What (or who) am I not listening to?

After that last post on "what am I listening to", I have been reminded this week of the opposite extreme in my listening practices. There is in fact one musical category I have been deliberately avoiding, for a full year in fact. I could not have gotten away with such avoidance in my previous career, especially for this past year, but in my current life it was relatively easy to do.

Yep, I'm one of those people who has been avoiding, deliberately, the music of Ludwig van Beethoven. 

Specifically, avoiding Beethoven's music during the year leading up to the 250th anniversary of his birth, which you might have heard was yesterday. 

It should be noted that this is actually one thing that was enabled by the ongoing curtailment of activities due to the pandemic. Last week or last month or some time I'd likely have been compelled to attend a big choral concert of one of his larger works, because my wife would have been singing in it. So, a narrow miss there.

Yes, it was a deliberate choice. Yes, it was somewhat encouraged by the anniversary. No, I'm not the only person. 

Why?

Because there was no need for music organizations to spend the last year or the next year bingeing on Beethoven music.

Why? Because music organizations, for the most part, already spend a great deal of their time and energy bingeing on Beethoven music.

This is especially true of instrumental groups, symphonies most of all. But choral groups will jump in on a Ninth Symphony whenever possible, and in a year like this other works were going to get a workout. But on the instrumental side, it's a pretty strong likelihood that any orchestra that put forth a Beethoven cycle (or had planned to) for last season or this had already done a Beethoven cycle (or some limited form thereof) some time in the past decade. Aside from certain specialty organizations, it's hard to imagine such a group going a full season without a Beethoven something. (And in the interest of full disclosure, I did participate in the Beethovenism, to the degree that one of my few public recitals was devoted to LvB's string trios, even though I was no Beethoven scholar.)

Perhaps even more pervasive is the presence of Beethoven music on such classical radio as exists these days. I'm not going to spend a full twenty-four hour period listening to a classical radio outlet (I need sleep), but it's hard to imagine such an outlet going a full twenty-four hours with no Ludwig. There may be a handful of others who get such treatment (Mozart or Bach might come to mind), but not many. 

The one exception I have made in the past twelve months is to let pass the fleeting bars of "Für Elise" that Schroeder tries to pass as "Beethoven Christmas music" in A Charlie Brown Christmas. Even that example points to the depth of the phenomenon. Mozart or Bach never got that pop-culture kind of treatment, nor others. (To be fair, Schroeder doesn't use his Beethoven fanaticism to demean the music of other composers, as the strip below shows.)

Interestingly, many of the names on that list Lucy spits out spent much of their careers laboring under the shadow of Beethoven, whether self-imposed or as part of a musical establishment in which LvB was increasingly idolized (I use that word more literally than I usually do on a non-religious subject). 

So, for me as a no-longer-music-professional, I simply didn't see any reason to support the Beethoven Binge with such funds as I had at my disposal. 

But not listening to Beethoven wasn't enough; something else needed to fill the musical void.

I ended up, as slightly alluded in the previous post, finding out just how much I had underappreciated Franz Schubert.

I rekindled my affection for the composers of late-19th and early-20th century composers of the US who had been my principal scholarly pursuit back in academia. 

I happily indulged in music of composers such as Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, William Levi Dawson (and I'm not referring to his choral arrangements of spirituals), William Grant Still, and others who committed the unforgivable crime of composing while Black. 

I remembered how much I liked jazz. I actually went to some jazz shows, both local and more national, before the pandemic shut down most concert life, and picked up some online shows in the meantime. 

I also put out feelers into other musical genres I hadn't indulged in much in a while. I ended up picking up some Broadway I wasn't familiar with and trying to find some of the classical music of India that had fleetingly passed through my life at least two decades ago.

And I discovered I liked hearing those things. 

So, with the term of avoidance technically over as of yesterday's big anniversary blowouts (such as they were), I have to admit that I honestly don't know whether that avoidance will continue or be dropped. 

I'm still obsessing over those Schubert piano sonatas. Still absorbed by that Chrismas Cantata by Daniel Pinkham. The presence of what might be called "classical Chrismas music" on one outlet I have available is helping pass the time. I still am waiting for Margaret Bonds to get the public recovery that Florence Price has been getting. (Listen to this and this if you wonder why.)

And one other thing: I'm not sure that "greatness" is enough of a reason to be force-fed one guy's music to the inevitable exclusion of some other composer's work. Call me a heretic if you like. It wouldn't be my first time.

So I have no idea what I'll do the next time LvB pops up in front of me anywhere other than from Schroeder's piano. Eventually I might spend some time with it. But I'm in no hurry. There's a lot of other stuff I need to hear.

??? Who knows what I'll do...

What am I listening to?

