness leading toward universal welfare – there is an undeniable sense of letdown, as is often the case with Mahler's triumphal endings, and, beneath the feverish invention, a monotony and melodic threadbareness, especially apparent upon repeated listening. The problem is that this multifarious world, once believed to possess an inherent divine harmony, is now being held together by the “I”. I am happy, but how fragile is that happiness, and how much of my worldview depends on maintaining that happiness?
To the disturbing question of collective destiny raised by the first two movements, the Rondo-Finale answers “At least I'm safe and happy.” It is a thoroughly bourgeois answer. I’m happily married now and own a house in the Berkeley hills. I drive our kids to school every morning in our Prius with politically progressive bumper stickers. Then I stop by the local coffee shop and drink fair trade organic coffee. But is this the pinnacle of human achievement – fair trade organic coffee? Is that all there is to life? But, my friend, you are really asking to much of a limited human being like yourself, one full of contradictory desires, haunted by the past and trying to do his best under the circumstances. Do you still remember what it was like in the old country? And isn't it enough that we have come thus far already? ...
Erik Satie - 3 Gymnopedies and 6 Gnossiennes played by Pascal Roge
Evenings in the height of summer, as the day simmers down to a thick broth of mixed colors and smells, then begins to dissipate, you realize that this seemingly boundless splendor of light is only one flower, resting in the lap of an even greater darkness, which waters it and surrounds it on every side. The petals are fully unfolded now, but soon they will begin to curl up. By winter it will have condensed to a single seed hidden in the blackness, until the light emerges again - from where?
Or, in the midst of a conversation, when you listen past the other person's words into the timbre of their voice, that unique tone appearing only once in this world, stamped with the grain of their personal fate, and you think that every living thing is like this, a lone voice singing, uncomprehended by the rest of creation, from whom to whom?
These mysteries, utterly transparent, utterly unfathomable, entered through the Rosicrucian obscurities that fascinated him or through daily life, Erik Satie manages to evoke with the solitary notes of the piano sparkling against silence, in these, his most famous pieces.
Our understanding of emotions is colored by Romanticism and its commercial use by Hollywood. Swelling violins, eyes overflowing with tears... when someone nowadays says "I'm feeling very emotional right now." It usually means they are on the verge of losing it, losing control of themselves. We confound emotion with passion, volcanic outbursts, operatic demonstrations.
But what about the emotion of tying your shoelaces? Of stepping outdoors in springtime from your room, or coming back into your room from the noisy streets? We often often have no words for these more ordinary, more intimate feelings, and for the same reason, it is hard for us to describe, for example, what emotion is expressed in Bach's First Suite for Cello. Maybe it is the emotion of walking around in comfortable shoes, or of cooking a full, satisfying meal for our friends.
Rather than seizing us in violent transports, these humble emotions bubble up in a stream throughout the day. Tenuous in themselves, they nonetheless point continuously to the our emotional nature. Perhaps before the advent of Romanticism, it was the constancy of this emotional nature, supported by our watery physicality, rather than the emotions themselves - differentiated into love, hate, anger, fear and other vivid, nameable forms - that was the proper subject of music, as it is of dance.
In Bach's Cello Suites, the most intimate turns and twists of the heart within the body directly correlate to the whirling of the cosmos. There is no need for the transcendent passions of Romanticism. Sliding our feet into a snugly fitting pair of shoes, we walk to the rhythm of stars. Thus Bach’s secular music moves beyond Christianity into a wider sense of the sacred. These allemandes, courantes and sarabandes must be what Davies had in mind when he wrote
Dauncing (bright Lady) then began to be, When the first seedes whereof the world did spring The Fire, Ayre, Earth, and water did agree, By Loues perswasion, Natures mighty King, To learne their first disordred combating: And, in a daunce such measure to obserue, As all the world their motion should preserue. Since when they still are carried in a round, And changing come one in anothers place, Yet doe they neyther mingle nor confound, But euery one doth keepe the bounded space VVherein the daunce doth bid it turne or trace: This wondrous myracle did Loue deuise For Dauncing is Loues proper exercise. ... Behold the world how it is whirled round, And for it is so whirl'd,is named so; In whose large volume many rules are found Of this new Art, which it doth fairely show: For your quick eyes in wandring too and fro From East to West, on no one thing can glaunce, But if you make it well, it seemes to daunce.
In autumn,
there are days that give the illusion of spring with their tender warmth. At
dawn the grasses raise their heads, the flowers open, and the birds sing out
feebly, as if everything could begin again – before a blast of killing wind
brings the dream to an end. This is the atmosphere of the first movement of
Mahler’s 9th Symphony. Late in life, memory is so overpowering that the present and past become
confused. One relives the enthusiasms of youth, and fights once more its
hopeless battles as if they could still be won. And when this youth is lived in a period of
general decline like ours, in the midst of a decaying empire, youth’s vigor
could not help but dash again and again against the walls before exhausting
itself prematurely.
The middle
section of the first movement is made up of three climaxes, each followed by a
collapse. In the first our hero, scaling a mountain, falls over a cliff into a
void filled with mocking voices. In the second, he finds companions who charge
into battle with him, amid brass fanfares, like Don Quixote against the
windmills. But the current reverses, an undertow pulls them in different
directions, friends scatter, each one left to fend for himself. In the third climax, the hero bets everything
on one last throw of the dice – and meets Death itself clad in full armor. Then
the outrage and bewilderment of “this is it” – a whole lifetime has gone by
like a dream; there are no more chances. The song of spring-within-autumn
returns, now mangled beyond recognition. Then, only scattered voices in the
shocked empty space, the consolation of utter hopelessness.
As always in
Mahler’s treatment of heroism, we do not know whether to identify with the
protagonist or watch him from a distance with ironic sympathy. We do not know
whether he is (we are) being righteous or absurd. Heroism, Beethoven’s heroism,
convinced of the individual’s power to influence the world, now appears delusional
in face of social and existential reality. Whereas the 6th Symphony
depicts the individual undone by the pressure of history, here personal
aspirations are undermined by Time itself, which emphatically enters the music
in gestures of “tearing away” – Time breaks in brutally, irresistibly upon the
moments of dream, of reverie and nostalgia, until all that is personal and
distinctive is carried away on the flood.
The icy grief in the central movement of Mozart's piano concerto in A Major, K. 488 - what is called in Japanese aesthetics "mono no aware" - the sadness inherent to earthly things: the realization that nothing here belongs to us, that one cannot hold onto the wilting of flowers, but only the continuity of blossoming and wilting - the fact that some things wilt in the middle of summer and others bloom in the dead of winter - this unfathomably rich fabric, this endless overlapping of threads is finally what we can trust in, even as the threads themselves unravel.
The music has the transparency of certain ancient Chinese poems and paintings. Mozart's classicism is classically Chinese. So is his politeness, evident in the outer movements of this concerto, with their garden frolics amid summer evening coolness. This politeness is more than an aristocratic posture. Politeness is a lightness of touch, the proper way to behave as overnight guests here on earth.