 The title question popped up on Facebook a couple of days ago (I think?), from a colleague/friend asking what music others were listening to right now. I did not answer at the moment, being a bit busy and distracted (my default state these days). When I had a moment to stop and check myself I didn't answer either. I still haven't, mostly because when I finally put my finger on the music that was most occupying my ears and my mind right now, neither of them seemed to be a "jam," and the question did ask what was one's "current jam." Making a currant jelly joke seemed a reach, so I left it.

In fact there are two things that have been lodging themselves on my sonic devices in particular - one which has been occupying my mind for quite a while, and the other coming to the fore more recently, apparently tied to the advent of the Advent/Christmas cycle now upon the church. 

When last I darkened the door of this blog I confessed to an ongoing obsession with the late piano sonatas of Franz Schubert. At that time his penultimate sonata, no. 20, was foremost in my ear and mind. Since then my listening has broadened...all the way to his last sonata, no. 21. In particular the second movement has taken hold. (Fair warning: this movement itself is about ten minutes long, although obviously I consider such minutes to be well spent.)

You will note that this movement ...  is ... slow. Now this is not itself so odd; your average Classic/Romantic era piano sonata has a slow movement. What's odd here is that in this particular case, the first movement of Schubert's sonata is also rather slow, and two slow movements back-to-back is less typical.

Also, this movement is not only slow, it is quite spare, for lack of a better word. Aside from the slightly faster and somewhat fuller middle section, this movement is joltingly spacious in its texture. Rather than being spun out in a line (a not-atypical way to talk about musical melodies or motives), these notes and figures seem almost suspended in empty space. Laden with the burden of pandemic time, it almost sounds as if the notes are socially distanced.

Even when things seem to get busier, the musical activity often consists of repeated notes or figures, which manages to sound busy without necessarily sounding full, at least as Schubert deploys them. And even then, after what passes for great agitation in this movement, the music ultimately returns to the arrestingly spare sonic space of the first section, with slight tweaks of harmony and rhythm,  the emptiness of notes and motifs hanging from gently swaying mobiles in a darkened room. It is not the sound of silence - that is Simon & Garfunkel's territory - but perhaps it is the sound of quiet - quiet in the way Frederick Buechner describes a room where people are not speaking; the room is darkened, perhaps, but not empty. 

I hesitate to guess why this movement has latched on to me of late. Maybe in the deafening emptiness of pandemic-tide the genuine quiet of the movement provides sanctuary. Maybe I'm just really geeked by Mitsuko Uchida's interpretation of the sonata. Maybe it's just the pleasure of ten minutes that invite me not to be overwhelmed or ragged or confronted with the endless rounds of I don't know how to do this that constitute so many of my days in this time. Or maybe it simply invites me in the direction of mystery, and some part of me that is normally shouted down and drowned out sneaks into my consciousness through it.

The second, more recent, more seasonal, and shorter fascination of late is a more modern composition, by an American named Daniel Pinkham. It is the second movement of his Christmas Cantata, a setting of the ancient text "O magnum mysterium." You might notice some similarities to the sonata movement among the obvious differences. 

I have had the intense pleasure of singing this work a couple of times. "Spare" and "spacious" are fitting adjectives here also, and the hints of medievalism add to the effect. This is a movement to tax the breath control of the finest choral singers and brass players, and the sheer length of notes makes more space rather than filling it. 

The effect is, to be sure, deepened by those initial words of the text - O magnum mysterium, "o great mystery." The hearer is led directly into that contemplation, in this case the mystery of the Nativity and Incarnation. The mystery does not avoid the seemingly ludicrous; barn animals the first witnesses of the infant Messiah. There is a thickening of the music as the Blessed Virgin gets her shout-out, a build to a volume climax spiced with discordant intervals and the long sustained notes underneath it all interrupted for a fraction of a moment, and yet at the last it all collapses in slow motion back into the space, the quiet, repeated motifs from the brass and organ strung together and fading away, to one last unresolving chord. 

It is a text for the Nativity, but musically it is all Advent - waiting, quiet, unbearable anticipation. It is much shorter than the Schubert sonata movement, but it is still music that demands time. Somehow, I guess this is something I need in some way or other. 

Anyway, that's what I'm listening to.

Wordlessness, mystery, and Schubert piano sonatas

What deadens us most to God's presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continuously engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought. I suspect that there is nothing more crucial to true spiritual comfort, … than being able from time to time to stop that chatter including the chatter of spoken prayer. If we choose to seek the silence of the holy place, or to open ourselves to its seeking, I think there is no surer way than by keeping silent.

--Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets

From pure sensation to the intuition of beauty, from pleasure and pain to love and the mystical ecstasy and death — all the things that are fundamental, all the things that, to the human spirit, are most profoundly significant, can only be experienced, not expressed. The rest is always and everywhere silence. 

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

--Aldous Huxley, "The Rest is Silence"

People often complain that music is too ambiguous; that what they should think when they hear it is so unclear, whereas everyone understands words. With me it is exactly the reverse, and not only with regard to an entire speech, but also with individual words. These, too,, seem to me so ambiguous, so vague, so easily misunderstood in comparison to genuine music, which fills the soul with a thousand things better than words. The thoughts which are expressed to me by music that I love are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary, too definite...

If you ask me what I ws thinking of when I wrote it [one of Mendelssohn's "Songs Without Words"], I would say: Just the song as it stands. And if I happen to have had certain words in mind for one or another of these songs, I would never want to tell them to anyone, because the same words never mean the same things to different people. Only the song can say the same thing, can arouse the same feelings in one person as in another, a feeling which is not expressed, however, by the same words.

--Felix Mendelssohn, letter to Marc-André Souchay, 1842

I am, dear reader, about to engage in what does seem an extraordinarly ironic effort: I (a pastor whose business involves a lot of words) am going to write a lot of words to encourage you to be...less bound by words.

This particular Lent has probably been the most challenging I've known in many, many years, as I suspect it might have been for some of you too. It was a little less than a year ago that I underwent that major surgery thing, one which is now inescapable in its consequences for my daily life even as I am expected to be more or less "back to normal" (a word I refuse to use for my life anymore; the closest I will come is "routine," in that sometimes my life might be close to having one). Things started off well enough, and I even got to enjoy some beach time and a spring training ballgame, and then of course the world went splat and we all had to go home. More and more we seem to live in a place that simply cannot take care of itself or be trusted to do the right thing for the great majority of people, and that's a wrenching place to be. 

Not shockingly, I turned to music. But it turned out that not just any music was going to work this time.

Normally this time of year I'd have been listening to all the Lenten music I've got - passions and other oratorios, Liszt's Via Crucis, MacMillan's Seven Last Words (and any other composers I could have gotten hold of), anything with a Lenten or especially Holy Week theme that I could load onto my computer (and then download onto a flash drive for driving listening, with my car no longer having a CD player). That project kept not happening, and then was scuttled for good. What ended up getting so recorded instead, for reasons I'm not even sure I fathomed at the time, was a whole bunch of music by Franz Schubert. Not the songs (or Lieder) for which he was most famous, but instrumental music - symphonies, violin sonatas, and especially piano music, including several piano sonatas.

The latter are, for the uninitiated, (usually) larger-scale works for the instrument, consisting of three or four movements most often. Neither Schubert nor the piano sonata as a genre was ever a particular subject of study for me during my academic years, so it's not as if it was a matter of returning to old favorites (as it is when I pull out the music of George Whitefield Chadwick, my dissertation subject). In fact, for a long time pretty much all I knew of those works was that a main melody from one of the late sonatas got appropriated and reworked into the main theme of the extremely average 90s sitcom Wings. Music scholarship pushed me into other musical directions, so that middling familiarity never germinated into anything in particular; it was classical radio programming and broadcasting that finally allowed me to hear the full sonata (Piano Sonata in A, D.959 - it deserves much better than that pop-culture affiliation). 

So, I listened to those piano sonatas. I listened on the way to and from Vero Beach some; I listened around town; and especially when we became homebound by Covid-19, I listened. It became, out of no particular identifiable impulse, my Lenten discipline. 

It took me a while to figure out why this happened. As the coronavirus situation disintegrated and epidemic was plowed over by pandemic, we were all inundated with instructions about what to do; washing hands and using hand sanitizer when washing had to wait (I finished off a small bottle of the stuff that I had had since I moved here), then the particular instructions for social distancing (keeping my distance from people in crowds is a thing I consider a specialty, so...), and finally the call for full-fledged isolation once the NBA broke down and major sports, theme parks and other entertainment edifices began to close. As church gatherings became prime opportunities for spreading the virus, the instructions continued, under the guise of "support" - how to put your service online, the various technologies available to do so (all hail the great god Zoom, at least until "Zoom-bombing" became a thing), and the various imperatives about what worship looks like in a time of isolation. Again, it took time for me to realize consciously what my subconscious evidently grasped very quickly: I needed a place to get away from the Hell (and I use that word most theologically) of words.

Frederick Buechner, quoted above about the need to shut off the chatter, was no word-hater, clearly - he has written a ton of them in his career, and has also had things to say about the power of words that themselves are among the most powerful words I know. Nonetheless I was forced to be reminded again by him that words are sometimes oppressors, and I needed a place to flee from them for a while. It is a strange thing to find myself in agreement with Aldous Huxley, but his appreciation of music (often snipped and turned into overly cute inspirational memes that would no doubt make Huxley gag) became my quest. Silence is impossible these days? Let the music drive out the noise. 

And, pace Mendelssohn, the music needed for the moment was music not bound by words. Not that Mendelssohn was devoid of song with words - he wrote plenty, not to mention two whole oratorios and other choral works, not to mention instrumental works with words attached, so to speak - his three main non-choral symphonies, after all, have descriptive titles: "Italian," "Scottish," and "Reformation," the latter of which quotes the melody of Luther's great Reformation hymn "A mighty fortress is our God," making it inseparable from words even further. No, what was needed here was that could only mean, as Mendelssohn put it in writing to his wife's cousin, "just the song as it stands." Not that there was no meaning at all - far from it - but the meaning was not going to be bound by words, not going to be reducible to words. 

Schubert's piano sonatas, it turns out, are pretty good vehicles for such un-worded listening. Unlike, say, certain Beethoven piano sonatas ("Moonlight," "Pathetique," "Appassionata"), most of Schubert's big works in the genre have no descriptive titles attached. In addition, they're quite "roomy" works. This does mean, among other things, that they're long, but it isn't length itself that makes for "roominess." Here further elucidation from Huxley helps. In the same essay as above he also writes: 

Silence is an integral part of all good music. Compared with Beethoven’s or Mozart’s, the ceaseless torrent of Wagner’s music is very poor in silence. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why it seems so much less significant than theirs. It “says” less because it is always speaking.

(So no, I'm not really a Wagnerian.)

The Schubert sonatas (again, especially the late ones) are pocked with silences - frequently unexpected and unprepared, and all the more arresting for their surprise upon the listener. At the same time, the sonatas are also frequently "roomy" in their measured pace; tempos might be fast or slow, but no idea is cut short or deprived of its opportunity to be heard and received and reflected upon in a measured and fuller way than, say, even some of Huxley's favored Beethoven. For music that is present, music that allows the mind or soul to be invited instead of merely demanded, it works pretty well. It does not submit to our words, no, but allows us to be drawn along instead of pounding the soul into submission. For this moment, it was (dare I say literally?) a godsend.

As this progress continued, I began to wonder where this particular bit of ... reflection? meditation? contemplation? might fit into my increasingly desperate quest for spiritual preservation (I dare not be so optimistic as to hope for spiritual "growth" in all of this, just let me survive...). In trying to look around ... I wasn't encouraged. Let's be honest; virtually all of the modes of meditation or contemplation or reflection or what have you in the Christian tradition (where I live) are pretty word-based. As for Buechner's declaration above, true silence is pretty elusive in the Christian tradition. And when such silence is in fact desired or explored or achieved, the end result pretty much turns out to be ... words.

So I wonder: is it possible that music - wordless music - might be an aid towards a form of silence, at least? Is it possibly, pace Buechner, an aid in clearing away the verbal clutter that so often and easily overwhelms our minds or souls, that tells us our feelings or emotions or spiritual yearnings are not "real" unless we can put them into words? (Never mind the Spirit's interceding for us with "sighs too deep for words" in Romans 8:26...) Might that things that, after silence according to Huxley, best expresses the inexpressible be a means towards finding some space for silence in our harried spirits? Might "just the song as it stands" (or the piano sonata, or the symphony, or whatever we can find - I have to believe there are options outside the Euro classical tradition for such un-worded listening but I claim no expertise to say) be a means to work towards mystery?

To me, that's where this becomes a thing I'm still grappling with. We stink at mystery. We have frankly turned the word into a literary genre about following clues and solving puzzles to catch criminals, so to speak, and lost the concept of mystery - that which lives outside of us, that which does not submit to our glib explanations and easy conceptualizations, that which is larger than us (and boy, do we hate to admit anything is larger than us!) and not controllable by us.

I have realized, I guess, that I am woefully ill-equipped to deal with mystery, and (distant enough from my scholarly past, I guess) am looking at musical experience as maybe, possibly, a portal into at least some form of spiritual mystery (as opposed to mysticism, I think). We end up suffering, I fear, when we cannot cope with mystery and the unknowable (trying to grapple with the unknowable was damn near killing me for a stretch over the past few years), and at least for the moment this kind of listening is helping me in a different way than I have known before.

So that has been this Lent's discipline, so to speak. I don't think this is one I can immediately give up or walk away from. Maybe I can listen to something besides Schubert, though. But I have to hope there is hope, or refuge, or I don't know what in the simple yet maddeningly difficult act of listening to music, unfettered by words, not seeking to describe or understand or analyze or break down or anything but listening, experiencing, maybe even feeling. At any rate, I have to keep going, I think.

Yep, pretty sure this would make Huxley gag.